Our narcissistic selves

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.