Narcissism and the Contemporary

1 Course Unit

The rise and prevalence of “narcissistic personality disorders” in the last few decades and recent developments in culture and politics have made narcissism something of a household name today. At a time when the psychic, the social and the political are so intensely convergent on this very problem, the use of narcissism as a socioclinical term to understand the present seems both fitting and warranted. Yet, while this rightly brings into awareness narcissism as a phenomenon of the contemporary, and lends it the urgency it perhaps requires, the purely descriptive use of the term risks rendering a definite psychic and clinical reality into a vague and formless reference lost in a cloud of indistinction, especially when it functions in popular discourse as a catch-all term for anything involving “self-absorption.” In the vein of an “anthropology of the contemporary,” this course aims to develop a properly conceptual understanding of narcissism, drawn from clinical psychoanalytic experience. Our guiding assumption is that what we see of narcissism in our social, cultural and political reality cannot be clearly apprehended without such a clinical perspective. In this course, we will address three simple questions: How is what we call “narcissism” formed, of what does it consist, and by what is it held (maintained)? Spring 1 Course Unit