NARCISSISTIC TRANSFORMATIONS IN ADOLESCENCE
Vann Spruiell, M.D.
ABSTRACT
Reprinted from the International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 1975, Vol. IV pp. 518-536.
In a continuation of studies of the issues taken up in a previous paper on narcissism (Three Strands of Narcissism, [vs75a], this paper traces the transformation of narcissism, especially during adolescence. Narcissism is defined here in terms of it being constituted by all the associated activities of the mind that are constituents of unconscious and unconscious forms of self love. These transformations of narcissism ordinarily parallel the transformations of love having to do with loving another person understood as a separate entity (object love), from phase to phase of development. Normally they occur between early and late adolescence, mostly in the year or two before or the year or two after the age of 16 and physical maturity. "Object love" implies the capacity to love another person in the sense that the other’s separateness and autonomy is at least to some extent recognized and treasured, and the individual is capable of erotic fulfillment that is shared in the adult sense. Narcissism is defined here, and examined, in terms of three strands of development that ultimately come to be related: erotic self-love, omnipotence, and the regulations of self-esteem. The developmental transitions from one phase to another occur relatively rapidly in most normal and psychoneurotic individuals. They involve massive reorganizations of the psyche as a whole. The acquisition of a body image of an adult sort creates a system that is an important organizer of whole, relatively adult, self, including its relations to the bodies and minds of others. It is harnessed to hormonal, interpersonal, and cultural influences. One normal and ordinary consequence is the first romantic love relationship. An understanding of the conflicts and their resolution (or lack of resolution) is important in psychoanalytic psychotherapy of both adolescents and adults. This paper is also complemented by two subsequent papers, vs79d (Alterations of the ego ideal in girls ...), and vs79b (Freud's concepts of idealization ...).
ADOLESCENTS – at least those whose genetic, developmental, and environmental backgrounds have been reasonably benign – almost suddenly (although the suddenness can’t be the case within) develop a remarkable new capacity: to both experience and offer romantic love, to truly "make love" rather than simply "make out" in an earlier, cruder kind of sexual behavior that is devoid of tenderness or even concern for the partner. I believe we can we can bring psychoanalytic insights to bear on this development as it occurs in more or less ordinary young people, normal or psychoneurotic. By "ordinary," I do not mean unintelligent or untalented or "dull;" I mean these individuals have so far not been blighted by life.
In particular, I wish to draw upon new insights into the developmental transformations of narcissism, examined from the viewpoint of the ego and the superego (including their unconscious aspects), rather than only from the more usual viewpoint of the drives (although I by no means do I exclude the necessity for some form of biological drive theory, or inherent motivational theory). Three lines of narcissistic ego development will be considered. They are self-love, omnipotence and self-esteem (Spruiell, 1975, vs75a). These "lines" are not entirely separate, although their transformations to do with personality as a whole. They also have to do with self as a whole. (See "The ego and the self" vs81a, and "Self" (1995) vs91b. And they particularly have to do with the influences and relationships of the external world. They have to do not only with the love, but the hate of others who are seen as independent entities.
If all goes well in these transformations the young person comes to be able to exist in a new sense, as a loving and beloved self in relation to a loving and beloved other – and the potentiality to also relate to the capacity to hate. If all goes well, the young person comes to be able to exist in a new sense, as a person with a loving and beloved self in relation to a loving and beloved other.
The "psychology of self," i.e., narcissism, (although it ought to be termed the psychology of self and object relations), has been less developed in mainstream psychoanalysis than the psychology of object relations. I hope that tracing alterations of narcissism will not only add to our existing understanding of the achievement of the capacity to love heterosexually (Blos, 1962), but will also demonstrate the general clinical usefulness of taking into account the development of narcissism as it parallels and interdigitates with non-narcissistic development. We really have only one psychology, not two. The focus of the paper may lead to apparent slighting of adolescent developments in the non-narcissistic sphere (essentially, the reorganization of drives and their derivatives along with structural alterations, coming about as a result of both biological maturation and relative mastery of preoedipal and Oedipal fixations and conflicts). This selective emphasis should not be mistaken for reality; narcissistic and non-narcissistic developments are inextricably related and can be separated only heuristically.
My experiences in attempting to understand these changing processes derive from the analyses of late adolescents, and some longitudinal observations of non-patient adolescents. In addition, because of my interests, I have managed to elicit many experiences, memories and fantasies from the lives of my adult patients.
FREQUENT MISUNDERSTANDINGS
Any sort of work with people, whether with individuals or groups, should rely on what can be understood of the inner truths of human experience at different phases of development. Any sort of approach should rely on a realistic view of normal developmental issues, whether manifested consciously or as derivatives of unconscious dynamics. If it does not, the consequences can be disastrous.
For example, psychoanalysts are sadly aware that much contemporary advice about adolescent sexuality is almost perversely naïve, particularly because the advice offered presumes that humans are essentially simple – either more like machines than extraordinarily complex systems, or more essentially simple like wild animals are thought to be. Of course, I am referring to extreme belief systems which jettison common sense in favor of supposedly rigidly fixed rules. For example, the extremes of some very "right-wing" believers or of some very "left-wing" believers, the general level of understanding of the complexity of human beings is very, very low. This, unfortunately, holds for people who are well-informed otherwise, even for many who represent themselves as psychotherapists. Against all evidence, the result is the abandonment of common sense and certainly willful ignorance.
If human beings are assumed to be essentially simple, so are social interactions. At the extremes, the very existence of individual, romantic love is denied, except, perhaps, as some sort of individual or group delusion. In some totalitarian forms of the "radical right," intimate, romantic love is denied, but the values preached have it that machine-like, genital sexual behavior is all-important. The position is that good sexual behavior simply needs to be taught. No need to worry about "black boxes" containing human psyches. On the other hand, some extreme members of the "radical left" argue that we should love everybody and equally. We should not become involved with one other body; the lasting and exclusive love between one individual and another is considered to oppose the welfare of the group as a whole. All our brothers and sisters should be loved interchangeably, freely and unpossessively. No person and no organ of sexuality is to have primacy in our affections; no enemy shall obtain our compassion.
Were it not for the fact that such values are currently influential, even to the point of invading some supposedly psychoanalytic psychotherapies, we could dismiss these "movements" as aberrations. The theories, if one could so dignify them, are derived partly from certain philosophical and political preconceptions, but perhaps they really come from more from personal disillusionment. In any event, too many adults preach their wishful thinking: that adolescence is a time of rampant, predatory, impulse ridden viciousness, and/or that adolescence is a time of autistic-like reliance on nothing but rational control.
Nevertheless, it is a fact that a large number of individuals cannot experience a combination of concern, tenderness, and lust for another over a period of time, or at least say they cannot; or rationalize that they should not for political reasons. But, fortunately, a good many people can say, believably, "Yes, I have loved, and been loved, and I know the difference between not loving and loving unambiguously."
How to account for the latter gift? What are the necessary happenings within the personality which can allow the gift of love to be given and received over long periods of time?
TWO CONVERGING APPROACHES IN THE STUDY OF NARCISSISTIC CHANGES
The material to follow will draw on two convergent approaches that I have pursued since the 1970’s. One has to do with attempts to identify the dynamics of inner structural psychic changes which must be coordinated if an individual is to move psychologically, though not biologically or socially, from early adolescence to late adolescence. The other has to do with an effort to study narcissism by teasing out separate (but closely related and intertwined) developmental lines of the ego. Here, I will summarize this work – for a much more detailed report, see my 1972 paper, "The Transition of the Body Image between Middle and Late Adolescence."
In 1972, I argued that while biological adolescence is functionally almost complete by the age of sixteen (give or take a year or so) with the achievement of adult physical stature. At the same time, social adolescence is defined by the social class to which the individual belongs; it may have little to do with the internal realities of the individual. Thus, psychological adolescence can be divided into two separate and dissimilar phases. Only a semantic accident leads us to call both early and late phases by the same term, adolescence; normally and in the case of most neurotics, the two phases are as qualitatively distinct as, say, the latency phase is distinct from the Oedipal.
Psychologically speaking, early adolescence refers to all those mental processes, their organizations and their reorganizations, existing from the first psychic reactions to oncoming pubescence to the time late adolescence begins. Late adolescence begins with adult capacities physically and sexually that are better than those of older people. But social adolescence depends upon the subculture in which the individual is raised. In our culture, young people may be physically able to procreate and care for children, but most of them are far from competent to meet the demands of a complex society.
The mental phenomena characteristic of early adolescence have been well described by Blos (1962), A. Freud (1958), and others. In normal and most psychoneurotic individuals, early adolescence to a large extent is coordinated with the span of biological adolescence – very approximately between the ages of twelve and sixteen.
Psychological late adolescence usually begins with the psychic reactions to the acquisition of adult bodily stature and capacities, including adult genital and procreative capacities. It is my belief these reactions are signified by the development of at least the beginnings of an adult body image. The implications, reflected by this new body image, of sexual and aggressive parity with adults, as compared to earlier childish body images in interaction with the child's conscious and unconscious "images" of adult bodies and adult functions, are enormous. All intrapsychic and interpersonal operations must change with the transition to conscious and unconscious recognition of the new status quo. Thus, the new body schema serves as an organizer for a radical reorganization of the personality, in terms both of the drives and the structures controlling, modulating and channeling the drives.
In other words, the achievement of relatively non-incestuous and non narcissistic capacities for object relations begins normally with late adolescence, often signified by one’s first intense "puppy-love" experience. The beginnings of (relatively) non-incestuous genital primacy and non-incestuous object finding go hand in hand with the capacities for altering or transforming narcissism, the primary subject of this paper.
The transition from early to late adolescence occurs quite rapidly, usually within a matter of months according to my observations. In the context of a beginning adult body schema; not only are libidinal motivations organized in a new way, but so are aggressive motivations. A new level of executive functioning is manifested in terms of both self- and object representations, and in terms of a new sense of time, a new sense of destiny, or mortality -- and even, in many, of a new level of abstract, formal operational thought (Inhelder and Piaget, 1958). The superego is also altered; there appear quite new ideals and standards, which come to alter the harsh, prohibitory superego operations seen earlier (A. Freud, 1958; Laufer, 1964; Spiegel, 1951, 1958).
In most individuals there is a sort of "jelling" of the character at that time, a "closing of psychic epiphyses." The beginning of more defined adult possibilities occurs at the beginning of late adolescence. The individual consciously or unconsciously comes to see himself in a new way as one who can both love and work, or as someone to an extent crippled as an adult in either one way or the other. It remains to be added that the working out of these possibilities requires years before the individual can come to see himself as safely functioning as an adult in a world of other adults.
To turn more specifically to narcissism, the other theme I wish to follow: in 1975 (see "Narcissistic Transformations in Adolescence.") I presented the earlier version of the present paper, an approach to the topic from the viewpoint of the ego rather than solely from the viewpoint of instinctual drives. Basic to this approach, which I can only barely summarize here, is the view, particularly emphasized by Kohut (1971), that narcissism is not opposed to object love, is not "given up" when another is loved; narcissism is instead altered --transformed, in Kohut's word, as development proceeds. There are immature and mature forms of narcissism, and healthy and pathological forms. The advance in the capacity to love another implies an advance in narcissism.
But what is narcissism from the viewpoint of the ego? What are the human phenomena we call by that name. It is possible to identify three separate strands of development events -- three independent developmental lines which, by the Oedipal phase, have become so entangled that they often cannot be easily discerned as separate except in the case of narcissistic, borderline or psychotic pathology. The first of these is self-love, the largely erotic investment of the self. The experience of self-love emerges well along in the separation-individuation phase (Mahler, 1968) out of a global, all-inclusive primary narcissism, with the establishment of more or less reliable distinctions between the self- and object representations.
The other two strands of narcissism are genetically as old as the first. One has to do with the development of action and intentionality, later more and more conceived as power; the capacity to make things happen. By the first half of the second year, the healthy toddler is able to experience himself as the possessor of great power. We term this state infantile omnipotence. Ordinarily, reality later forces the child to ascribe a large part of this power to others. Still later, he must gradually alter and deepen his conscious and unconscious conceptions of the nature of power and how it may be ascribed to himself and to others. If one speaks in terms of instinctual motivations, omnipotence (and I am using that term to represent all of the intrapsychic concerns with power, however realistic or unrealistic) has more to do with aggressive motivations than libidinal.
The third strand of narcissism has to do with the regulation of inner states of well-being, at first as an aspect of the mother-child field, later internalized as the intrapsychic regulation of self-esteem. Incidentally, this aspect or strand of narcissism is frequently (and unfortunately) equated with the whole of narcissism in much of the contemporary literature. The regulation of self-esteem is a complex matter, including the ego's relations with the ego ideal, the conscious and unconscious estimations of how well one is living up to what one would like oneself to be, perceptions of what other important people would wish one to be, perceptions of safety, physical well-being, etc. It additionally is sensitive to the quality and intensity of internal conflicts, the adequacy of the drive-controlling and regulating aspect of the psyche, and the level of satisfactions by way of gratifications.
Obviously the regulation of self-esteem overlaps the other two aspects of narcissism already mentioned, self-love and intrapsychic ascriptions of power. As development proceeds, the regulation of self esteem becomes more autonomous; one mechanism by which this occurs has to do with first finding idealized qualities in others, and then, as a result of disillusionment and internalization, acquiring these actualities as internal standards of one's own (Kohut, 1971). As I will try to demonstrate, this process is essential in the young person's coming to be able to experience romantic love in the transition from early to late adolescence.
The three strands, or sets, of ego motivations having to do with narcissism -- self-love, omnipotence, and the regulations of self esteem -- ordinarily become relatively intermixed during the Oedipal period, but the melding is not finally completed until mid-adolescence, when Oedipal issues become relatively resolved on a genital level in normal and most psychoneurotic patients. In the case of narcissistic pathology, however, each line of development may be specifically stunted or specifically augmented; erotic interests may be used defensively against dangerous issues of power, or vice versa; interests involved in the regulation of self-esteem may lead to the suppression, repression or splitting of interests having to do with sexuality, or power, or both. In other words there may be alliances and conflicts within narcissism, so to speak.
ONE BOY'S DEVELOPMENT AS AN ILLUSTRATION
In order to illustrate common narcissistic transformations, I'll present a fragmentary picture of the adolescent history of one boy, utilizing data derived from his later analysis as a successful but depressed young lawyer. I will not go into detail about his adult life or his analysis, except to say that while he was sexually active and competent, for a long time in his analysis he felt unable to commit himself to lasting experiences of love.
In Russell's analysis sufficient memories emerged to allow the recognition and reconstruction of a rapid change during a few months of his sixteenth year. Prior to that time, he had spent a socially unremarkable boyhood in a small Louisiana town near the Texas border. Perhaps he was considered somewhat odd by his peers by virtue of his high intelligence and interest in books; nevertheless he was included at least as a follower and a sometime butt of jokes in group activities. Although he always had one or two close friends, he was extremely shy with girls and secretly entertained an altogether savage envy for boys who dared to date them. Inwardly, he felt lost, disorganized and lonely, oscillating between excesses of religious devotion and sinful masturbatory abandon.
Russell had, in early adolescence, a welter of day dreams. Mostly they related to all kinds of questions of power, in others, in himself. They were intermixed with fantasies about sexuality – his own and others’. They were frequently accompanied by masturbation, and they included all sorts of heterosexual, homosexual, sadomasochistic, exhibitionistic and voyeuristic themes. Their intensity, violence, and inchoate nature terrified and enthralled him in early adolescence. Later, they were worked into highly organized general fantasies. Although he remembered feeling deeply ashamed and afraid of them, he was more comfortable with his secrets. These were primarily military in nature: the various states of this country had been split into separate nations; an adjoining state would invade his own, but at the last moment he would lead a band of peers to his grandfather's hardware store -- breaking in, they would acquire arms in order to fight exciting guerrilla actions; eventually they would destroy the evil dictator and his minions in their capital deep within the enemy state. Variants of this fantasy persisted through later adolescence and even into adulthood.
There seemed to be no doubt that during his early adolescence, this socially "normal," sensitive, intelligent teenager was involved in a turmoil of feelings: guilt, anxiety, expiation, sadness, and fear of "craziness.". In his private life he was unreliably gloomy or high, hopeless or elated, grandiose in his fantasies of future power or weak and helpless in his premonitions of disaster. Russell was trying to avoid fathers and to abandon mothers. He was able to connect with his peer world but he could not connect these relationships with any reliable conception of himself.
During the spring of his sixteenth year Russell was becoming more and more anxious about finally going out for the football team. It was to be his moment of truth; his dark ruminations about it wound about the coming exposure of himself as a coward, a failure, and an object of total scorn. But his pride would not leave him be; he had to seek his fate. On the other hand, he asked himself, could that fate be a good one? Might he become a star, a superstar? Much later, during his analysis, when a crisis in the transference neurosis was occasioned by mounting homosexual wishes and fears, Russell recovered a clear memory of an experience just before football practice began. For a year or two, to the irritation of the rest of his family, he had begun spending increasing amounts of time looking at himself in the mirror in the only bathroom. He struck poses, assumed expressions, and inspected blemishes. Sometimes he masturbated with body posed in various positions.
On this occasion, he happened to look at himself in profile, using a hand mirror. He thought -- although later he knew that this could not have been true -- that this was the first time that he had ever seen himself in profile. To him, his nose seemed ever so long and aquiline, and the thought came to him that it looked exactly like the nose of a boy who also happened to be the most effeminate in his class. It was not the perfect nose he had imagined. Russell felt shattered, utterly dismayed.
He remembered thinking, "People have been seeing me this way all along. They must think I'm a sissy like him."
Afterwards, it must have required a great deal of courage to actually report for football practice. But to his surprise, even astonishment, he discovered that he was a big boy, strong and fast, and capable of acquiring the necessary skills. Not only was he treated with respect, he was admired for some of the things he could do.
In a very brief time, Russell acquired a less inflated, less grandiose, but therefore more competent representation of himself as a male; the other version of himself, the effeminate, degraded, cowardly Russell, while still present, began to recede. Over the ensuing months he began to approach girls, tentatively at first, later with more assurance. Some experiences of petting strengthened his masculine vanity. At the same time he experienced a strong disillusionment with his religion and a simultaneous spurt in intellectual interests. He began to read all sorts of books which excited him, strengthened his disbelief in the maxims he had been taught, and introduced categories of knowledge he had never before known existed.
Yet, he remembered later, in spite of his physical and intellectual blooming, he still did not feel completely ' right." He could not fall in love with a real girl. His dreadful secret, that he might be homosexual, continued. Along with his excited ambitiousness, which included hopes to excel in an impossibly large number of areas, there lurked intimations of future defeat and impotence. And these problems continued with him through his later adolescence and early adulthood, no matter how many women he later seduced and no matter what kinds of external success came his way.
In the section to follow, I wish to examine the self-centered, selfish, egoistic, narcissistic aspects of Russell's development. I want to compare it as well as I can with what most of his peers were going through. At the same time I hope to counter culture-bound prejudices to the effect that narcissistic phenomena are by definition evil, pathological, or immature. In taking this approach, it will be necessary to slight some of the most important things about Russell's inner life: his lustful loving and hating, his fear and guilt, his regressive longings for lost satisfactions, his conflicts, his patterned defenses, and his post-Oedipal, Oedipal and pre-oedipal development. How to relate to others is inseparable from how we relate to ourselves, and vice versa.
ALTERATIONS IN SELF LOVE DURING ADOLESCENCE
How did Russell erotically love -- and hate -- himself as a young adolescent, and how did this self love change? Before looking directly for evidences of this self-love, I want to examine very briefly the ways he related, in his mind, to other people. Insofar as Russell could be said to relate to adults and peers as independent beings, he loved and hated them in infantile and childish fashions. The emphasis was on his interests rather than those of others; by definition the relationships were narcissistic in nature. Compared to still younger days, it is true, he could conceive of other people as autonomous human beings to a vastly greater degree. But it is also true that, compared to adequate levels of adult loving, his erotic love and hate related almost entirely to an interest in his own gratifications and possible frustrations, not those of others. But in one respect, Russell, like most of his peers, had already in latency negotiated an enormous step in development. He had been able to experience feelings for a very small number of "best friends"; he cared about certain chums and was loyal to them. These intense, but on the surface non-erotic friendships, with their tenderness and their emotional acknowledgment of the realities of other equal human beings, represented one of the true forerunners of adult love, the "tender current." And what of the "lustful current?" It was scattered about, so to speak: in the continuing unconscious incestuous relations, in relations with degraded peers, and most of all, in his concerns with his own body (see contemporary papers on these themes, vs96 (The body image and affects ...) and vs97 (Review of the psychoanalytic theory of affects ...).
Aside from the aim-inhibited relations with "best friends" and a few adults, and largely unconscious relationships of an incestuous nature, Russell's apparent interests in others had very little to do with these others as human beings. That is, he "loved" and "hated" parents and peers and their substitutes first in terms of his own needs for gratification and secondly in terms of the objects serving as still-external regulatory functions of his own personality, functions which would later come to be internalized. Kohut (1971), more than any other author, has documented narcissistic relations of this second sort. Third, Russell "loved" others as potential heroic versions of himself or his sexual object. Much of what is ordinarily described as normal adolescent homosexuality comes under these latter two headings.
Loving himself through others, Russell, like most of his boy or girl friends, loved himself in early adolescence quite directly. His masturbation fantasies, however, indicated that the self he loved was extraordinarily poorly defined. It might be better to say that he loved a range of frequently contradictory sexual versions of himself. Nor would it be right to talk of love without talking simultaneously about hate. Even before the experience with the mirror, in which a simultaneously wished-for and a degraded version of himself as feminine emerged clearly into consciousness, self-loathing had been barely concealed. Some of his grandiose imaginings must have had to do with defensive efforts to avoid thoughts and feelings about himself as unlovable, even as despicable.
Nevertheless, some of his versions of himself as lovable must have been primarily continuations of earlier views of himself as absolutely adorable and marvelous. To borrow Kohut's (1971) striking metaphor, the mirror gleamed, like his mother's eyes, in response to his exhibitionistic display; the mirror approved, whether earlier his mother had or not, his sublime and wonderful sexuality. Or the mirror darted hateful glances at his shameful imperfections, glowed balefully in response to his ugly depravity.
I believe (for similar views, see Laufer, 1968, and Blos, 1962) that Russell's masturbation fantasies were products of an unconscious attempt to organize his views of himself as a lovable and loving potential man, to rid himself of some contradictory or forbidden infantile views, to amalgamate his varied representations of himself into one more or less reliable and enduring – but flexible – self-representations. Above all, he believed that it was absolutely necessary to rid his body image, at least that part of it that was consciously available -- of its feminine components, or at least isolate them. One might say that the whole psychological movement during those six or eight months of his sixteenth year represented a lonely and courageous attempt to face himself, and to love or if necessary hate himself in a more organized way -- and thus come to be able to erotically love (or hate) another person who was not a parent. In part, as we have seen, he failed, but at least he acquired a functional psychoneurotic organization.
How many of his friends in early adolescence were doing the equivalent of masturbating in front of a mirror? What kinds of fantasies did they have? In truth, there’s no way to know. Perhaps there is no more mysterious time of development than early adolescence. Even adolescent patients rarely give us access to these aspects of inner life; adult analysands often cannot remember or their analysts are not interested. Normal boys and girls may tell each other some things, but certainly their confidences are guarded and limited, especially from the adult world, but also from their other peers.
Still, it is also safe to guess that the majority of boys in Russell's peer group were also utilizing masturbation fantasies in a similar way to organize masculine heterosexuality. However, for most of his contemporaries, the group pressures -- not so available to Russell -- undoubtedly provided a smoother, if more limiting transition. They spelled out acceptable fantasies, pressuring increasingly for the actual "making" of girls, if not in fact at least in fancy. And although the equivalent development in the girls of his peer group was probably more complex (Kestenberg, 1968), group pressures undoubtedly played a strong guiding and supporting role in them as well.
In view of all this it is understandable that actual heterosexual experiences in early adolescence are usually, and simply and trivially, narcissistic exploitations. So are most same-sex sexual experiments. As more complicated and gratifying masturbation fantasies, they have little to do with adult love although there are exceptions, the partners are typically dropped subsequently as degraded and despised.
Russell's sixteenth year brought great changes in his self-love, but not as great as those of most of his peers. Most of them were able to fall in love -- if ever so briefly and ever so changeably. How can we account for this major alteration, which brings not less self-love, but a new and better version of it, a new "taming" of self-love? We can observe the transitions from early to late adolescence better than we can explain them. From a distance, we can say that the transition comes about by way of a further "coming together" and melding of self-love with the other two "strands" of narcissism -- omnipotence and the mechanisms for maintaining self-esteem. As cause and/or consequence, this melding is accompanied by an alteration of each. Adult, older peer, and peer relationships play a part in this process; perhaps biological maturation itself also plays a part. And whether as cause or consequence, this coming together is related to new internalizations which serve to structure the organized self-representations and object representations in new ways.
I speculate that Russell's development was different from his peers only in that he was less successful in organizing and reworking infantile aspects of sexuality under the dominance of heterosexual love. I would expect that his peers were less aware of their infantile fantasies than was this introspective, sensitive boy. Nor were they likely as concerned with the infantile dichotomy of absolute and perfect lovability versus its absolute opposite. Certainly more of them became capable of uniting the tender and sensual emotional "currents" -- more of them came to be able to love other persons seen as autonomous and real human beings. They did not give up their self-love, they altered it. But from my limited observations of non-patient adolescents, the differences between Russell and his peers were more quantitative than qualitative.
ALTERATIONS IN OMNIPOTENCE
So far I have not wandered far from traditional formulations of narcissism. But it would be a mistake to view Russell's fantasies and activities only from-the viewpoint of sexual concerns about himself. At the usual magnification of the analytic microscope, we would say that along with libidinal derivatives there are also aggressive derivatives. At our different level of magnification, and confining ourselves to the narcissistic pole of the dichotomy of human loving and hating, we can see that Russell was immersed in intrapsychic concerns with power -- who had how much and what kind of capacity to make things happen.
At each level of development, some of the infantile omnipotence is surrendered and ascribed to others; then it is altered qualitatively. We say the child becomes more "realistic." Paradoxically, as the child and others become less fantastically powerful, each becomes more actually powerful. For example, one of the great achievements of the Oedipal boy is the recognition that he is small, that his parents are big, and that direct, murderous competition is hopeless. A new future comes into being; only in that future might competition become overt. But this achievement in the boy means that he actually becomes more competent -- and it means also that he sees the power of others in more restrained, more limited. and more realistic ways (A. Freud, 1958).
More often than not, the central disillusion, whether expressed openly or not, is with the power of parents. They are secretly or openly denigrated; in part compensation, other adults may be idealized as protectors or models for the future. Most of all, the peer group is seen to be more and more powerful; and one can actually be powerful by leading the group, or one may partake of the power of the group by belonging to it.
At the same time, usually unconsciously, the adult world is seen as potentially more menacing and dangerous than it had been during latency. Regressions may re-ignite partly abandoned infantile conflicts and infantile notions of the omnipotence of adults, just as notions of one's own childish omnipotence may be regressively reinstated in an attempt to bypass conflicts or defend against experiences of helplessness.
Russell's military fantasies had as much to do with those issues of power as they had to do with sexuality, recognizing of course that there was power in his sexuality and sexuality in his power. And no matter how well he kept up appearances socially, he was more inwardly cut off than most of his peers from potential solutions to problems of power through relationships with alternative adults, relationships With his group, and relationships with peers within the group. Not only may groups offer positive models providing solutions which support self esteem, they may older some seemingly negative solutions. As adults we often forget the unending assaults young adolescents make on each other's puffed-up vanity, pompous grandiosity, and spoiled self-centeredness. Adults react to the "cruelty" young people show each other and indeed the savage attacks they make on each other may be damaging -- but usually ignore the actual value of manageable narcissistic blows. Young adolescents chip away, so to speak, at each other's immature versions of self-love and omnipotence. In a sense, adolescents really castrate each other -- at least in partially cutting away at immature versions of phallic grandiosity.
Might actual heterosexual experiences during early adolescence have been of use to Russell in organizing a conscious and unconscious sense of his own power and that of others? It is a moot question. If Russell had been ready for early heterosexual encounters he would have had no difficulty finding them. Such encounters would have to have been presented to Russell by a generous environment in the form of some particularly aggressive and seductive girl or woman – or some well-meaning authority arranging a visit to a prostitute. Even if the one or the other happened, it seems unlikely to me that the experiences would have amounted to very much psychologically in any positive sense; they most likely would not have been integrated with the rest of his personality. At best the memories of such sexual encounters might have remained isolated and secret items of vanity. Or they might have been integrated with his infantile grandiose imaginings about power, delaying the alteration of these sets of ego motivations. At worst Russell might have suffered a premature sense of failure as a man, and turned the fear into the actuality of weakness. But we can be sure that early sexual experiments would not have been put in the context of romantic love (unless they were unconsciously seen as same-sex love) in terms of the omnipotent strand of narcissism, any more than would have been true of self-love. In other words, premature erotic experiences might have resulted in narcissistic complications, just as they might have stirred castration anxiety, guilt, and associated defenses in the sphere of object love.
During the transition from early to late adolescence, Russell was constructing his body image in terms of power as well as its sexuality. In a sense he had to: by his sixteenth year he could not avoid recognizing that he was not small but big. He had adult stature. The future had arrived! Not only sexually but aggressively, he was actually as potent or more potent than other adults.
His discovery involved action -- in his case on the football field. And that action seemed to catalyze a new synthesis: he came to accept that he was reasonably powerful. He was neither a superstar nor a weakling. The effeminate – for him, in power terms, weak -- image became altered because it became fused with the image of himself as a sort of Hollywood star -- in power terms, omnipotent. It is true that Russell was not able to fuse the images totally; he could not resolve the politics of sexual power and thus find his way to intimacy; he was able however to make a tolerable adjustment from the standpoint of others. He did not become an identifiable deviant.
In my view, Russell's development was more like that of his normal boy and girl friends in the alteration of intrapsychic power than was the case of his alterations of self-love and alterations of object-love relationships. Of course his style in dealing with these matters was unique. Most girls, for example, have entirely different techniques for dealing with them. Power itself is defined differently for most girls in that it is less apt to be seen in terms of physical force and more apt to be seen in terms of subtle interpersonal influences. These distinctions between the sexes are only group trends, of course, and may not apply at all to individuals. For example, many boys with or without Russell's athletic gifts find other avenues than his.
At any rate, it seems to me that whatever the avenues or styles, there is a wide range of possible outcomes in the characteristic ways of dealing with such issues as dominance, submission, control, possessiveness, mastery, manipulativeness, acquisitions, and the like. We do not know very much about the psychology of power, although we know that many seemingly normal adult personalities may subordinate every other consideration, including erotic ones, to its acquisition. And we know that our culture may highly reward such individuals with all the trappings of success. On the other hand, those who devote themselves to the surrender of power may actually take their places among the downtrodden.
Later adolescence is a time for the gradual alteration of the new inner conceptions of adult power, particularly in regard to its use vocationally. At first, adult possibilities seem almost limitless, and Pumpian-Mindlin's (1965) term "omnipotentiality," seems appropriate to describe this optimism which must slowly be narrowed by the strictures o£ reality. To summarize, there is a course of development from infantile omnipotence to delegated magical omnipotence, to omnipotentiality, and to competence and potency. One either goes through these stages, or one is held up, or one regresses to earlier stages. And one either fuses this developmental strand with other strands of narcissism or one has to make do with a fragmented and constricted inner self in which sex is used for power, or power for sex, or the mechanisms for maintaining self esteem become pathological.
THE REGULATION OF SELF-ESTEEM
The regulation of self esteem has its origins in the earliest time of the mother-infant field, in which the infant's states of well-being are almost entirely constituted by the mother. As development proceeds, the child internalizes more and more of these regulations; instead of receiving directions, rewards, standards, values, prohibitions and ideals from the outside world, the child is able to function increasingly autonomously.
By the end of the Oedipal phase, the child has established the basic framework of the superego (including the ego ideal). However, we are familiar with the fact that the building of the framework continues, and that the latency and early adolescent child continues to need inputs from his environment -- rewards, gratifications, succor, and directions, standards, disapprovals, and even punishments. As a matter of fact, we know very well that healthy late adolescents and adults continue to need gratifications and even regulations in some form or another from the environment.
Russell, during early adolescence, resembled most of his peers in unconsciously seeking to undo idealized attachments to his parents which had served him in good stead during latency. Paralleling the various distancing maneuvers, designed for protection against the renewed menace of Oedipal wishes, guilt, and fears, were active denigrations reflecting narcissistic interests. He sought to diminish the importance of his father and mother both as objects of love and hate and as idealized, external representatives of his own self-love and power. In his attitudes toward them he became consciously indifferent, privately contemptuous and secretly ashamed.
But in reducing the now dangerous possibilities for gratification he also vitiated the regulations of self-esteem and behavior they had provided. No suitable internalizations replaced them. And Russell was less successful than others in finding alternative groups and individuals to idealize, models with which he could during late adolescence become manageably disillusioned at the very same time he internalized some of their functions. Kohut (1971) has described how individuals seek others whom they can idealize in one form of narcissistic relationship. In a sense, these individuals are searching for missing parts of their own psyches. In my opinion this is nowhere seen more clearly and normally than in adolescence.
It will be remembered that if Russell seemed to be relatively unsuccessful in finding idealized persons with whom he could relate, he at least attempted to use his religion as an idealized form. And other material could have been brought forward showing how he idealized certain older boys, a few teachers and his football coach; there were both erotic idealizations and power idealizations; to some extent all these functioned as parts of an ideal that was still mostly external in nature, not assimilated and accommodated to internally.
Partly as a consequence, Russell's regulations of self-esteem were highly unreliable during early adolescence. One part of him was at war with his emerging sexual and aggressive impulses because they were still in large part directed unconsciously toward his parents. He was unable to integrate a self and to feel sure that it was indeed in the main a lovable, competent, and reasonably safe self. He was extremely uncertain about whether or not he had power and uncertain about the nature of this power; similarly, he was unclear about his ascriptions of power to others. Russell was unable to continue childish gratifications and at the same time unable to replace them with adequate sexual, athletic, group, or intellectual gratifications. In a real sense he was deprived of ordinary, expectable, age-appropriate satisfactions. Finally, he had not as yet altered his childish and harsh prohibitory superego by the addition of reliable adult ego ideal formations. Having to some extent cut himself loose from external sanctions, he had insufficient inner resources with which to replace them. It is understandable that he would have had difficulty maintaining his self-esteem and avoiding the terrible extremes of elated conceit and agonized inferiority.
How would his peers compare? I don’t know, reliably. I agree with several non-analytic observers of adolescence who believe that most ordinary young people show a minimum of external signs of conflict and pain. Yet Russell (and other people I have treated) make a counter-case. Russell’s very real adolescent suffering did not seem to perturb others because he carefully disguised it. And it is a common sense observation that many adolescents who seem troubled "settle down" as they become adults, becoming "solid citizens." It may be that the successful spontaneous transition from early to late adolescence, even if delayed, is "curative" in that it indicates that adult erotic gratifications become possible. Still, I doubt that most of Russell’s peers were as troubled as he was. I imagine that most adolescents do not consciously feel as badly about themselves as Russell did -- nor as marvelously good as he occasionally did.
During the transition period between early and late adolescence, Russell was able to resolve more than his fragmented representation of himself in terms of sex and power. The fact that he "proved himself" athletically and socially, and that he was able to begin an excited intellectual growth, indicated that an alteration of his ego ideal had taken place. Was this a result of an identification with some figure, the coach, perhaps, which we were unable to understand during his later analysis? Was this an identification with some more abstract "collective alternate?" (See Greenacre, (1957). Was he able to meld ideals out of his new-found confidence and out of various intellectual models he found in books? Was his group more important to him than he knew?
I speculate that each question could be answered affirmatively if more data had been available, and furthermore that other, unknown factors were at work. I believe that most adolescents go through something similar in the transitional period, and that structural changes of immense importance occur. The altered superego continues in effect to insist that incest is bad but begins to say that a new kind of sexual love is good. The ego discounts both the wish to castrate and the fear of castration: the ego says in effect that not all members of the opposite sex have to indicate the parent; the ego says in effect that adult gratifications are achievable. One can begin to love and one can begin to work.
Just as the structural changes which signify the end of the oedipal phase signify only a new beginning, the structural changes in mid-adolescence signify only the beginning of adult possibilities. Late adolescence represents the gradual, and in specialized societies (like ours) very gradual, mastery of the adult possibilities of existing as a relatively self-sufficient, relatively autonomous individual in a world of other such individuals.
Thus the regulation of self-esteem must rely on the inner gratifications of self-love and sense of competence, as well as the increasing possibilities of real external gratifications. Only if this occurs is it possible partly to relinquish the unending regressive wishes and conflicts. Then, one can begin to love another person as a sexual equal, an equal in terms of power, and as one with whom mutual gratifications may merge.
ADULT REACTIONS TO ADOLESCENT SEXUAL BEHAVIOR AND SEXUAL LOVE
I have alluded to the fact I hat many early adolescents carefully avoid the possibilities of actual heterosexual consummations. Certainly many of their peers, on the other hand, do have such experiences. Is Blos (1962) right in asserting that premature heterosexual behavior tends to coarsen the character? I tend to agree with him. While most such experiences among middle-class early adolescents tend to be isolated in occurrence and remain more or less defensively isolated and unintegrated memories, in some they raise the possibility of interferences with the slow work of fantasy in organizing transformations of object love and narcissistic interests. Occasionally, early "success" seems to interfere with the rich possibilities of an elaborated erotic life; occasionally early "failure" can throw the individual into turmoil and retreat. Sexual behavior per se does not mean erotic bliss, or love for the other partner, or anything more than a future disillusionment. It may not even have positive narcissistic meanings for the self.
Sexual love, in contrast to mere sexual behavior, is ecstatic sharing and the sharing of ecstasy. If the ability to truly "make love," rather than to simply "make out," is an end result of an extraordinarily complex period of development in both non-narcissistic and narcissistic senses, then it is fair to say that many of the currently fashionable, supposedly "liberating" schools of thought which confuse sexual behavior with love -- or simply deny the existence of love -- are involved in a trivialization of human beings. To psychoanalysts, sexual behavior in itself is not the primary matter of importance -- the meaning of behavior is. And there is never one meaning in any bit of behavior or fantasy; there are many meanings at different levels. Adults who would invade with too much advice the adolescent world of sexuality do so at great peril to those they would like to "help."
Why do some sex educators (and some psychotherapists) become sex proselytizers for the young? I am sure that a part of the answer lies in contemporary inclinations to turn away from psychoanalytic insights. But I am equally certain that many workers entertain misplaced identifications with adolescents, idealize them, and use them in the attempt to work out, or act out, unresolved adolescent conflicts of their own, both in the sphere of object love and hate and the sphere of narcissism.
To turn from the specific to the general concerns of this paper, the intention has been to demonstrate the clinical importance, not only for adolescent but also for adult patients, of understanding narcissism from the point of view of complex and sometimes contradictory interests of the ego. Furthermore it is important to understand how alterations in these interests relate to the non-narcissistic alterations which must take place within the psyche before an individual can truly come to think, feel and behave as an adult -- and love and be loved as one.
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