Narcissism and Its Discontents

by Walsh, Julie

• ISBN13: 9781137333438
• ISBN10: 113733343X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-11-27
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Narcissism and Its Discontents challenges the received wisdom that narcissism is only destructive of good social relations. By building on insights from psychoanalysis and critical theory it puts forward a theorisation of narcissistic sociability which redeems Narcissus from his position as the subject of negative critique. Following a close engagement with Sigmund Freud's 1914 paper 'On Narcissism: An Introduction', two further critical moments are considered: first, the mobilisation of narcissism in Anglo-American cultural discourse of the 1970s to 1990s where the term functioned as a descriptor for cultural malaise; and second, the discursive shift from narcissism to melancholia associated with more contemporary critical theory. This book pays particular attention to the paradoxical relation between the narcissist and the social world, identifying in Narcissus a figure whose turning away extends a call to others, and who finds in the vulnerabilities of the self the makings of the social scene.

Author Biography

Julie Walsh is an Institute of Advanced Study Global Research Fellow in the department of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. On the Introduction of Narcissism to Psychoanalytic Theory: 1914 and its Consequences
2. Socialising Narcissus via the Case of 'Little Hans'
3. Sociology 1: On the Narcissism of Nostalgia
4. Sociology 2: Cultural Narcissism, Some Examples from Anglo-American Sociology
5. 'Exceptional' Woman and Exemplary Sociability: The Figure of the Narquette
6. From Narcissism to Melancholia, and Back Again…