Insecure Attachment and Narcissistic Vulnerability: Implications for Honneth's Recognition-Theoretic Reconstruction of Psychoanalysis. Issue 4 (November 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ganis, Richard
• Is Part Of: Critical horizons. Volume 16:Issue 4(2015)
• Page Start: 329
• Page End: 351
• Publication Date: 2015-11
• Subjects: Honneth -- attachment theory -- narcissism -- recognition -- intersubjectivity; Critical theory -- Periodicals; 142.05
• DOI: 10.1179/1440991715Z.00000000056
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1440-9917

Abstract

Abstract : This paper endeavours to move Axel Honneth's recognition-theoretic reconstruction of psychoanalysis beyond its existing focus on the perspective of Winnicott. To this end, it places Honneth into conversation with several non-Winnicottian approaches to the phenomena of insecure attachment and narcissistic vulnerability: the attachment theory of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, the self psychological perspective of Heinz Kohut, and a more recent intersubjectivist psychoanalytic paradigm set forth by Robert Stolorow, George Atwood, Bernard Brandchaft, and Donna Orange. Similar to Honneth, these authors seek to lay bare the maladaptive genetic circumstances under which the psyche becomes alienated from its capacity for self-realization and its ability to engage in healthful intersubjective endeavours. However, with respect to our primary affective relationships, their accounts of pathogenesis depart from Honneth's, focusing not just on overt physical abuse and negligence, but also on other, seemingly more mundane, intersubjective ruptures. The paper maintains that were Honneth to pay closer attention to such subtler relational disturbances, he could better appreciate the nature and pathogenic implications of misrecognition experienced at the level of our primary affective attachments.