Science and Narcissism

In a 1917 apologia for psychoanalysis, Freud portrays the history of science as a series of parallel revolutions, each in its own domain inflicting chastisement upon the retrograde influence of what he terms human “narcissism.” The mandate of scientific thought, according to Freud, is to abolish all the fallacies that arise from anthropocentrism, from ascribing a privileged position in the natural world to human values or a human point of view. Copernican astronomy, Darwinian biology, and now psychoanalysis all give expression to this paramount motive of science, “the destruction of . . . narcissistic illusion.” ¹This definition of scientific method as (in Freud’s repeated term) the “wounding” of human self-love fits closely with his analysis in texts such as Civilization and Its Discontentsof the cruel mutilations of libido that civilization necessarily exacts upon mankind. Given the sadistic impulse that he identifies as the crucial imperative in science, it is no wonder that he worries in this essay that many regard his own new science with “aversion and resistances.” ²

The indictment of anthropocentrism was hardly original to Freud. Around the turn of the twentieth century and in the following several decades, it was proclaimed with a frequency that seems to signal some noteworthy cultural perturbation. One writer after another identifies anthropomorphism or anthropocentrism as precisely the antithesis, the nullification, of science. “Anthropomorphism plays a considerable historic role” in the genesis of physical thinking, admits the mathematician Henri Poincaré in 1902, “but it can be the foundation of nothing of a really scientific or philosophical character.” ³In keeping with a series of late Victorian writers who identify anthropomorphism as the characteristic mode of thought of “primitive man,” of the prescientific mentality, James Frazer in The Golden Boughattempts a vast evolutionary reconstruction of this deluded phase of thinking. Central to his analysis is his definition of myth as “a description of physical phenomena in imagery borrowed from human life”; science, which he calls the “golden key” to truth, by contrast, is the method that as its primary operation “strips nature of personality.” ⁴In his analysis of the superstitious roots of primitive anthropomorphism, Frazer means to drive a scientific stake at last into the heart of this ancient source of folly, ignorance, and cruelty.

Not every contemporary observer was sanguine about soon eliminating the lethal contaminant of human narcissism from science. Arthur James Balfour declares in 1879 that “our idea of the external world is . . . anthropomorphic” inescapably, concluding from this that science is afflicted with an irrationalism that no amount of supposed methodological rigor can ever cure. ⁵The anthropologist and philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, in his book Ethics and Moral Scienceof 1903, frames the same problem in only marginally less pessimistic terms, focusing now on biology. Scientific research strives to cleanse knowledge of what he calls its “specifically human character” and thus to attain “objectivity,” he declares. ⁶Yet so deeply ingrained is the anthropocentric principle in human thought, says Lévy-Bruhl, that even the mighty achievements of modern science have failed to annihilate it. “The struggle against anthropocentrism is far from ended,” he concludes; “its strongest positions are not yet touched. It has only lost, so to speak, its outworks.” ⁷

The declaration of war on anthropocentrism may constitute the permanent creed or charter of true science, as all these writers take for granted, but the prominence of this theme in turn-of-the-century discourse indicates its distinct period-specific character, too, as one component of the wave of new thought and expression, and of anxiety, known as modernism. As the reaction against a period perceived as in thrall to complacent sentimentalities and self-aggrandizing systems masquerading as timeless verities, modernism in one of its aspects takes a mood of critical astringency and of a principled denial of self-gratification as the mark of rectitude in sophisticated intellectual inquiry. This is the aspect of modernism anatomized, for instance, by José Ortega y Gasset in his essay “The Dehumanization of Art.” Serious modern artists, he declares, take it as their mission to create artworks from which narcissistic appeals to human sentiment have been systematically purged...