On Reading Narcissistic Texts An Object Relations Theory View of the Life and Works of Søren Kierkegaard Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Stirling Kenneth GGreenhalghreenhalgh May 2008 Page 111 Abstract This thesis is concerned with the psychoanalytical concept of narcissism, and the effect that texts written by narcissistic writers have upon their readers. I use Søren Kierkegaard as an example of a narcissistic writer who produced narcissistic texts. In order to follow through the logic of the thesis, it is necessary to explain first the Freudian idea of narcissism, and then narcissism as considered by one post-Freudian school called Object Relations theory. It is also necessary, second, to summarise a psychoanalytic model of what happens when we read any kind of text. The methodology of this thesis is usually called psychobiography, the systematic application of psychodynamic principles to the study of a life, and so, third, both the principles and some of the issues of this methodology are presented. Having established an operational definition of narcissism, the thesis looks first at Kierkegaard’s life, identifying a series of key events or stages that can be re-interpreted on the assumption that Kierkegaard was narcissistic. Three of his key texts are considered next - Fear and Trembling , Works of Love and The Sickness Unto Death . Each of these can be interpreted to show how his narcissism influenced his writing. Two substantial appendices are included. The first is a comment upon the relationship between God and psychoanalysis, presented primarily to introduce the ideas of Donald Winnicott. The second is on the concept of psychopathology, a difficult topic, since it is at once both heavily value laden, but is also persistent in any analysis of psychological difference. In conclusion I refer to several key Kierkegaardian themes, emphasising their narcissistic origins, and ask the reader to reflect upon their own responses to these issues, to consider how Kierkegaard’s narcissism influences their own emotions, and how these in turn affect any cognitive understanding of Søren Kierkegaard. Page 222 Contents Page A Subjective Preface 6 1. Introduction and Summary 14 2. The Concept of Narcissism 25 2.1 Introduction 25 2.2 The Current Psychiatric View 28 2.3 Preface to an Object Relations View of Narcissism 31 2.4 The Origins of the Psychoanalytic Concept of 33 Narcissism 2.5 Melanie Klein 35 2.6 Ronald Fairbairn 38 2.7 An Operational Definition of Narcissism 42 3. Reading and Psychoanalysis 49 3.1 Introduction 49 3.2 The Eclipse of the Author 49 3.3 Understanding the Response of the Reader 57 3.4 The Psychodynamics of Reading Narcissistic Texts 61 3.5 Projective Identification in Reading 65 3.6 The Concept of the Narcissistic Text 73 4. The Idea of Psychobiography 77 4.1 Introduction 77 4.2 Objections of Psychobiography 82 4.3 Discussion 85 4.4 Truths for Some 87 5. Approaching Søren Kierkegaard 90 5.1 Introduction 90 5.2 Kierkegaard’s Early Reception 92 5.3 Kierkegaard in the Anglo-Saxon World 97 5.4 Current Approaches to Kierkegaard 100 6. Narcissistic Influences in Kierkegaard’s Life 109 6.1 Introduction 109 6.2 Sources of Evidence 112 6.3 Mother 115 6.4 Father and Brother 119 6.5 Søren’s Childhood 124 6.6 The Young Man 129 6.7 Regine Olsen 132 6.8 Kierkegaard’s Sexuality 144 Page 333 6.9 The Corsair Affair 149 6.10 Kierkegaard and the Common Man 154 7. Fear and Trembling 160 7.1 Introduction 160 7.2 Approaching Fear and Trembling 161 7.3 The Narcissistic Attraction of the Aqedah 163 7.4 Narcissistic Silence 167 8. Works of Love 173 8.1 Introduction 173 8.2 The Problem of Self Love 178 8.3 The Sexual Experience 181 8.4 Narcissistic Abstraction as the Denial of Alterity 185 8.5 Conclusion 190 9. The Sickness unto Death 193 9.1 Introduction 193 9.2 Reception 198 9.3 The True and False Self 205 9.4 Is the Self Divided? 209 9.5 Rereading The Sickness Unto Death 211 10. Reading Søren Kierkegaard 218 10.1 Introduction 218 10.2 Grunberger’s Challenge 222 10.3 Relating, the Other, and Silence 226 10.4 Approaching Kierkegaard's Texts 233 10.5 Withholding and the Assistant Professors 236 Bibliography 244 Appendix I: A Clinical Vignette 264 Appendix II: God and Psychoanalysis 266 II.1 Introduction 266 II.2 The Freudian View 267 II.3 The Protestant Influence 270 II.4 The Intermediate Space 273 Appendix III: The Troubling Matter of Mental Illness 279 III.1 Introduction 279 III.2 Deconstructing Psychiatry 281 III.3 The End of the Concept of Cure 287 III.4 Discussion 293 Page 444 Acknowledgements I am grateful to many people who have helped me along the way to writing this thesis. To my sponsors, Professor Alan Newall and Professor Colin Watt FRS are due enormous thanks for their initial support and continuing encouragement. Thanks are due also to my fellow members of the Wormit Great Book Society, for acting as a receptive but critical audience for my ideas. My supervisors at the University of Stirling, Dr Alison Jasper and Dr Andrew Hass, have offered profound and sympathetic criticism over the last five years and have gently but firmly guided me throughout this process. I must also thank of Dr Vicky Clifford, who gave me sound advice at a difficult time. The major thanks must go to my wife Jenny, who has lived with this thesis, with the ghost of Kierkegaard, and with an often distracted and occasionally distant husband for longer than the enrolment period might suggest. Without her patience, eternal kindness and usual optimism, it would never have been completed. Page 555 A Subjective Preface Very many people have fallen under the spell of Søren Kierkegaard. Many have tried to make sense of what he said. Almost as many, I fear, have had but limited success. But what is fascinating, deeply fascinating, is how most commentators feel a need to relate personally to this writer: to comment, usually for good, but sometimes for ill, on the personal effect Kierkegaard has had upon them. So in most instances of the secondary literature, somewhere in the introduction, or in some footnote, there is a small though often large comment about how that writer first met the ideas or reputation of Kierkegaard. It would seem that Kierkegaard is not just another author, but one who somehow engages us in an unusual way. Most secondary writers have a personal story to tell, but much more interestingly, they want to tell it. Why? What does Kierkegaard do to us that makes our relationship with him seemingly qualitatively different from other philosophers or theologians? Julia Watkin, for example, one of the most assiduous writers, scholars and bibliographers of Kierkegaard's output, tells her story of how at Bristol University: Dr (later Professor) John Kent, who regularly filleted the big names in religious studies like so many fish, was strangely lenient with Kierkegaard, thus arousing my curiosity and expectancy. This expectancy was not disappointed, since when I began to read Kierkegaard in 1972, I saw in a flash of illumination that I was encountering a great mind that had something to say to the problems of our time. 1 And there is the famous story of how David Swenson, a formidable Kierkegaard scholar essentially of the nineteenth century, and the very first Kierkegaard translator and champion in the USA, encountered Concluding Unscientific Postscript in the Minnesota University library, where in 1898 he was a teaching assistant: It was quite by accident that one day I picked up a Danish book from the shelves of the library, a book which seemed to have philosophical content. The name of the author told me nothing, for I had never 1 Watkin (1997) Preface. Page 666 heard of Søren Kierkegaard. On a venture, I took the book home. It was Saturday evening, and I did not rise from the reading begun on reaching home, until half past two Sunday morning. By Sunday night I had finished the more than five hundred closely printed pages of the book, so impossible was it for me to lay it aside. 2 In the introduction to a very recent text, Peter Mehl likens his relationship with Kierkegaard to that with his wife: So too has my relationship with Kierkegaard gone: until now it is a mutually critical partnership. We will never divorce and I do not think we could. He will always be with me, yet he is not as immediately infatuating as he initially was. He now occupies a place in my consciousness that is pervasive but not all consuming. 3 And, continuing the theme of post-nuptial surprises, the distinguished British Kierkegaardian scholar, George Pattison, admits to something similar: Hilary, my partner, had no ideas when she married me that she was going to have to share so much of her living space with the great Danish writer, with whom, like me, she has a love-hate relationship. Not quite a ménage a trois, but it sometimes, I fear, feels like it. 4 But long before Kierkegaard became fashionable, or known outside the Nordic countries, it was clear that the act of reading the works of this writer had an impact on the reader. The Kierkegaard scholar P A Heiberg in his 1895 text ‘ Contributions towards a psychological portrait of Søren Kierkegaard in childhood and youth’ commented: Søren Kierkegaard’s personality forces the objective scientific enquirer, by an arresting glance, as it were, to make a subjective “preface”.