Narcissism
Françoise Dolto locates the roots of narcissism in the privileged experience of words spoken by the mother directed more at the satisfaction of desires than in response to needs.
(Like when your mother tells you that you’re the one she loves most in all the world, that you’re the most beautiful thing she has done in her life, that her life was worth living if only for this, to have you, to have had you, that of course giving birth is not exactly a pleasure cruise but there’s nothing more beautiful in life, nothing, that she thinks you’re so very intelligent, that she wishes she had talent like yours, that naturally she avoids saying it too often, but of course you’re the prettiest of all the little girls she knows, that just because she tries not to say it too often, doesn’t mean she’s not thinking it, that she will love you forever, that that will never end. Never, never, never, you understand?)
Homosexuality
Freud was not interested in valorizing, degrading, or passing judgment on homosexuality, but first and foremost in understanding its causes, origin, and structure from the perspective of his new theory of the unconscious. Hence his interest in latent homosexuality in neurosis and even more in paranoia. Freud used the term perversion to designate sexual behaviors deviating from a structural (and not social) norm, and he classified homosexuality as such. He did not assign it any pejorative, differential, depreciating, or on the contrary, valorizing character. In a word, he brought homosexuality into the whole of human sexuality and humanized it by conceiving of it as an unconscious psychological choice.
In 1920 he formulated a canonical definition: homosexuality is the result of human bisexuality and exists in a latent state in all heterosexuals. When it becomes an exclusive object choice, its origin in girls is an infantile fixation on the mother and disappointment with respect to the father. And he stated “…to undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual is not much more promising than to do the reverse…” In a letter dated April 9, 1935, to an American woman worried that her son was homosexual, Freud wrote: “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them. It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime – and a cruelty, too.”
The Kleinian view, although liberal, considers the female version of homosexuality to be an identification with a sadistic penis.
A lover of literature, Freud often stressed that the great creators of art were homosexuals.
Subject
A common term in psychology, philosophy, and logic. It is used to designate an individual who both observes others and is observed by others.
Suicide
Suicide is the act of killing oneself so as not to kill another. It is not the result of neurosis or psychosis, but of depression or a serious narcissistic disturbance.
Perversion
A term derived from the Latin pervertere (inversion) used in psychiatry and by the founders of sexology both pejoratively and positively to designate sexual practices considered to deviate from a social and sexual norm. From the middle of the 19th century, psychiatry categorizes as perversions sexual practices as diverse as incest, homosexuality, zoophilia, pedophilia, pederasty, fetishism, sadomasochism, transvestism, narcissism, autoeroticism, coprophilia, necrophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, sexual mutilation.
Sadomasochism
A sexual perversion founded on a mode of gratification from the infliction of pain on another and from pain suffered by a humiliated subject, as well as on the reciprocity between pain passively suffered and pain actively inflicted.
Two processes: the reversal of aggression against the subject him- or herself and the inversion of an active function into a passive one. This process can be accomplished only by means of an identification with the other in the order of fantasy. In sadism, one inflicts pain on another and feels pleasure in a masochistic way by identifying with the suffering object.
Moral masochism is performed through language, based on a sense of guilt, it is the most significant and most destructive. It is characterized by its apparent remove from sexuality and a loosening of ties with the loved object, attention being focused on the intensity of the pain, whatever its source. It is a matter of being able to sustain a certain level of suffering. Psychoanalysis has progressively shifted sadomasochism to the core of ‘normal’ individuals.
Nazism
From the moment he rose to power, Adolf Hitler implemented the National Socialist doctrine, of which one of the principal objectives was the extermination of all Jews in Europe as an ‘inferior race.’ Similarly, it was seen as necessary to remove all those considered ‘defective’ or bothersome to the social body. Thus Nazism treated homosexuality and mental illness as equivalents of Jewishness according to their theory of hereditary degeneration.
Hysteria
This condition’s distinctiveness lies in the fact that unconscious psychological conflicts are expressed in a theatrical manner and in symbolic form, through paroxysmal physical symptoms. (I mentioned them, screaming, ragged breathing, blocked diaphragm, the need to lie down on one’s back, the tendency to drop to one’s knees, the cries, indifference to being watched by others or even experiencing pleasure in it, slapping one’s own face being the epitome, an actor rehearsing in front of a mirror, crying jags, nervous breakdowns, lying on the ground, messages left on the answering machine saying “I’m begging you, please” and ending in a sort of groan, audible even on the machine.)
Desire
It is connected to mnemic traces, to memories, it is realized through the unconscious and hallucinatory reproduction of perceptions that have become ‘signs’ of satisfaction. The demand is addressed to another, it is apparently directed at an object, this object is not essential because the demand is a demand for love. Desire is directed toward a fantasy, towards an imagined other, it is the desire to be the object of another’s desire and desire for absolute recognition by another at the cost of a fight to the death, which Lacan identifies with the dialectic of the master and the slave.