348
PARTISAN REVIEW
As we know, the psychological disorders which psychotherapists treated
most often eighty years ago were hysterias. But today hysteria is a relatively
rare complaint. Instead, what appears most commonly in clinics for treat–
ment are "character disorders." The patient feels empty, dead, or dissociated
from the people around him, but has no objectified neurotic signs such as
an hysteria or a phobia. One has this feeling of deadness, of an inability to
feel or
to
relate to other people, precisely because one has begun to conceive
of that outside world as a peculiar mirror of self.
It
exists to fulfill the self;
there are no' 'human objects" or object relations with a reality all their own.
The peculiarity and the destructiveness of this narcissistic vision is that the
environment of the human being becomes less fulftlling the more it is
judged in terms of its congruence with or subservience to self needs . Expec–
tations of the outside grow enormous.
It
is a sea in which the self floats
without differentiation; and for the very reason that expectation of fulfill–
ment becomes at once so vast, and so amorphous , the possibilities of ful–
ftllment are diminished . Because there are no boundaries between self and
other, experiences lose their form ; they never seem to have an end or a
deftnition of completion . Concrete experience with other people therefore
never seems "enough." And because gratification from this oceanic , bound–
aryless outside never seems enough, the self feels empty and dead. The
obvious content of a character disorder is , "I am not feeling" ; the hidden
narcissistic content is, "the world is failing me, and so I am not feeling ."
This shift in clinical data from Freud's generation
to
the present has
occurred because the society has changed.
It
is a society which has orches–
trated the energies of narcissism around the theme of emotional " libera–
tion." This new music drowns out the very idea of society itself. By "society"
I mean a situation in which people weigh different domains of experience
against one another so that choices are made, and people sacrifice one set
of gratifications for the sake of another. Moreover, " society" involves the
operation of external, believable constraints upon the self (like class con–
sciousness, religious commitment, manners or rituals of kindness) having
a reality of their own.
Let me give an example of how this mobilization of narcissism operates
in one of the popular ideologies of sexual liberation. In Germaine Greer's
The Female Eunuch
one is presented with a clear and incontestable picture
of the domination of men over women in jobs, education, homelife, etc.
Then one is told that this siruation obtains because a social " system" oper–
ates in society: men aren't tyrants, modern life simply makes them play that
role. Well and good. The next step in the argument is the assertion that a
woman has to rebel against this system by being able to do anything a man
