‘Exceptional’ Woman and Exemplary Sociability: The Figure of the Narquette

Abstract

Freud tells us that patients who suffer but also take pleasure in suffering their own exceptionality will make themselves known to the analyst via an explicit refusal to renounce any satisfaction, or submit to the temporary discomforts that therapy must entail: ‘They say that they have renounced enough and suffered enough, and have a claim to be spared any further demands; they will submit no longer to any disagreeable necessity, for they are the exceptions and, moreover, intend to remain so’ (1916b, 312). Accounting for these ‘Exceptions’ in his paper ‘Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work’, Freud notes that their sense of suffering stems from experiences in early childhood over which they had no control. The ‘privileges’ claimed by the ‘Exceptions’ are a form of recompense or retribution for ‘an unjust disadvantage’ of which they know themselves to be ‘guiltless’ (313). To explore the consequences that this sense of injustice might have on the development of character, Freud takes as his lead example the eponymous protagonist of Shakespeare’s Richard III whose villainous intentions are bound up with his congenital deformity, or physical lack. Here is the excerpt from the soon-to-be King Richard’s complaint that Freud reproduces in his text:

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;