40
someone who displayed unusual or even criminal sexual behaviour. The pervert, in Freud, connects Victorian ideas on sexuality to mental illness, and he used the term‘ paraphrenia’ to describe this connection. Specifically, in terms of narcissism, Freud used the phrase‘ narcissistic libido’ 8 to describe‘ mental illness characterised by the withdrawal of libido from the outside world and its direction on to the ego’. 9 In other words, the state of loving is directed towards oneself and it is this direction of love that causes neurosis or psychosis in patients. Freud offered four types of narcissistic choice in his paper‘ On Narcissism’:
1. What he himself is 2. What he himself was 3. What he himself would like to be 4. Someone who was once part of himself 10
Narcissism in this schema is omnipresent, it encompasses past, present and future and reveals the inherent loneliness of the narcissist who, in their isolation, cannot grasp onto love. A notable absence is found here – what about female narcissism? Freud believed that women predominantly loved themselves. Yet they suffer‘ penis envy’( the narcissistic wound) where their lack or emptiness is exhibited by not having that‘ superior’ piece of equipment. 11
Contemporary theory tackles this kind of Freudian discourse and I will now turn to the work of French linguist, philosopher and psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva, who reworked Freud from a feminist standpoint. Kristeva devised a theory of language based on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She called the bodily, pleasurable and sensual aspects of communication the‘ semiotic’ and the more rational and logical aspect the‘ symbolic’. The semiotic is many things but what it is not is a kind of standardisation that inhibits fantasy and damages psychic space. It floods the unconscious mind with‘ jouissance’ – that lifeblood of the psyche which erases subject / object relations. The subject can explore, adventurously, the affect established by sensing( or non-sensing) objects to deconstruct unity and engender the fragmentation inherent in the Lacanian body-in-pieces. 12 The external world is therefore part of the person and the isolation.
French feminist theory( which found ultimate expression during the May 1968 student uprising), proceeded the confessional poetry of Plath and Sexton. These poets’ oeuvres are seen, by many feminists, as a reaction against patriarchy which denied women a voice – particularly when the topic is‘ taboo’. Poems such as Plath’ s‘ Daddy’ and‘ Lady Lazarus’ and
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.
12
Laplanche, The Language of Psycho Analysis. See entry on the Mirror Stage, 243-254.