Our narcissistic selves

By and large, Australians don’t have “creeds” - and, if they did, they couldn’t articulate them. Most of us couldn’t frame a manifesto to which we could give “common” support.

What we do have is an essentially narcissistic character that responds to the theme “I want to - and I’m going to - do it my way”. We are or would like to consider ourselves to be individualistic, independent and creative.

This might be thought to show symptoms of immaturity - the narcissism of the child - not quite the illness of the autistic, but heading in that direction.

But that is too simple. The essential, and potentially self-destructive, character of humanity is that we are all narcissistic, wherever we were born, whatever our racial characteristics and whatever our “culture”. We all have an intense affection focused on ourselves or, if we lack such an affection - or have it in what we regard as insufficient intensity - we all want to win it, be awarded it or somehow or other to realise it. Above all, we want others to recognise that we have a worth approximating to our self-assessment.

For much of humanity, the self-image of individuals or the group is the image of the god they worship - who, in turn, is in their image. They see their actions as divinely inspired and godlike. They are superior to all other creation and may be unique in the universe.

Australians are no less narcissistic than the rest of their species but probably no more. They have been responsible and industrious enough to build a remarkable material and even non-material civilisation, in a remarkably short time on a not-remarkably accommodative continent. True, they destroyed a previous civilisation in building their own but they show some signs of maturity in their rhetoric of circumscribed regret.

In confronting this dichotomy between accomplishment and violation, what “creed” does it suggest we have in “common?” How far, as individuals, have we been party to the accomplishment and how far to the violation, and other more negative aspects, of our civilisation, culture and society?

In probing this, we move from the phenomenon of individual narcissism to the much more significant, potentially more valuable, but above all potentially more catastrophic phenomenon of narcissistic transference.

How strong are we Australians within our own bodies, minds and “souls”? Like the rest of humanity, some of us are stronger than others. A few - the supermen of Nietzsche - might be able to live within themselves - strong in their own self-image. In denying God, Nietzsche was the typical individualist genius: "Do not believe those who speak of supra-terrestrial hopes." He rejected all forms of narcissistic transference, believing the godhead could and did reside in him. His philosophy was the antithesis of the blind fanaticism characterising Nazism - with which his name has, ironically, been so unjustly linked.

Another robust individualist, the explorer, anthropologist and writer, Richard Burton, proudly proclaimed he'd broken all Ten Commandments. His advice to others was:

Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause. He noblest lives and dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.

All other life is living death, a world where none but phantoms dwell;

A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling of the camel bell ...

Burton sought no blending of individual destiny with humanity’s, no harmony with the cosmos. His was the battle-cry of genius down the ages. Where narcissistic individualism can take up the cry, genius can thrive - and the society progress. But genius doesn't belong to everyone; and, for practical purposes, should not. Too many narcissistic individualists - too many narcissistic Everymen - will plunge the society into anarchy and chaos.

So it is healthy and “natural” for most of us to reinforce our conviction, sense or feeling of self-worth by joining with others in what might become orgies of never-ending communal self-aggrandisement. Those “others” are not really others, but are seen to be narcissistically compatible. They look like us; they speak our language; they share our emotions; they think our thoughts; in empathetic guise, they eat our food and drink our wine. They are “us”.

This is what I have called narcissistic transference.

Transference starts within the family. It extends to some outsider - extra-family - environments in childhood: to secular schools and religious manifestations, to the extended family and their friends - people with whom family members practise, in some measure, two-way narcissistic transference and who therefore become part of the family at one or several removes.

The process gathers force in teenage years and into adulthood. Narcissistic transference takes place to intellectual, social, political and other associations. Characteristically, it extends to those in the same profession, perhaps in the same office or on the same factory floor. We’re all in this together. We’re stronger if we stand together - even if we are less moral, less splendid even than the association in its own proclaimed image or in the assessment that the public makes of it, says it should be.

We exclude others. We don’t always say, “Those who aren’t with us are against us;” but that’s how we often act. Those in the associations to which we transfer our narcissistic identity expect us to act that way. If we do not, they will be shocked, might denounce us and try to bring us back into line - inter alia, as a discipline to keep others in line too.

We are Australians - with an Australian image. Various as that image may be, we used it to attack “Chinamen” and “blacks” and all sorts of others in the past. We refused them entry to our territory and characteristically sneered at those who managed to get in.

We are far from alone in this: breeding pure Aryans, Hitler and the Jews, ethnic cleansing, Klu Klux Klan, Whites Only, apartheid, niggers, segregation, boongs, Wasps and ethnics, discriminatory immigration, boat-people, White Australia, identity and multiculturism, "lesser breeds without the law", reffos, untouchables, wetbacks, Kaffirs, Polacks, balts, dagos.

The racial indicators and pejoratives roll on, applied by “us” to the alien "other". Socialising and breeding are preferably among, by and for people who share an image of our group "self".

There was a time when we Australians abused Jews who fled to us for refuge - not as badly as those who slaughtered them where they came from but the spirit of hatred was sometimes hard to distinguish.

The narcissistic antipathy was often made brutally explicit - and sometimes farcically mistook its victims. Australian-born Robert Helpmann, later to be knighted as one of Australia's outstanding ballet dancers, directors and choreographers was thrown fully-clothed into the Bondi surf by Aussie toughs because he toted a "portmanteau" typically carried by many, especially Jews, fleeing the Hitler terror. The "portmanteau" was part of the "alien" image that the Aussie toughs had of "the slinking, rat-faced men" who might "horribly" marry Australian girls and defile the narcissistic image the Bondi-Beach yahoos had of themselves and, in some woolly way, of their society and country.

Once, we disliked and despised the Chinese too. Was it Arthur Calwell, Minister for Immigration at the time, who so wittily reminded us that “Two Wongs don’t make a White?”

Nearer to right now, we have seen something of the same spirit towards Arabs - with more justification, the red-neck Aussies might allege, because these “aliens” are threatening “us” in exercising a narcissistic transference much more intense and dangerous, they would allege, than we have ever done.

So if once we hated Jews and Asians, now we hate Muslims and Arabs. But the hatred or antipathy extends much more widely than that. We hate - or at least we’re not crazy about - those who don’t look like us - whatever it is we think we look like - who don’t pray like us, who don’t think like us, who don’t play our games or abide by what we imagine to be our “moral code”.

So, on the one hand we can acknowledge positives in the transference of identity to those who have qualities that, for sound, enlightened or whatever “good” reason, we admire and think we should embrace.

But there is a flip side: it lies in the negatives in the transference that provoke exclusion and hatred in varying degrees - to be expressed in varying forms of intensity - for those who differ or are imagined to differ from the image we have of ourselves.

We need to be fully conscious of the power of narcissistic transference. It can be to a small family unit or to an association that embraces people around the world. That is both its strength and its menace. A religious cult or sect, a political party, an economic movement can attract millions and coerce millions to do its bidding - or excommunicate those who “betray” the group by questioning what it is doing or may have done.

To complete the process, narcissism and narcissistic transference require something to which the self can be transferred. That means there must be a narcissism whose institutions can receive applications to join, coerce its members and enforce its judgments.

If Australians have the usual endowment of personal narcissism and are equally endowed with the capacity to practise narcissistic transference, so also they have a plethora of institutions - economic and financial, professional, social, religious, sporting and other - which characteristically practise institutional narcissism in their daily activities.

Here - in transferring the self and acting in loyalty to the narcissistic institution that has been chosen - we may think there is something of an element of a distinctive Australian “creed”: “stick by your mates”; “don’t let the side down”; “be a good team player”.

Even here of course, any distinctive character may be only in the intensity of the exhortation. Other human societies know it just as clearly in its essence though they may respond to it less robustly - or much more. They all scream support for their football team, wave flags and recruit religious radicals. Many of them are inclined to despatch suicidal terrorists, in a variety of forms, to slaughter the “other”.

Even in the intensity of the loyalty to the institution of choice the differences between various human societies may be less than we imagine; and it is there, in the universality of the affliction of excessive and misguided faith and belief in the self, that the ultimate danger lies.

Millions or tens of millions may join a movement, via the route of narcissistic transference and institutional narcissism. Their objective may be to pursue their interests by whatever means, if necessary to the disadvantage and perhaps the destruction of other societies. In the end, the road-rage character of much of our narcissistic imperative might thus lead to the destruction of humanity itself. We might suffer the nemesis of Narcissus: self-destruction through overweening pride in self.

The believer seeks to destroy the unbeliever. The jihad is one of the instruments of destruction.

The faithful may be Christian, Muslim or Jew. The jihad may be by crusaders for some real or fancied cause or for the “liberation” of some real or fanciful “holy land”.

So perhaps we should ask not what creeds we Australians hold in common but how far we have managed to distance ourselves from or efficiently manage all creeds, except one that alone will deliver us from self-destruction and possible extinction of the species.

That creed is that we should join with others to frame a common narcissistic image of a human being and that we should transfer our narcissistic self to no other institution than one that embraces us all.

“Civilisations die from suicide, not by murder,” Toynbee reminded us. So the narcissistic imperative common to us all must be reined in so that the demons of narcissistic transference and institutional narcissism do not lead, through intensification of hatreds and conflict, to the destruction of humanity itself; but rather to an enlightened immortality in which we can all share.