Abstract
The following paper makes use of Kohutian self-psychology as a hermeneutic for interpreting Marie de l’Incarnation and her perplexing decision to abandon her young son Claude in favor of religious life. The author argues that filtered through the lens of Kohutian self-psychology, Marie de l’Incarnation emerges as a pathological narcissist and the decision to abandon Claude symptomatic of a narcissistic grandiosity.
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Notes
All translations are mine.
Kohut would drop the hyphen in the term “selfobject” by 1977, with the publication of The Restoration of the Self.
Although in some of his writings Kohut suggests that the mirroring function is ordinarily performed by mothers and the idealizing function by fathers, elsewhere he acknowledges that—particularly in the absence of one parent—the other parent can adequately perform both functions (Kohut 2009, p. 190).
It is important to distinguish here between chronic failures in parental care and the experience of optimal frustration. While both chronic failure and optimal frustration imply parental shortcomings, the latter never reaches the threshold of the former. The experience of optimal frustration is, in other words, an exception to the rule of the parent who habitually does satisfy the child’s mirroring and idealizing needs, while chronic failures in parental care describe the parent who habitually does not satisfy these needs.
Although Marie presents very little evidence about her own upbringing in the Relations of 1633 and 1654, mentioning her parents only to describe them as good Christians and as those to whose wishes she deferred in marrying rather than entering religious life, assumptions about the context of Marie’s early development might still be hazarded on the basis of her later life history. The historian, proposed Thomas Kohut (1986), historian himself and son of Heinz Kohut, “can more than compensate for [such a dearth of evidence]…by studying the entire life-curve of his historical subject, which expresses both the experiences of childhood and the subsequent experiences of adult life” (p. 342).
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) identifies the following among the markers of grandiosity associated with narcissistic personality disorder: an exaggerated sense of self-importance, a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, a sense of personal superiority and social isolation, a need for excessive admiration, a sense of entitlement, a tendency towards exploitativeness in interpersonal relationships, a lack of empathy for others, feelings of envy, and arrogant or haughty behaviors or attitudes. DSM-IV (1994) 4th ed.
The extent to which affection—the lack of which Claude complains about repeatedly over the course of his thirty-year correspondence with his mother—was part of the mix of maternal expectations in seventeenth-century France remains a matter of debate. Although since Philippe Ariès’ (1962) L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime (translated into English as Centuries of Childhood) historians have identified the eighteenth century as the turning point in the ideology of motherhood, evidence abounds to suggest that parents did feel—and were expected to display—affection towards their children well before the time of Rousseau’s sentimental revolution. The letters written by Madame de Sévigné to her daughter between 1669 and 1696, for example, testify to the ways in which at least some mothers cultivated intense and intimate affective relationships with their children and indicate that Marie’s contemporaries were not idiosyncratic in excoriating Marie for having left Claude at such a young and tender age (Mossiker 1985; Wolff 1993).
Despite formal recommendations that mothers breastfeed their own offspring, statistics suggest that only a minority of mothers (particularly in urban areas like Tours and among the upper classes) actually complied. In Paris in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, for example, of the 21,000 estimated infants born annually, only approximately one thousand were nursed by their own mothers (Shahar 1990).
By the end of his career, Kohut had proposed a third type of narcissistic transference (in addition to the mirroring and idealizing transferences)—the twinship transference—by means of which the self seeks out another essentially like himself.
In appealing to (and rejecting) the dichotomy between the “bad” and “good,” I take my cue from Robert Orsi (2005) who calls for the religious studies scholar to free herself from “any notion of religious practices as either good or bad” and to recognize that “[r]eligions are as ambiguous and ambivalent as the bonds that constitute them, and their effects cannot be generally anticipated but known in practice and experience” (p. 2).
Charles Strozier (1997), commenting on Kohut’s own understanding of the psychodynamics of religion, suggests that for Kohut, similarly, the “spiritual uplift” afforded by religious experience “evokes our earliest encounter with the maternal selfobject matrix” (pp. 168–169).
In her analysis of Francis of Assisi, Lisa Cataldo argues that Francis’ relationship with Jesus proved “optimally frustrating” at critical points, thus permitting Francis to internalize the grandiosity and idealizations that had previously been sustained by the divine selfobject. In Cataldo’s reading, the repeated obstacles encountered by Francis—including “confusion, loneliness, and the rejection of his family and friends” (p. 536)—encouraged the (albeit incomplete) transformation of Francis’ infantile narcissism into narcissism of a healthy, mature variety.
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Dunn, M. Mysticism, Motherhood, and Pathological Narcissism? A Kohutian Analysis of Marie de l’Incarnation. J Relig Health 52, 642–656 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-013-9674-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-013-9674-5