The Human Mirror: Narcissistic Imperative in Human Behaviour Love and hate, rise and fall, defying death by James Cumes. Online pdf. 4 pounds.

Re: Social psychology of hate and death

Subject: Re: Social psychology of hate and death

From: schulte-baeuminghaus (cresscourt@chello.at) Date: Sun Mar 11 2001 - 02:06:46 CST

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Dear Lauren,

Indeed, we are quite remarkably on the same track. I suspect you have given me only a sample - a mere taste - of your whole work.

However, it satisfies my narcissistic imperative for recognition - if I may put it that way! - that you and I have looked at a behavioural area and come to much the same sort of conclusions. I can only speculate on how much further you've taken this work. In my own case, I've looked, inter alia, at narcissistic transference and institutional narcissism.

In the complex, modern plural society, institutional narcissism has, I believe, received far too little attention - indeed, there's hardly any real awareness of it except of course among people like yourself. (I'm using "plural" in the de Tocqueville sense, rather than limiting it, as it often is, to ethnic notions.) Despite that lack of awareness, institutional narcissism has a major impact on the culture, economy, society, political character and military security of any community. It can be a reinforcement or, just as often, a corrupting influence - a decline-and-fall factor. Allied with institutional narcissism is narcissistic transference. Indeed, a sine qua non of institutional narcissism must be that many, most or virtually all of us will be prepared - indeed, will be eager - to transfer part and, often, a large part of our identity from our individual selves to an institution or institutions with which we identify. The intensity and the variety of this transference will vary with the individual and with the vigour with which particular institutions seek to obtain recruits and condition them. The appeal of traditional religious institutions might be compared with the compulsions of radical cults.

On a currently hot topic, the narcissistic imperative in human behaviour has a close relationship with the appeal of cloning. At least, the appeal is likely to grow as the procedure becomes better and more widely understood. While I was working on The Human Mirror, I was impressed with the fierceness with which most people, and particularly women, rejected the idea of human cloning. This seems largely to be based on an anxiety that we'll have a thousand Hitlers wandering our streets or even multiple reproductions of Nobel laureates, instead of just everyday babies, growing normally into normal adults - in so far as we're ever "normal" of course. In fact, human cloning will be much the same as traditional sexual reproduction, except that there will be one genetic parent instead of two. There won't be multiple reproductions - except in the way that some couples now might have five or six or ten children through traditional reproduction - and, so far as we can tell, only the physical characteristics of the single genetic parent will be reproduced. The personality - the "mind" or "soul" or whatever - of the child, as it develops in its own environment and within its own family group and society will be distinct from its original. When it is better understood, human cloning will almost certainly, for many, satisfy more perfectly the quest for continuing identity - a sort of limited immortality - of the individual. The quest for immortality is powerful but, short of immortality, the quest for survival of the self, if not quite universal, is widespread among both individuals and societies. Sexual reproduction imperfectly satisfies this quest. Cloned reproduction will, for many, satisfy it more perfectly.

Whatever its advantages or otherwise, human cloning is likely to become a feature and perhaps a major feature of human reproduction. It will be one of the ways in which the narcissistic imperative will be satisfied or, in any event, solaced.

All of these manifestations of human behaviour to comfort, enhance or honour the self have received far too little attention. A major investigation of, for example, institutional narcissism, is urgent. We need to know more too about narcissistic transference and what impact it can have, especially on the more vulnerable in our societies. To what extent is it used to exploit the more vulnerable - the more susceptible, the more impressionable?

There is a fundamentalism about these issues that makes them important for humanity as a whole as well as for individual societies. Their significance extends to our politics, our economies, our morals, our cultures - just about everything we do. Again, congratulations on your work and my best wishes to you for the future.

James Cumes

---------- From: LLPSN@aol.com To: cresscourt@chello.at Subject: Re: Social psychology of hate and death Date: Sat, Mar 10, 2001, 4:53 pm

Dear James, thanx, will dl. Meanwhile, I was trained at the Chicago Insititute under the shadow of Heinz Kohut. One of the thing I have done in my own work, following a long tradtion, including Fromm has been to reject Freuds's biologism. From one of my paper on national-you can see we are on same track, best, Lauren Recognition, Pride and Shame. For Hegel, the life or death struggle for recognition was the basis of self consciousness. The Master seeks recognition of his very being and his domination over the Slave lest he face the terrors of utter contingency. Hegel's phenomenology clearly anticipated recent psychoanalytic theories of motivation that have moved from ¢X°Egratification of drives' to the desire for recognition of selfhood that in turn provides esteem, pride and joy as the most powerful human desire. Caretakers provide recognition as well physical care for the neonate. They serve as "self-objects" that provide recognition to the archaic self. Kohut (l973) calls this "mirroring" of selfhood that. In the context of secure attachments, what Winnicott (l952) called "good enough mothering", the reduction of tensions takes place along with recognition of selfhood. As a result, various discreet fragments of experience gradually become integrated into a cohesive self. Parents serve a number of functions, they (may) empathically soothe tensions, grant recognition of emerging selfhood and/or act powerful models with whom the child might identity. Recognition by caretakers leads to a primitive configuration of differentiated selfhood as an internal locus of affective experience. This recognition enables individuation, or as Mahler (l975) has put it, recognition fosters the "psychological birth of the infant". The differentiation between selfhood as an internal locus of experience and desire for recognition from the external other forms the basis of a socialized, reflexive agent pursuing such recognition in his/her quotidian as well as episodic collective rituals.

The recognition of emergent selfhood is associated with joys and pleasures divorced from physical needs, recognition becomes a desire in its own and forms the basis for self esteem, pride, dignity, honor, etc. In later life, this becomes a powerful desire impelling various behaviors that the culture recognizes. This pursuit of recognition provides people with self esteem and in turn the anticipated positive affective experiences. Membership in groups hence not only provide social ties, but also grant members identities and in turn recognition of selfhood. Taylor (l992) has suggested that the fundamental basis of cultural politics are the quests for recognition and in turn pride and dignity. Most groups, whether premodern nomads, suburban cubscouts, inner city gangs or modern armies, Churches and even professional associations provide their members with some forms of honor and dignity. In modern societies pride can often be based on the recognition based on the accomplishments of mediated, "indirect ties" (Calhoun,1986) to significant members of one's community, eg leaders, artists, scientists, diplomats, basketball players, sociologists and celebrities of mass media. But when people are denied recognition of their self, when they are shamed, denigrated or humiliated, they often react with violent expressions of narcissistic rage as an attempts to restore their recognition and dignity (Scheff, 1994). The frustrated pursuit of recognition and or denial of dignity can become the basis of sado-masochism. People will readily commit heinous acts and/or degrade themselves to glean recognition as Fromm (1941) noted and Jessica Benjamin (l982) more recently echoed , to inflict pain is to be recognized as powerful, while the power to destroy the Other give one the power of God. Conversely, it is better to be beaten as a recognized as a beaten self than ignored as a nobody. Hatred of that Other can itself provide a recognized identity.. German Fascism crafted a valorized Aryan identity, a "bogus nobility" that gave the anxious petit bourgeoisie a compensatory identity and basis for dignity in hating the Jew (Bloch,1971). For Frantz Fanon, far more onerous than the political domination/exploitation of the colonizer was his/her denial to recognize the selfhood of the other.