Sociology 1: On the Narcissism of Nostalgia

Abstract

The question ‘what does it mean to have something in common?’ is at the heart of the narcissistic dilemma of social recognition. Because it engages with the unresolved intricacies of differentiation and identification — differentiation from the other; identification with the other — it is also the basis upon which narcissism intersects with sociology. Writing of Gemeingeist (common spirit), Freud alerts us to the fantasy structure of every social bond: ‘What appears [as] Gemeingeist,[&] does not belie its derivation from what was originally envy’ (1921, 120). Paying short shrift to the idea of a primary harmony, then, Freud suggests that the ‘appearance’ of a common ‘social feeling’ has at its root an appropriative fantasy. Hence he reveals the devious operations of power that paradoxically maintain the semblance of social cohesion. And yet, his demystifying impulse — exposing the aggression concealed by a fantasy of social harmony — is countermanded by an equal appreciation for the power of fantasy itself. It is ‘in the nature of an [narcissistic] identification’ says Freud, to turn ‘what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie’ (121). In other words, in Freud’s mind there is a clear association between the present achievement of a common bond and the past narcissistic fantasy of undifferentiated self-hood. In this chapter I am concerned to connect the complexities of what I have begun to call narcissistic sociability to the construction of a sociological discourse which takes as its object the dissolution of social bonds in the period of modernity.