Simone de Beauvoir on Narcissism

 “In fact, narcissism is a well-defined process of alienation: the self is posited as an absolute end, and the subject escapes itself in it… What is true is that circumstances invite women more than men to turn toward self and to dedicate her love to herself. All love demands the duality of a subject and an object. Woman is led to narcissism by two convergent paths… in her functions as wife, mother, and housewife, she is not recognized in her singularity. Man’s truth is in the houses he builds, the forests he clears, the patients he cures: not being able to accomplish herself in projects and aims, woman attempts to grasp herself in the immanence of her person… she gives herself sovereign importance because no important object is accessible to her.” (667)

“If she can put herself forward in her own desires, it is because since childhood she has seen herself as an object. Her education has encouraged her to alienate herself wholly in her body.” (667-668)

“In truth, it is not possible to be for self positively Other and grasp oneself as object in the light of consciousness. Doubling is only dreamed… It is above all in woman that the reflection allows itself to be assimilated to the self. Male beauty is a sign of transcendence, that of woman has the passivity of immanence…” (668-669)

“We know, for example, how attached women are to their childhood memories; women’s literature make its clear… They are nostalgic for this period when they felt their father’s beneficent and imposing hand on their head while tasting the joys of independence; protected and justified by adults, they were autonomous individuals with a free future opening before them: now, however, they are poorly protected by marriage and love and have become servants or objects, to be imprisoned in the present… She returns emotionally to this younger sister whose freedom, demands, and sovereignty she abdicated and whom she more or less betrayed.” (671)

“The character she portrays is more of less coherent and original according to her intelligence, obstinacy, and depth of alienation. Some women just randomly put together a few sparse and mismatched traits; others systematically create a figure whose role they consistently play…” (672)

“But above all she has not realized herself in her life, the heroine cherished by the narcissist is merely an imaginary character; her unity does not come from the concrete world: it is a hidden principle, a kind of ‘strength,’ ‘virtue’ as obscure as phlogistonism… woman, in her own eyes, adopts the tragic hero’s need to be governed by destiny. Her whole life is transfigured into a sacred drama.” (674)

“The woman in love quickly forgets herself; but many women are incapable of real love, precisely because they never forget themselves.” (675)

“the caricature of action… if she cannot take action, the woman invents substitutes for action; the theater represents a privileged substitute for some women.” (676)

“The stubborn narcissist will be as limited in art as in love because she does not know how to give herself.” (677)

“Many women imbued with a feeling of superiority, however, are not able to show it to the world; their ambition will thus be to us a man whom they convince of their worth as their means to intervention; they do not aim for specific values through free projects; they want to attach readymade values to their egos; they will thus turn – by becoming muses, inspiration, and stimulation – to those who hold influence and glory in the hope of being identified with them.” (677)

“Her misfortune is that, in spite of all her bad faith, she is aware of this nothingness. There cannot be a real relationship between an individual and his double, because this double does not exist. The woman narcissist suffers a radical failure. She cannot grasp herself as a totality, as plentitude; she cannot maintain the illusion of being in itself – for itself. Her solitude, like that of every human being, is felt as contingence and abandonment. And this is why – unless there is a conversion – she is condemned to hide relentlessly from herself in crowds, noise, and others. It would be a grave error to believe that in choosing herself as the supreme end, she escapes dependence: on the contrary, she dooms herself to the most severe slavery; she does not make the most of her freedom, she makes herself an endangered object in the world an in foreign consciousnesses.” (681)

“if she sought recognition by others’ freedom while also recognizing that freedom as an end through activity, she would cease to be narcissistic. The paradox of her attitude is that she demands to be valued by a world to which she denies all value, since she alone counts in her own eyes.“ (682)