HISTORICIZING BORDERLINE NARCISSISM

One of the most important differences between Lacanian and object-relations psychoanalysis, despite their common debt to the work of Melanie Klein, involves Freud's notion of Nachträglichkeit, or “deferred action.” Kernberg and other object-relations psychoanalysts tend to conceive of psychic causality as a linear determinism, whereby childhood experience determines later psychological disturbance (as when severe frustration during childhood, for example, later causes borderline narcissism in the adult). In the Lacanian view, by contrast, psychic causality is not linear, for the meaning(s) later attributed to earlier events count for more than the “events themselves” (which may turn out to be fictitious anyway, according to the Freud of “Infantile Sexuality”). Indeed, from his very earliest work on hysteria, Freud suggested that childhood events may become meaningful and psychologically effective only long after they occurred; as he put it in an essay entitled “Screen Memories”: