Cartesian Narcissism PDF

Cartesian Narcissism
Simone Drichel
American Imago, Volume 73, Number 3, Fall 2016, pp. 239-274 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2016.0014
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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/635080
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Simone Drichel 239
SIMONE DRICHEL
Cartesian Narcissism
Man’s unhappiness, says Descartes, is due to his having
first been a child.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Arguing, in her 1947 text Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté, that

childhood, insofar as it is at odds with the existentialist project,
constitutes a problematic stage of life, Simone de Beauvoir cites
the authority of none other than the “founding father” of mod-
ern Western philosophy in support of her claim: “Le malheur
de l’homme, a dit Descartes, vient de ce qu’il a d’abord été un
enfant” (1947, p. 51)—or, in the English translation, “Man’s
unhappiness, says Descartes, is due to his having first been a
child” (1948, p. 35).1 While this particular “citation” is likely
to be one of her own making,2 Beauvoir is right in a general
sort of way: childhood does constitute a problematic stage of
life for Descartes. Thus we read, for example, in Principle 71
of his Principles of Philosophy that “the first and main cause of
all our errors” derives from childhood: “The chief cause of error
arises from the preconceived opinions of childhood” (1985, p. 218,
emphasis in original).3 In fact, although he here associates
childhood with “error,”4 not, as Beauvoir suggests, with malheur
(“misfortune,” “tragedy,” or, as in the Frechtman translation of
Pour une morale, “unhappiness”), this may well have been the
passage in Descartes’ work that Beauvoir had in mind when
she “cites” him on the conjunction of childhood and malheur.
Bracketing, in this essay, a closer analysis of what makes
childhood so problematic for Beauvoir, I instead would like
to give some thought to what might be so terribly wrong with
childhood for Descartes: where does the “error” (or malheur?)
lie, and how is he proposing it be overcome? Further, and im-
portantly, what are some of the more troubling consequences of
this overcoming, and how may they be mitigated? How, in other
words, may we come to reconsider the Cartesian conception
American Imago, Vol. 73, No. 3, 239–274. © 2016 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
239
240 Cartesian Narcissism
of subjectivity (particularly in its renunciation of childhood),

and how do we address the lasting effects of this renunciation
on our contemporary conception of subjectivity?
The argument I will develop here derives from a suspicion
that the reasons for Descartes’ aversion to childhood stretch
beyond a well-established narrative that sees him associate an
infantile dependence on the senses with falling prey to pre-
conceived opinions: a trap from which then only the mature
exercise of Reason can liberate us. Of course I am not suggest-
ing that this narrative is simply mistaken, or that it in any way
misconstrues Descartes’ avowed justifications for moving beyond
the “errors” of childhood. Such a suggestion would be foolish:
in view of the overt statements Descartes makes to this effect in
his work, we would be hard-pressed to argue otherwise. What
I do want to suggest, however, is that this “official narrative”
may perhaps not tell the full story, and that other—possibly
less conscious—motivations could also have a role to play in
Descartes’ aversion to childhood. These less overt or conscious
reasons might have less to do with an abstract notion of child-
hood (and its limitations or otherwise) than with the very
specific situation of Descartes’ own childhood: a childhood
that, as we will see, is marked by traumatic loss and upheaval.
Drawing on D. W. Winnicott’s work, my reading of
Descartes recasts our common conception of the Cartesian
cogito—the thinking ego—as the secure foundation for hu-
man knowledge: seeing in it less the triumphant overcoming
of dependency (on the senses, on preconceived opinions, or
on the authority of scholasticism), than a defensive disavowal
of such dependency and retreat from relationality—as the very
mode of being in the world which harbors within it the dreaded
specter of dependency for the ego—into rationality. Read in this
way, our ongoing attachment to Cartesian subjectivity may start
to look less like the successful narrative of rational autonomy
we all know than a less familiar one of defensive retreat into
narcissistic self-enclosure—a defensive “r(el)ationality,” if you
will—especially if we consider that “the core of narcissism,” as
Neville Symington reminds us, “is a hatred of the relational”
(1993, p. 18).
Simone Drichel 241
Recast as “Cartesian narcissism,” Cartesian philosophy

takes on an altogether more troubling character than the one
it conventionally plays within the history of Western thought,
challenging us to recognise how such a narcissism may still be
involuntarily acted out and innocuously reinforced in contem-
porary Western culture through the cultural values endorsed
and lived—both explicitly and implicitly—in our relationships.
Arguably, this continuity finds its most acute expression in the
disavowal of vulnerability and dependency that is written into
our cultural value of autonomy. The freedom from (a loathsome
dependence on) relationality that autonomy promises, and that
Descartes associates with the cogito, is, I propose, perpetually
being reanimated in contemporary socio-political contexts in
various—highly problematic—renditions of Descartes’ founda-
tional mind/body split.
By extension, read as Cartesian narcissism, the eternal
recurrence of Cartesianism in our culture takes on a different
inflection and makes different demands on us. We may, for ex-
ample, begin to suspect that this eternal recurrence could well
be the expression of repetition compulsion, thereby pointing to
a disavowed trauma that begs to be analysed. And once attuned
to the possibility of trauma, we may also come to understand
that our continued investment in “the Cartesian doctrine of the
isolated mind” (Stolorow, Atwood, & Orange, 2002, p. 1) does
not, in fact, testify to the secure and confident ego posited in
Western ideals of autonomy or liberal individualism, but instead
is intimately entangled with this disavowed trauma.
It is in this context, I propose, that Beauvoir’s statement—
“Man’s unhappiness, says Descartes, is due to his having first
been a child”—begins to take on new meaning and open the
door to a vital re-examination of the difficult time childhood
represents for Descartes.5 What is at stake is nothing less than
a reconsideration of the role that the self-grounding ego plays
both in Cartesian philosophy itself and—perhaps more press-
ingly—in the endowment that Cartesian philosophy has left
us: an endowment that sees us, on this reading, living in the
wake of an unconscious trauma against which we continuously
mobilize narcissistic defenses.
“I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason”
Reflecting on some of the less overt or conscious reasons

behind Descartes’ aversion to childhood, I want to take my
cue from Beauvoir’s “misquotation”—if that, indeed, is what
it is—of Principle 71: “Man’s unhappiness, says Descartes, is
due to his having first been a child.” Note the shift in word
choice here: Beauvoir chooses “unhappiness”—or malheur in
the French original—over Descartes’ “error.” It is a subtle shift,
a subtle reframing: one that in fact offers us a slightly different
take on the reasons Descartes may have had for renouncing
childhood. Most immediately, perhaps, what this shift brings
into view for us is the psychology of childhood: not the errors
of judgement but the unhappiness, the misery, the tragedy of
childhood. Of course I am not suggesting that Beauvoir herself
offers us such a psychological reading of Descartes in Pour une
morale.6 Instead, what I want to suggest is that her subtle shift
from erreur to malheur alerts us to the possibility of reading
Descartes in psychological—or perhaps I should say psycho-
analytical—terms. To put it more bluntly, I want to ask: how
would our reading of Descartes shift if we took him to associate
childhood not with “error” but with “unhappiness”? Not with
falling victim to preconceived opinions but with being miser-
able or even traumatized? Where exactly does the malheur lie
and how does the proposed flight from the body to the mind,
to mature adult rationality, promise to move us beyond it? Or,
to ask more pointedly—if speculatively—what may have been
Descartes’ unconscious motivations for associating childhood
with some form of malaise from which only the flight to the
mind can hope to offer deliverance?
I will begin to address these questions with a discussion
of Descartes’ project in Meditations on First Philosophy, the text
that introduces concerns similar to Principles 71–76 (where
Descartes explicitly expresses his aversion to childhood), but
that also lends itself more readily to a psychoanalytical read-
ing. In contrast to the more formal Principles, the Meditations
traces the development of a central “character,” who emerges
from a dependency on the senses to the exercise of reason.
Published in 1641, three years before the Principles, it functions
Simone Drichel 243
as a philosophical Bildungsroman, in which the author’s quest

for rational certainty documents a journey from philosophical
infancy to mature adulthood.
What the Meditations aims to prove, in Descartes’ words, is
“that God exists and that the mind is distinct from the body”
(1984, p. 6), and in pursuit of this aim, the text “begins,” as
Daniel Garber observes, “in rejection”: “The meditator, to give
the protagonist of the Meditations a name, begins by rejecting
all former beliefs, doubting everything that can be called into
doubt, from the most obvious deliverances of the senses to the
simplest truths of arithmetic and geometry” (2001, p. 279).
In other words, the meditator begins exactly at the point of
renouncing the childhood inheritance of “preconceived opin-
ions” that Descartes believes are the source of all “error.” And
given that it is the body that holds us tied to these preconceived
opinions, it is of course the body, the senses, which are the first
to be sacrificed on the journey towards philosophical matura-
tion. Rejecting, therefore, in the first meditation, the senses in
their ability to impart true knowledge, while also adding that
what is taken as real and true might well be the “delusions
of dreams” created by a “malicious demon” out to deceive
him (1984, p. 15), Descartes tells us in the second meditation
that such true knowledge instead begins with the cogito, the
thinking ego, as the ultimate point of certainty: “thought; this
alone is inseparable from me. I am, I exist—that is certain.”
He famously continues:
I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks;

that is, I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or
reason—words whose meaning I have been ignorant of
until now. But for all that I am a thing which is real and
which truly exists. But what kind of a thing? As I have
just said—a thinking thing. (1984, p. 18)
And at the opening of the famous third meditation, this “think-

ing thing” is ready to sit down and get on with the job, that
is, to think and to prove “that God exists and that the mind is
distinct from the body,” which requires him, in a first step, to
shut off his senses and focus on intellectual understanding in-
stead. In an extraordinary passage, Descartes therefore declares:
I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all

my senses. I will eliminate from my thoughts all images
of bodily things, or rather, since this is hardly possible, I
will regard all such images as vacuous, false and worthless.
I will converse with myself and scrutinize myself more
deeply; and in this way I will attempt to achieve, little by
little, a more intimate knowledge of myself. (1984, p. 24)
What Descartes seems to be describing here, in his prioritiza-

tion of the mind and renunciation of the senses, is a willing
retreat into an interiority so absolute that a relationship with the
external world is all but severed, and where this self-reflexive
interiority is defined exclusively in rational terms: “I am a mind,
or intelligence, or intellect, or reason.”
Let us pause here for a moment and ask, what kind of
thought experiment—what kind of fantasy—is this? A fantasy
of a world where nothing (and no one) can be trusted, where
evil demons might deceive the meditator, and where, to cite
another infamous example, when he looks out the window
and sees men in their “hats and coats,” he cannot even be
sure that they really are men and not “automatons” (1984, p.
21)? A world where a point of certainty, a point of security, can
only be attained through a complete mental retreat from such
a thoroughly uncertain and untrustworthy world peopled by
strange demons and automata? On one level—and this, surely,
is the overt and conscious level—Descartes here describes a
character who comes to eradicate childhood “error” success-
fully and emerge in the desired state of mature rationality and
its ability to provide certainty. That is the official story. But is
there perhaps another story to be told? A story of less conscious
motivations? Such a story sees in the methodical doubt that
underpins the Meditations not just the rational operations of
philosophical scepticism but also a profound disturbance in the
capacity to trust or relate. It presents Descartes’ bizarre thought
experiment not as a conventional Bildungsroman, which tells
us of troubled beginnings magnificently overcome in mature
adulthood, but instead recounts a fearful, paranoid descent
into psychopathology.
Simone Drichel 245
“he unconsciously sensed his vulnerability”
I am by no means the first to suspect that something a

little less wholesome might be at work underneath the well-
known story of Descartes’ triumphant tale of self-grounding
subjectivity. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, for one, hints at such a
possibility when she opens her essay on Descartes with the fol-
lowing question: “When is a meandering about the nature of
things—a rumination about, as it may be, God, matter, death,
virtue, the soul—the work of a genuine philosopher, and when
is it the babble of an isolated and perhaps deranged spirit, an
arrogant megalomaniac intent on ordering the world?” (1983,
p. 545). Of course Oksenberg Rorty ultimately leaves little
doubt that she considers Descartes a “genuine philosopher”;
however, the very fact that the possibility of its opposite can
be raised—the fact that the Meditations even lend themselves
to being considered as “the babble of an isolated and perhaps
deranged spirit, an arrogant megalomaniac intent on order-
ing the world”—is worth noting, for what it opens up is the
possibility of telling another kind of story alongside the official
story. If the official story insists that Descartes’ project is one of
establishing secure foundations for knowledge, the unofficial
story begins from the premise that there might be something
quite seriously wrong in the scenario Descartes concocts for us.
Following Oksenberg Rorty’s lead, David Weissman brings
this “wrongness” into sharper relief in his essay “Psychoanalysis,”
published alongside the Meditations in the 1996 re-edition of the
text. Weissman picks up on what we might call the defects in
relationality that the meditator suffers, noting particularly the
“emotional isolation” of the cogito and proposing that “Des-
cartes’ cogito atrophies for want of . . . significant others; or it
turns grandiose, seeing others as shells onto which to project
the image of its own virtues” (1996, pp. 332, 334). John Hanson
similarly notes that the Cartesian world is a “world of repudi-
ated interaction” (1977, p. 160), which he reads as a defense
against “cosmic rage”: “In drawing a set of rigid boundaries
around the cogito, in withdrawing the ego from the world and
the body, his sustained philosophical rejection of interaction
avoided what he felt was a cosmic rage” (1977, p. 175).
Pushing beyond the observations of Oksenberg Rorty,

Weissman, and Hanson, David Michael Levin goes so far as to
offer us an unequivocal diagnosis of psychopathology. Invoking
the “Bible” of the American Psychiatric Society, the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), he frames the
Meditations as “a psycho-logic of moments in the symptom for-
mation of narcissistic pathology” (1991, p. 55).7 His humorous,
as well as provocative, rendition of the Cartesian world is worth
citing at length:
The “real” world is full of dangers. Limitless occasions

for deception create fear, uncertainty, even temptation.
How could there be certainty in knowledge and security
in life unless life is reduced to the compass of unques-
tionable knowledge? Methodic doubt, systematic doubt,
compelled Descartes to renounce the world. This renun-
ciation seemed at first to put him in control; but, as we
eventually can see, it also sentenced him to a solipsism,
a monadological isolation, that was not without its own
dangers . . . Instead of finding ontological security within
himself, as he expected, he found himself threatened
by the possibility of annihilation. On the verge of be-
ing overcome by the enormity of his loss, he fell into a
narcissistic rage, turning his ontological anxiety into a
wild paranoia. He constructed an appropriate phantasy,
which embodied his paranoia in an evil demon, a being
“not less powerful than deceitful.” His textual strategies
betray the fact that he unconsciously sensed his vulner-
ability: unless there is a benevolent deity about whose
existence and attributes he can be absolutely certain, his
“unquestionable” first axiom, the proposition, cogito ergo
sum, can at most secure his existence only if, and only
when, he is actually thinking it. Thus, the extremity of
his narcissistic withdrawal from realism very quickly put
him in an essentially depressive position: his grandiose
renunciation of all that is uncertain threatened to cut
him off from God; and his peculiar self-absorption so
isolated him from others that, when he looked out his
window, all he could see were self-moving machines in-
stead of people. (1991, p. 56)
Simone Drichel 247
With “symptoms” as clear-cut as “narcissistic rage,” “paranoia,”

and “self-absorption,” Levin quickly proceeds to the standard
DSM diagnosis of “secondary narcissism”:
The meditations of the Cartesian ego exemplify the

disorder of secondary narcissism . . . In the “arrogance”
of the Cartesian proof that God exists, in a proof whose
steps are to be found within the unquestionable cogito,
all the “symptoms” by which the DSM-III diagnoses cog-
nitive disorder can be recognized: a grandiose sense of
self-importance and uniqueness; delusions of omnipo-
tence and unlimited success; an exhibitionistic need for
constant attention, for unconditional benevolence and
admiration from the most important of all beings; char-
acteristically paranoiac and defensive responses to threats
thought to jeopardize self-esteem and the integrity of the
self; problems of self-identity; extreme self-centredness
and self-absorption; and a deficient capacity for empathic
responsiveness and social interaction. (1991, pp. 56–57)
Although Levin is quick to point out that he is offering this

analysis “partly for the sheer pleasure of it, and not too seriously”
(1991, p. 55), I suggest here—as is clear from the title of this
essay—that we give Levin’s proposal serious thought and con-
sider Descartes’ strange fantasy in the Meditations as a narcissistic
fantasy. Taking this suggestion further, we may more fruitfully
engage a little more closely with a “fact” Levin only mentions
in passing, namely “the fact that he unconsciously sensed his
vulnerability.” Such an engagement considers Cartesian philoso-
phy to take shape against a background of narcissistic defense
against an experience of vulnerability that is felt to be unbear-
able. Read in these terms, our inheritance of cultural ideals
such as reason, autonomy, or individualism becomes readable
as a defense against vulnerability. In other words, to push the
thought still further, to be a rational, autonomous individual
means, first and foremost, not to be vulnerable.
“the most important thing to know about narcissism”
While finding Levin’s “diagnosis” thought-provoking, I

have no intention of following him down the line of running
the meditator’s symptomatology against the painfully reductive
“checklist” of the DSM; in fact, as Robert Stolorow recently
observed, with reference to the fifth and latest edition of the
DSM, “the philosophical presuppositions that underwrite the
entire DSM enterprise . . . descend directly from the metaphysi-
cal dualism of Rene [sic] Descartes” (2016, p. 70). The DSM,
that is to say, is somewhat ill-equipped to give us insight into
what may motivate the eternal recurrence of Cartesianism in
our culture because it is itself a symptom of this recurrence.
Side-stepping the DSM, I similarly wish to avoid the Freudian
terminology of primary and secondary narcissism—principally
because both treat psychopathology (including narcissism) as
an intra-psychic rather than inter-psychic phenomenon and
thereby continue to underestimate the role relationships play in
the shaping of the psyche. As relational psychoanalyst Stephen
Mitchell notes in his discussion of narcissism:
Ever since Freud’s abandonment of the theory of in-

fantile seduction, the legacy of drive theory on the
subsequent history of psychoanalytic ideas has included
an underemphasis of the role of actual relationships on
the evolution of mental structures and content. With
respect to narcissism, both these traditions [to regard
narcissism as defensive or creative illusion] isolate the
figure within the relational tapestry and, in so doing,
overlook the extent to which grandiosity and idealization
function as relational modes, arising as learned patterns
of integrating relationships, and maintained as the ve-
hicle for intimate connections with others. To regard
these phenomena solely in terms of individual psychic
economy is like working with only half of the pieces of
a jig-saw puzzle. (1999, p. 169)
Following contemporary relational psychoanalytic theorizing (in

the broadest sense), I want to consider narcissism not “apart
Simone Drichel 249
from the relational matrix” (Mitchell, 1988, p. 201), but instead

as a response to a relationship.
More specifically, my thinking on the relational dimensions
of narcissism is informed by Daniel Shaw’s recent relational
reframing of narcissism in Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Sys-
tems of Subjugation. Suggesting that “the most important thing
to know about narcissism [is] how deeply rooted narcissism
is in relational trauma” (2014, p. xv), Shaw defines clinical
narcissism as “the result of cumulative developmental trauma
to the capacity for intersubjective relatedness,” which makes
narcissism both “traumatic and traumatizing” (2014, p. 3). Such
double-edged trauma, he says, is a product of “the narcissist’s
pervasive negation of the child’s sense of being a subject in
her own right” (2014, p. 6), adding that what is being particu-
larly harshly negated in the child’s emerging sense of self is
the child’s “right to dependency” (2014, p. 34). This negation
makes dependency (and vulnerability) particularly fraught
emotional territory: so fraught, in fact, that it is readily split off
or disavowed. Significantly, the child’s acceptance of the par-
ent’s condemnation of dependency, in turn, sets the scene for
the intergenerational perpetuation of “traumatic narcissism”:
To put all this in the simplest possible terms: the develop-

ing child of the traumatizing narcissist takes one of two
possible paths for survival in the face of being raised by
the traumatizing narcissist: 1) externalization of shameful
dependency (the badness) through the subjugation of
others; and 2) internalization of the badness the traumatiz-
ing narcissist parent has projected. Number 1 becomes
much like his traumatizer—the traumatizing narcissist.
Number 2 becomes the post-traumatic, objectified, and
self-objectifying person who repetitively finds himself
in relationships in which he is subjugated by the other.
(2014, pp. 35–36)
Offering two utterly fraught “paths for survival,” narcissism

perpetually re-establishes, from one generation to the next,
the same complementary relational patterns—traumatizing/
traumatized, subjugating/subjugated or, in Jessica Benjamin’s
terms, “doer/done to” (2004)—that are its relational trade-

mark. As a result, narcissism is highly “infectious” and difficult
to shake off.
What a relational perspective on narcissism therefore re-
veals is its pernicious force, which lies precisely in its co-option
of the relational pathways in which we develop our sense of self
and a “calcification” of these pathways into stubborn relational
patterns that follow a split perpetrator/victim (or doer/done
to) format. In revealing this force, a relational perspective
opens up a possibility of understanding narcissism within an
historical chain of continuity. To be clear: I am not propos-
ing a direct causal link between Cartesian and contemporary
relational patterns—to do so would be naïve. I do, however,
wonder whether placing narcissistic patterns of relating within
an historical chain of continuity may allow us to see the ways
in which a specifically Cartesian narcissism may still be written
into the fabric of our relationships and the cultural values that
inform them: whether the very fact that Cartesianism persists in
our culture says something about the difficulty of interrupting
the “relational systems of subjugation” that are the bequest of
“traumatic narcissism.”
Significantly, it is the very persistence—or perhaps we
could say repetition compulsion—of these damaging narcissistic
patterns of relating that offers a way out of them. As Lynne
Layton argues in “Retaliatory Discourse: The Politics of Attack
and Withdrawal,” “The way out of narcissistic doer/done-to
relations is to undo the split polarities that rule our current
lives and attachments. Because repetition compulsions always
seek to undo such polarities, there is hope that we can find our
way out” (2006, p. 153). In other words, the fact that narcis-
sistic patterns of relating repeat so insistently signals, perhaps
paradoxically, a simultaneous attempt at their undoing.8 Or to
put this in yet stronger terms: the fact that we forever repeat
the split polarities of our Cartesian inheritance—mind/body
or, just as significantly, independence/dependence, autonomy/
relationality—signals an unconscious effort at their undoing.
The critical mandate that emerges from this observation—a
mandate to which this essay responds—is perhaps two-fold. The
first task, I believe, is to recognize the repetition as repetition:
Simone Drichel 251
in other words, to see historical continuities between our cur-

rent narcissistic splitting—especially around cultural ideals of
autonomy that must not betray any traces of “shameful depen-
dency”—and the Cartesian cogito’s narcissistic flight to the soli-
tary mind because “he unconsciously sensed his vulnerability.”
If this defensively “purified” form of autonomy—which plagues
the contemporary world through, in Shaw’s terms, “relational
systems of subjugation”—can indeed be traced back to Cartesian
origins, then what emerges as a second critical mandate for us
is to bring to light the trauma of which the eternal recurrence
of Cartesianism in our culture speaks—with the aim, ultimately,
of understanding what might get in the way of our capacity to
reintegrate the split-off dependency and vulnerability into our
conception of what it means to be autonomous.
“unique personal experiences”
In turning to the question of trauma, I am asking, ulti-

mately, where the narcissistic fantasy in the Meditations comes
from, or, more specifically, to what prior relationship this fantasy
responds. In other words, if, as Shaw suggests, “the most im-
portant thing to know about narcissism [is] how deeply rooted
narcissism is in relational trauma,” we need to understand the
particular nature of this relational trauma: why should the
Cartesian meditator seek certainty with such single-minded
zeal, and why does he find it only in the solitary mind—that
is, in turning away from relationship? Or, as Stolorow et al. ask:
How might one psychologically understand the original

elaboration of this doctrine that has had such a fateful
influence on us all? Why would a man need to find an
absolutely reliable and certain foundation for what he
believed, something about which he could never be
deceived? And why did the solution he discovered take
the form of a reified concept of the existence of his own
solitary selfhood? (2002, p. 5)
In seeking answers to such questions, they agree with schol-

ars who have turned to “the social and historical context of
Descartes’s thought” and drawn attention to the “extreme

instability in the political, intellectual, and religious spheres of
life” (2002, p. 5). However, while endorsing a socio-historical
analysis of the Cartesian quest for certainty, their own point of
interest lies elsewhere: “Here, however, we seek the context of
the Cartesian quest in Descartes’s individual life and history, for
his search must also have had its sources within its originator’s
unique personal experiences” (2002, p. 5). And with this firm
understanding that the Cartesian meditator’s quest is at least
partly motivated by Descartes’ “unique personal experiences,”
they turn to a discussion of Descartes’ psychobiography.
I want to follow their example on this point, albeit not with-
out acknowledging the specter of psychological reductionism
that inevitably rears its ugly head in this context. As Stephen
Frosh reminds us, psychoanalysis “has always been controver-
sial as a method of literary analysis,” and psychoanalysts often
“seem simply unable to resist the temptation to speculate freely
about literary characters or their authors, perhaps rejoicing in
them as ‘patients’ who cannot answer back.” He suggests that
the “most outrageous instances of psychoanalytic ‘reading in’
to literary productions treat them as somehow transparent in-
dicators of the mental state and psychobiographical attributes
of the author” (2010, pp. 70–71). Although Descartes’ Medita-
tions is a work of philosophy, not literature, the same caution
undoubtedly should be borne in mind, and I am certainly not
intending to “reduce” Descartes’ text to his psychobiography
here. However, I am suggesting that a sideway glance to the
psychobiographical context in which the text emerged not only
has its justification—in fact, not to acknowledge this context
would in itself be repeating the Cartesian gesture9—but also
has potentially far-reaching implications for how we approach
the legacy of Cartesianism in our culture. If we begin to see
how this foundational text of modern philosophy—a text that
continues to hold such influence over us—came into being as
a narcissistic defense against relational trauma, then we may
come to realise that, to the degree that we are still Cartesian,
we remain entangled in the legacy of trauma and its defensive
aftermath—with disastrous consequences. Bringing to view this
dynamic between trauma and narcissistic defense—the force
Simone Drichel 253
field in which the Meditations took shape—might allow us, in

turn, to free ourselves from the perpetual repetition to which
this traumatic legacy compels us.
“the most intimate of creations”
In making a case for the relevance of psychobiographi-

cal material in relation to the elaborate fantasy constructed
in the Meditations, I am, on one level, stating the obvious, for
it is well established that the material is prefigured in three
dreams Descartes had on the night of 10 November 1619:
“Modern philosophy, we might say, was born during the night
of Descartes’ three dreams” (Feuer, 1963, p. 3). What this
means, of course, is that Cartesian philosophy is born (at least
partly) of a very personal, and indeed unconscious, impulse. In
a thought-provoking discussion of these dreams, Robert With-
ers notes that Descartes himself regarded these dreams “as so
significant that he carried an account of them—together with
his own interpretations—in a notebook, for the rest of his life”
(2008, p. 691).10 Echoing Lewis Feuer, Withers suggests that the
dreams were so important to Descartes because he “thought that
the philosophical underpinning of the scientific method—and
hence of the modern age—was somehow prefigured in the
dreams” (2008, p. 691).
A detailed account of these rich and complex dreams, not
to mention the various analyses they have attracted over the
years from both philosophers and psychoanalysts (including a
somewhat reluctant one from Freud himself),11 is beyond the
scope of this essay. What is crucial to note in this context is
the connection that the dreams establish between Descartes’
life and philosophy—a connection that pivots on the point
of traumatic loss and defense against the pain of this loss. As
Allen Dyer argues:
Descartes claimed that his new philosophy, which has

come to be known as the scientific method, was revealed
to him in a series of dreams . . . What has come to be
known as Cartesian thought views the world as if the
knower were not part of the world. This way of view-

ing reality serves as a psychological defense mechanism
against painful affects. (1986, p. 175)
What Dyer establishes here is that Cartesian philosophy, and

more particularly Cartesian dualism, finds its roots in a defense
“against painful affects,” or perhaps we could say, in a defense
against emotional trauma. Thus when Descartes proclaims that
he has discovered the “foundations of a marvellous science,”12
what he—on this reading—really has discovered is a successful
defense against the pain of emotional trauma.
It is further noteworthy in this context that Descartes had
these dreams on the back of a stint of military service: it seems
highly likely that the first-hand experience of war re-triggered
underlying, already existing traumatic vulnerabilities. In fact,
Gaukroger argues that “it is quite possible that Descartes was
suffering a nervous breakdown, almost certainly not his first”
(1995, p. 110). This means that we are, as he says, “left with
two different events: the nervous exhaustion and excitement,
and perhaps breakdown, that culminated in the dreams, and
the possible recovery from this, on the one hand; and the in-
tellectual discovery . . . which occurred at the same time and
was symbolized in the third dream.” Seeking to explain the
connection between these two events, he proposes that one
“possibility is that Descartes suffered a nervous breakdown,
recovered from it, and rationalized his recovery in terms of a
great discovery,” adding that “this is probably close to the truth”
(1995, pp. 110–111). As a result of this connection, Gaukroger
suggests, the intellectual discovery of a new scientific method
became imbued with all the significance of recovery from
breakdown: “I suggest that the events of the days surrounding
10 November probably constituted a mental collapse of some
kind, and that the thoughts on method that Descartes had been
pursuing at the time came to symbolize his recovery from this”
(Gaukroger, 1995, p. 111).
To explore the nature of this “recovery”—which, we
could argue, takes the shape of a successful defense against
breakdown13—I would like to draw on Peter Shabad’s evoca-
tively titled essay “The Most Intimate of Creations: Symptoms
Simone Drichel 255
as Memorials to One’s Lonely Suffering.” In this essay, Shabad

argues that neurotic symptoms may unconsciously be designed
to memorialize a traumatic experience that was suffered alone,
unwitnessed, and that therefore retains a sense of irreality.
The symptom, on this account, comes to function as a home-
grown “witness,” giving manifest expression to the “silent loyalty
oath” the sufferers “took with themselves during the loneliest
of times,” which, he says, is the “oath never to forget” (2000,
p. 210). The function of the symptom is therefore ultimately
one of—somewhat desperate—communication: “Symptoms,”
he says, “may be viewed as self-created communicative actions
intended to build a lasting monument once and for all to
one’s experience of suffering.” Further, he proposes that, in
this, symptom formation is akin to the creative process: “If the
artistic process consists in creatively elevating one’s experience
through its dramatization into an objective event, then the
neurotic creates an ‘illness’ of symptoms in a dramatic attempt
to objectify his or her unwitnessed experience of suffering.”
As a result, the symptom becomes an “involuted work of ‘art’
with a very private language,” the communicative intent of
which frequently remains occluded. As something of an “artiste
manquée” whose “insulated communicative attempts never find
their sought-for audience,” the neurotic is hence driven to
escalate the symptomatic message in an increasingly desperate
attempt to communicate: “Perhaps the more unheeded the
symptomatic message, and the more doubt-laden the memory
of our suffering, the more we must raise the decibel level of
our choked-off communications” (2000, pp. 207–208).
I introduce Shabad’s notion of the symptom as “the most
intimate of creations” here because I want to explore the pos-
sibility of reading the Meditations as such an “intimate creation,”
one whose “symptomatic message,” though “loudly”—i.e., hy-
perbolically—presented, is still waiting to find its “sought-for
audience.” In other words, my aim is to attend to the “choked-
off communication” and consider this text as a philosophical
counterpart of what Shabad elsewhere calls a “characterological
monument” to suffering (1993, p. 493), where the perpetua-
tion of a certain neurotic symptomatology—such as anxiety
or depression, or, as in the case of the Cartesian meditator,
narcissistic withdrawal—serves the function of “memorializing

and objectifying one’s suffering” in the only way possible: as
a symptom (1993, p. 493). Read in this way, the Meditations
present as a symptom, or “monument,” of suffering: as an in-
voluntary expression of the author’s central psychic struggle
that is unconsciously designed to “memorialize and objectify”
this struggle.
Shabad’s argument unfolds as follows. He suggests—and
this is a view widely shared among contemporary relational
psychoanalysts—that what leads to traumatization is not the
experience of suffering in itself but rather the absence of a
relational other who will bear witness to the suffering and
thereby make it “real”:
Perhaps it is this very transformation of experienced

suffering into a witnessed reality at the moment it oc-
curs that inoculates experience against traumatization.
For if . . . trauma can be known only “after the fact”
through its residual trail of post-traumatic communica-
tion, it suggests that being alone and not being able to
convey one’s experience immediately are intrinsic to the
transformation of suffering into trauma. (2000, p. 200)
Trauma, in other words, is the result of aloneness in the face of

unbearable suffering. Further, the response to such traumatiza-
tion in turns leads to “stoic self-reliance” (2000, p. 200). Such
self-reliance not only puts us into a solipsistic universe;14 what
is even more problematic is that the very self upon which reli-
ance is sought is damaged by the experience of trauma. In a
commentary on Shabad’s work, Paul L. Russell writes that, while
early theorizations have associated trauma with amnesia, “the
phenomenon goes far deeper than that.” Using the camera “as
a metaphor for affective development,” he suggests:
It is not just that the camera has taken a picture that is

then lost or forgotten or censored (although clearly that
can and does happen). It is more that the photographic
perceiving and recording apparatus itself is damaged
while it is being built. The camera cannot photograph its
Simone Drichel 257
own injury; it needs to be fully developed, operational,

and somehow separate from itself in order to do so. It
needs, in short, to be what it would have become had it
not been damaged. (1993, pp. 517–518)
The result of the camera being unable to photograph its own

injury (or of the traumatized person to objectify their own
experience) is a fundamental uncertainty—and here it pays
to hold Descartes in mind—over whether or not the suffering
experienced was real. Engaging with Russell’s camera metaphor,
Shabad writes:
To return to the metaphor of the camera photographing

its own injury, I would suggest that although the photo-
graphic apparatus is damaged, we nevertheless, through
the use of self-consciousness, attempt to photograph our
own injuries. Our aim of objectifying our experience is
made difficult by the fact that we have placed our own
narrative stamp of memory on our suffering as soon
as it occurred. Because of the nature of the involuted
mental equipment, when the photograph is developed,
it is dreamlike and blurry. With regard to the uncertainty
conveyed by the Winnicottian paradox (Did I create this
or did I find it? or Did I do this or was it done to me?),
we remain trapped in doubt. (2000, p. 202)
Note these two words: “uncertainty” and “doubt.” A question

to ask here is whether the Cartesian quest for certainty, fueled
as it is by a methodology of systematic doubt, constitutes an
attempt to “photograph [his] own injuries” through the use of
self-consciousness. In other words, can we read the Meditations
as a symptomatic snapshot unconsciously designed to memorial-
ize a “forgotten” (or rather occluded) injury that has become
traumatic? Evidence, therefore, of repetition compulsion?
Repetition compulsion, Russell writes in a memorable
phrase, “is an illness of loneliness, the scurvy of psychological
deprivation.” Importantly, he continues, “It is also the indi-
vidual’s only means of reattachment and emotional growth”
(1993, p. 521). Repetition compulsion—and this was Layton’s
point as well—while clearly an indication of underlying un-

conscious trauma, is simultaneously a sign of hope. In the
context of trauma, repetition compulsion is a seeking for
certainty (of wounding) that only another can confer; in
other words: it is a seeking for the cure of relationality—the
“sought-for audience”—from within the midst of the “illness
of loneliness.” Given that repetition compulsion is the effect
of an unconscious, and therefore unresolved, trauma, what is
ultimately being sought by the repetition compulsion is the
trauma itself: its effort being directed at bringing the suffering
experienced into consciousness, at gaining a photograph taken
with a functioning camera that can bring the “dreamlike and
blurry” suffering into sharper focus.
“Man’s unhappiness, says Descartes . . . ”
With these thoughts in mind I return to Descartes. Taking

my cue from Beauvoir’s skewed “citation” of Descartes—“Man’s
unhappiness, says Descartes, is due to his having first been a
child”—I want to reconsider the origins of this strange fantasy
in the Meditations, asking what kind of “unhappiness” might seek
an audience in such an involuted way. What, in other words,
is the “symptomatic communication” encoded in the medita-
tor’s narcissistic flight to the mind? If we regard the meditator
as a somewhat displaced avatar of Descartes himself, or more
specifically of Descartes’ psychic struggle, what might be the
“unknown” or “unreal” suffering of which the meditator cannot
speak, but which the text itself enacts or manifests?
If, as Shabad suggests, symptoms “are pregnant with con-
structive meaning, constructed as they are with the purpose of
bringing the dignity of recognition, sometimes many years later,
to a person’s experiences of lonely suffering” (2000, p. 210),
our task seems to be to read “through” the avowed project of
the Meditations so as to discover the “symptomatic message” held
within the text. Another way of putting this would be to say
that our task as readers of the Meditations might be to become
the “sought-for audience” to the “insulated communicative
attemp[t]”: the witness to suffering that was missing at the
Simone Drichel 259
time of suffering, thereby transforming a painful experience

into a traumatic one. What this requires, ultimately, is for us
to enter into a relationship with the text, that is, to become the
relational other in the presence of whom trauma can become
visible as trauma: “As those experiences finally are revealed in
the presence of a credibly empathic witness, they are infused
with the meaningful breath of having real life, if even for a
briefly conscious moment” (Shabad, 2000, p. 210). Gaining
“real life” through the relational encounter with the reader as
a “credibly empathic witness,” the painful experience becomes
available for working through, thereby rendering obsolete the
repetition compulsion, i.e., the eternal recurrence of Cartesian-
ism in contemporary life.
To read for the “symptomatic message”—that is, with a view
to understanding the painful experience for which a narcis-
sistic glorification of the mind may be symptomatic—we need
to look more closely at the few details known about Descartes’
childhood. We do not have to look far to find potential sources
of “unhappiness” in Descartes’ early relationships: born in
1596, he lost his mother as a young child and then lived with
his maternal grandmother until he was separated from her at
the age of ten upon being sent away to the Jesuit college of
La Flèche. His grandmother died just three or four years later.
His father, meanwhile, remarried as early as 1600 and started
another family. While his stepmother remains a shadowy fig-
ure with whom Descartes “does not seem to have had much
contact” (Gaukroger, 1995, p. 21), his father was a distant, if
not outright hated, figure: Dyer notes that the father “never
developed an emotionally close relationship with young René”
(1986, p. 169).
Most intriguing, perhaps, among these bare facts speaking
of several fraught and broken early attachments is a curious
discrepancy regarding the date of Descartes’ mother’s death.
His mother died, in childbirth with his brother, when Descartes
was 13 months old. Yet, he writes the following in a letter to
Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, in which he also offers advice
regarding a remedy for a recent ailment of hers—the cause of
which, incidentally, he considers to be “sadness:”
I take the further liberty of adding that I found by

experience in my own case that the remedy I have just
suggested cured an illness almost exactly similar, and
perhaps even more dangerous. I was born of a mother who
died, a few days after my birth, from a disease of the lungs,
caused by distress. From her I inherited a dry cough and a
pale colour which stayed with me until I was more than
twenty, so that all the doctors who saw me up to that
time gave it as their verdict that I would die young. But
I have always had an inclination to look at things from the
most favourable angle and to make my principal happiness
depend upon myself alone, and I believe that this inclina-
tion caused the indisposition, which was almost part of
my nature, gradually to disappear completely. (1991, pp.
220–221, emphases added)
With reference to this passage, Gaukroger wonders “why Des-

cartes should lie about the date of his mother’s death” (1995,
p. 17). He suggests that it might have been “a means of indicat-
ing that he was raised without a mother” and that it is “surely
indicative of some strong feeling on the matter,” adding:
It is not at all surprising that he should have strong feel-

ings about such a distant event. There is a widespread
view amongst psychologists that anxiety over separation
from one’s mother seems to affect the infant most greatly
from about 13 to about 18 months, and his mother’s
death cannot have come at a worse time for Descartes,
psychologically speaking. (1995, pp. 16–17)
Here we see that childhood was not just a time of “error” but
also of “unhappiness” for Descartes: he suffered a traumatic
loss at an early age, a loss about the specifics of which he ends
up lying for no apparent reason. Additionally, and perhaps
more interestingly, in the correspondence with Elizabeth he
indirectly tells us how he coped with the distress he was bound
to have suffered. For a start, he repeatedly acknowledges a clear
psychosomatic connection in the diagnosis of physiological
symptoms, the root cause of which is said to be psychological
Simone Drichel 261
in nature, thereby giving the mind significant power over the

body. Thus he explains that the most likely cause of Elizabeth’s
slow fever is “sadness” and, in the passage I just quoted, that
his mother’s lung disease is “caused by distress”; further, what
allowed him to overcome his sickliness as a child and adoles-
cent is his own positive attitude (“inclination to look at things
from the most favourable angle”). In all these cases, the state
of mind acquires a physiological manifestation. Thus, his rec-
ommendation to Elizabeth—that she “frees her mind from all
sad thoughts” (1991, p. 220)—appears much like the kind of
“medicine” he embraced as curative in dealing with his own
psychic distress. Finally, not only does he suggest that “in this
way one will recover perfect health” (1991, p. 220), but he also
informs us of the source of this happiness that is so essential
for restoring health: “I have always had an inclination . . . to
make my principal happiness depend upon myself alone”
(1991, p. 221).
From these statements we can derive a distinct, if also
crude, recipe for dealing with emotional trauma: because
emotional trauma is likely to take on a physical manifestation,
we must cure the mind, which, in turn, will cure the body.
Moreover, we must do this alone: the path to health lies in
mental self-sufficiency, in turning to one’s own mind in the
way others might turn to other people—in the way a child
might turn towards its mother—for comfort and happiness.
It is a recipe for which the Meditations offers an exemplar, or
perhaps a philosophical rationale: “One might say,” suggests
John Hanson, “that the adult Descartes made a virtue of his
childhood condition of abandonment by creating a philosophy
of solitude” (1977, p. 175). But let us push the analysis a little
bit further and ask what, more precisely, the “symptomatic
message” might be that is written into this solitary investment
in the mind. If we remind ourselves here of Levin’s “diagnosis”
of narcissism in the Meditations, and further consider Shaw’s in-
sistence that narcissism is “deeply rooted in relational trauma,”
we can comprehend more closely the kind of relational trauma
the Meditations may “memorialize.”
“Cogito, ergo in mea potestate sum”
With the thought of trauma in mind, and drawing on Win-

nicott’s much-discussed “Mind and its Relation to the Psyche-
Soma” (1954/1984), in conjunction with the essay’s lesser-
known companion piece “New Light on Children’s Thinking”
(1965/1989), I would here like to present a somewhat different
understanding of the place “mind” or “thinking” might hold
vis-à-vis health. In fact, if Descartes postulates that the mind
holds the key to health, Winnicott proposes the exact opposite:
for the psychoanalyst, the overinvestment in the mind points
to a defense against early relational trauma.15 Ingeniously
reframing, in the later paper, the privileged status Descartes
gives to “thinking,” Winnicott turns Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo
sum” into “Cogito, ergo in mea potestate sum” (1965/1989, p.
156), thereby alerting us to the desperately defensive gesture
that lies behind, or within, this statement. “Thinking,” in Win-
nicott’s version, does not confer the certainty of existence, as
it does for Descartes, but bestows (much-needed) power upon
the ego, specifically the power of sovereignty. While not simply
dismissing “thinking,” and indeed acknowledging that “think-
ing is an aspect of the individual’s imagination,” Winnicott
cautions in this essay that thinking “can become exploited in
the individual economy in defence against archaic anxiety and
against chaos and against disintegrative tendencies or memo-
ries of disintegrative breakdown related to deprivation” (p.
157). “Thinking,” in short, can defend against early emotional
trauma: especially, as he suggests here, “disintegrative break-
down related to deprivation.” The question now becomes: how
does this reframing of “thinking” help us understand the kind
of emotional trauma that, as I suggested, the Meditations may
unconsciously “memorialize”?
Winnicott begins the earlier and better-known essay—an
essay Adam Phillips rightly reads as “a critique—a pathologiza-
tion—of Descartes’s meditations” (1995, p. 232)—by suggest-
ing that, in healthy development, the mind is not a separate
entity in the way Descartes proposes: “The mind does not exist
as an entity in the individual’s scheme of things provided the
individual psyche-soma or body scheme has come satisfactorily
Simone Drichel 263
through the very early developmental stages; mind is then no

more than a special case of the functioning of the psyche-soma”
(1984, p. 244). Given that the mind does exist as an entity in
the Meditations—in fact, as we know, the efforts of the medita-
tor are directed at proving that mind and body are separate
entities—we can speculate that something must have gone awry
in “the very early developmental stages” here: mind, instead
of being an integral part of the psyche-soma, has become split
off from the body.
Read through Winnicott, the very investment in proving
that mind and body are separate entities is therefore symptom-
atic of disavowed developmental trauma. He says:
Let us assume that health in the early development of the

individual entails continuity of being. The early psyche-soma
proceeds along a certain line of development provided
its continuity of being is not disturbed; in other words, for
the healthy development of the early psyche-soma there
is a need for a perfect environment. At first the need is
absolute. (1984, pp. 245, emphases in original)
Problems arise if the environment is not perfect, or not even

“good-enough.” In that case, the early integrity the infant expe-
riences—its “continuity of being”—is put under pressure, and
if this happens for prolonged periods of time, and repeatedly,
the result may be a rupture of this continuity of being: the
kind of traumatized state that is characteristic of cumulative
developmental trauma. Reflecting on the infant’s experience
of being separated from its mother, Winnicott writes, in Play-
ing and Reality:
In X + Y minutes the baby has not become altered. But

in X + Y + Z minutes the baby has become traumatized . . .
Trauma implies that the baby has experienced a break in
life’s continuity, so that primitive defences now become
organized to defend against a repetition of “unthink-
able anxiety” or a return to the acute confusional state
that belongs to disintegration of nascent ego structure.
(2005, p. 131)
Here we discover an intricate balancing act between trauma—

something that Winnicott variously refers to as “unthinkable
anxiety” (1967/1989, p. 196), an “unthinkable state of affairs”
(1963/1989, p. 88), or “primitive agony” (p. 90)—and a de-
fense organization whose job it is to prevent the breakdown
of the ego. Defense organization at this early stage of devel-
opment indicates a rupture at the most fundamental level of
ego integration: its very existence, its very continuity of being,
is at stake—which is why Winnicott says that the “underlying
agony is unthinkable” (p. 90). A successful defense organiza-
tion is therefore vital. In a recent commentary on Winnicott’s
essay, Christo Joannidis emphasizes this connection between
breakdown and defense organization, as he writes: “Failures
of the environment at this initial stage . . . create trauma
against which psychosis, narcissistic, and borderline states act
as defenses.” He further emphasises the degree to which the
thus-traumatized person remains haunted by fear and terror:
“Despite such defenses,” he says, “the experience remains as an
unintegrated, unmentalizable alien element within the vulner-
able psyche, and its reverberations reach the conscious surface
as terror of its being relived,” adding that “Winnicott refers to
this conscious feeling of foreboding as fear of breakdown/fear
of madness” (2013, p. 57).16
Winnicott’s point in “Fear of Breakdown” is that defenses
are created against a breakdown that has already happened,
and that breakdown therefore signals “a failure of defence
organisation” (1963/1989, p. 88). “The ego,” he says, “orga-
nises defences against breakdown of the ego organisation.”
What is particularly problematic, however, is that “the ego
cannot organise against environmental failure in so far as
dependence is a living fact” (p. 88, emphasis added). What this
means—crucially—is that dependence is a singularly fraught
state, one in which the ego cannot organise “defences against
breakdown of the ego organisation.” Left utterly vulnerable,
the dependent ego is exposed to the threat of annihilation
without being able to defend itself. This leaves only one op-
tion: a disavowal of dependence. This inspired task—that is, a
disavowal of the dependence that is responsible for the threat
of annihilation—falls to the mind, which comes to the rescue
Simone Drichel 265
with a deus ex machina solution of sorts. The mind, in other

words, is charged with the vital task of disavowing unbearable
dependence, and it does this through dissociating from the
dependent body. Dissociation offers a “defense when there is
no defense,” precisely through the disavowal of vulnerability
and dependence signalled in Winnicott’s “Cogito, ergo in mea
potestate sum,” which gives “thinking” the power to step into
the care-taking function:
If the baby has a good mental apparatus this thinking

becomes a substitute for maternal care and adaptation.
The baby “mothers” himself by means of understanding,
understanding too much. It is a case of “Cogito, ergo in
mea potestate sum.” (1965/1989, p. 156)
“Thinking,” in this traumatic scenario, becomes a “Mother-

Substitute” (p. 155), taking the precarious care of the ego into
its own potent hands.
It is at this point, I think, that the kind of defense orga-
nization that is at work in Descartes’ psychobiography—and
arguably in that of his avatar in the Meditations—comes into
sharper relief. As we saw with reference to Descartes, his re-
sponse to emotional trauma was not just to mobilize the mind
but also to deny his dependence on others: “I have always had
an inclination . . . to make my principal happiness depend
upon myself alone” (1991, p. 221). Rereading this statement
now, we begin to see in it evidence of a rather desperate effort
on his part to heal a ruptured continuity of being—induced
by the early loss of his mother17—by compensating for that
loss in a home-grown fashion: through his own mind. Shabad
explains, in Winnicottian fashion, that “the narcissistic vehicle
of self-consciousness or mental preoccupation with oneself is
an attempt to take control of one’s survival and wellbeing”
(2004, p. 163). In other words, the infantile ego responds to
its ruptured continuity of being—a continuity of integrated
psyche-soma—through splitting: specifically, in this case, split-
ting of mind and body. Dissociating from the psyche-soma that
is in a state of “primitive agony,” the infant conjures the only
defense it has at its disposal: its own mind. In a much-cited
passage Winnicott writes:
Certain kinds of failure on the part of the mother, es-

pecially erratic behaviour, produce over-activity of the
mental functioning. Here, in the overgrowth of the
mental function reactive to erratic mothering, we see
that there can develop an opposition between the mind
and the psyche-soma, since in reaction to this abnormal
environmental state the thinking of the individual begins
to take over and organize the caring for the psyche-soma,
whereas in health it is the function of the environment
to do this. (1984, p. 246)
In Descartes’ case, we are not dealing with a case of erratic

mothering but instead with a sudden loss of mothering; the
effects, however, are comparable: “the environment” fails to
fulfill its caring function for the psyche-soma, threatening a
breakdown in the continuity of being. Against such a breakdown
the only available defense is being mobilized: “an overgrowth
of the mental function.” Shabad and Selinger comment:
Out of the baby’s mandate to care for himself emerges

a pragmatic soul that must ensure that the baby avoid
confronting the blank face of annihilating nothingness
at all costs, even if that means developing a dissociative
“opposition between mind and psyche-soma.” The baby’s
projection of a mental, disembodied extension of himself
is a desperate attempt to take up the slack for who is not
there and bring in some proof of his own real existence
. . . (1995, p. 216)
At this point it becomes possible to read Descartes’s famous

dictum of self-grounding subjectivity—“cogito, ergo sum”—with
somewhat different eyes: not as the triumphant statement of
self-certainty but rather as a fragile ego’s desperate attempt to
ensure himself “of his own real existence.” And the mind is the
only available object—the only available defense—to do the job.
In the Meditations, the end result is precisely the solipsistic self-
absorption that subsequently plagues the thinking ego, which
now can be certain of its own existence, but very little else.18
The outcome, in other words, is narcissistic self-enclosure:
Simone Drichel 267
The baby compensates for who is not there by enclosing

himself in a mental relationship with himself. In thus
providing a home-grown mirror from the outside look-
ing in, the baby holds himself together as if in a mental
self-embrace so as not to disintegrate. In this sense, the
narcissistic vehicle of self-consciousness or one’s mental
relationship with oneself is an involuted attempt to fill
up the still silence between self and other with one’s own
voice. (Shabad & Selinger, 1995, p. 218)
The mother as primary object is here replaced with the mind

as self-created object: a “mind object,” as Edward G. Corrigan
and Pearl-Ellen Gordon appositely call it (Corrigan & Gordon,
1995). Winnicott writes—and here his “anti-Cartesian medita-
tions” (Phillips, 1995, p. 234) are at their sharpest point of
contrast with Descartes’ celebration of the mind as the ultimate
foundation of certainty—that this investment in the mind as ob-
ject “is a most uncomfortable state of affairs, especially because
the psyche of the individual gets ‘seduced’ away into this mind
from the intimate relationship which the psyche originally had
with the soma. The result is a mind-psyche, which is pathologi-
cal” (1984, pp. 246–247).
“hope that we can find our way out”
“Man’s unhappiness, says Descartes, is due to his having

first been a child” (Beauvoir, 1948, p. 35). Involuntary though
it may have been, we can see now why Beauvoir’s recasting of
“error” as “unhappiness” (or malheur in the French) is in fact
eerily prescient: the glorified mind, celebrated and revered in
the Western tradition, is, in this reading, born of childhood
unhappiness. The “mind is an attempted self-cure for a too-
problematic dependence,” states Phillips pointedly (1995, p.
234); in other words, “mind” is a narcissistic defense structure
that takes the form of a retreat from relationality into the “men-
tal self-embrace” of rationality. This retreat is unconsciously
designed to protect against the pain of emotional trauma: a
trauma—the threat of annihilation—that is associated with
unbearable vulnerability and dependency.
Although she does not trace the connections back to Des-

cartes, Layton offers us a useful discussion on the links between
narcissism and contemporary Western culture, particularly
post-9/11 U.S. culture, in “Retaliatory Discourse.” Arguing
that our attitudes towards dependency and vulnerability are
“powerfully shaped by economic relations and the cultural
discourses that subtend them,” she points out that if we have
trouble tolerating anxiety, narcissism is likely to be part of the
picture: “If our dominant discourses and institutions function at
a narcissistic or paranoid-schizoid level, if they cannot contain
anxieties but rather foster splitting and projection, then the
narcissistic aspects of psychic functioning will be mobilized and
become dominant” (2006, p. 146). Further, she is suggesting
that in the context of the various retaliatory discourses that
currently “dominate the public sphere” (2006, p. 143), one
particular psychic split—between “two sets of human capacities
that ought not be separated”—is repeatedly mobilized: a split
between “relational and autonomous capacities.” “When these
capacities are split,” she writes, “they create narcissistic ways
of both attaching to others and asserting the self.” What we
are left with is not just a form of attachment “that repudiates
all versions of autonomy as selfish” but also, and more gravely
perhaps, a form of autonomy “that repudiates dependency and
vulnerability, fostering an attitude of domination toward other
people and the natural world” (2006, p. 147).
The logic of splitting, which she highlights here, speaks of a
pervasive legacy of Cartesianism in our culture: the mind/body
split reappearing in the guise of a split between “relational and
autonomous capacities.” The defensive aloneness at the heart
of this split insidiously informs our cultural values of autonomy
and individualism, thereby incessantly repeating narcissistic pat-
terns of relating in their predilection for what Layton calls “an
attitude of domination” and Shaw characterises as “relational
systems of subjugation.” As I suggested earlier, however, citing
Layton, repetition compulsions always also seek to “undo the
split polarities that rule our current lives and attachments”: the
very fact that we still find ourselves repeating uncomfortable
Cartesian splits can therefore be seen as “hope that we can find
our way out” (2006, p. 153). Following Layton’s logic, finding
Simone Drichel 269
our “way out” of narcissistic ways of relating would mean not

needing to split off either autonomy or attachment: it would
replace our current defensive model of autonomy with what I
would like to call “relational autonomy”: a mode of being that
is capable of being both separate and connected.
As a goal of emotional maturity, such “relational autonomy”
would build upon Winnicott’s suggestion that the “capacity to be
alone” is paradoxically achieved in relation with another, not in
a narcissistic withdrawal into the ego à la Descartes. Winnicott
tells us, in the eponymously titled essay, that the “capacity to
be alone” is “one of the most important signs of maturity in
emotional development” (1965, pp. 29). Significantly, he also
tells us—and we should take heed of his words here—that this
capacity only develops through relationality: “the basis of the
capacity to be alone is a paradox; it is the experience of be-
ing alone while someone else is present” (1965, p. 30).19 This
“paradox” implicitly juxtaposes the split between “relational and
autonomous capacities” of which Layton speaks—only to undo
the split that holds them apart: the basis of (the capacity for)
autonomy is (the capacity for) relationality. In fact, Winnicott
goes so far as to say that “the capacity to be alone is based on
the experience of being alone in the presence of someone,
and . . . without a sufficiency of this experience the capacity to be
alone cannot develop” (1965, p. 33, emphasis added). The infant
who cannot be sure of a “benign environment”—a protective
environment in which the premature ego can risk coming
undone—is not free to “discover his own personal life.” What
this means is that an aloneness which is arrived at without suf-
ficient “experience of being alone in the presence of someone”
is not the sign of emotional maturity but instead what Winnicott
calls its “pathological alternative,” which, he says, “is a false life
built on reactions to external stimuli” (1965, p. 34). Mature
aloneness—an aloneness that signifies genuine independence—
therefore requires an experience of what Winnicott might call
“good-enough” relationality: a relationality, in other words,
that is sustained, reliable and benevolent. “Maturity and the
capacity to be alone implies,” he says, “that the individual has
had the chance through good-enough mothering to build up
a belief in a benign environment” (1965, p. 32). If this kind of
“good-enough” relationality is not experienced—as it was not,

in Descartes’ case—mature, healthy aloneness, that is, the kind
of aloneness required for genuine autonomy in all of its facets
(creative, moral, and political), cannot develop. “Whenever
the world is not good enough one has a mind instead,” Phil-
lips notes (1995, p. 235), and we have seen that this “mental
self-embrace,” where mind takes the place of the “presence of
someone”—i.e., someone else—through relationship with whom
the capacity to be alone was supposed to develop, does not have
the same potency to bring about the “capacity to be alone” of
which Winnicott speaks. Instead, and this is the serious side
to Phillips’ humorous quip, we are left with the pathological
alternative: a narcissistic disavowal of relationality—a pseudo-
self-sufficiency—under the guise of rigidly upheld ideals of
independence and autonomy that are part and parcel of con-
temporary Western conceptions of subjectivity.
How do we find our way out of this eternal return of
Cartesianism? Layton and Russell have asserted that repeti-
tion compulsion is a sign of hope. Hope, most immediately
perhaps, that an “unreal” trauma will be made “real” by find-
ing the “empathetic witness” or “sought-for audience” that is
needed to access the occluded trauma. Hope, also, that the
relationality established in this act of witnessing, this act of
listening and attending, might make the world “good enough,”
even momentarily, to suspend the usual reactive drive to have
“a mind instead.” Hope, in other words, that we can break
chinks into the armor of our defenses against relationality. A
compassionate awareness of the double-edged traumas that
produce narcissistic enactments and an empathic recognition
of the unbearable vulnerability that often lies behind nar-
cissistic relational patterns—a vulnerability that must not be
experienced for fear of psychic disintegration—might peace-
fully lay to rest Descartes’ ghost, such that it no longer silently
drives our sense of who and how we are. What is at stake here
is nothing less than a reintegration of our split-off dependency
and vulnerability so that the fixed and complementary pattern
of narcissistic relating—“subjugation,” “domination”—can
be broken, and relational forms of autonomy can replace its
painfully defensive cousin. What is at stake, in other words,
Simone Drichel 271
is the hope that something other than the eternal return of

Cartesianism—Cartesian narcissism—may become possible. It
is something we cannot afford not to hope for.
Notes
1. The phrase reappears once more a little further on in the text, and in this later
instance, spells out more directly where the problem lies for Beauvoir: “the mis-
fortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his
freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic
for the time when he did not know its exigencies” (1948, p. 40). In other words,
childhood, or particularly a child’s dependency, is problematic because it stands
counter to the existentialist investment in freedom.
2. Descartes scholars Stephen Gaukroger, Theo Verbeek, and Daniel Garber have
confirmed that no such direct statement appears in Descartes’ work, and suggested
to me a number of valuable passages in Descartes work that Beauvoir may have
had in mind with her “citation” (personal e-mail correspondence, 4 June 2014).
3. I owe the reference to Principle 71 to Daniel Garber.
4. The French version—the most likely source for Beauvoir—likewise uses “erreurs”
instead of malheur: “Que la première & principale cause de nos erreurs sont les prejugez
de nostre enfance” (Descartes, 1904, p. 58), closely following the original Latin
“errorum”: “Præcipuam errorum causam à præjudiciis infantiæ procedere” (Descartes,
1905, p. 35).
5. Because Descartes’ overt reasoning regarding the “errors” of childhood is well
established in the literature, I restrict myself in this article to a fuller analysis—
speculative though it may be—of some of the less conscious reasons he may have
had to lament the fact that we begin life as children.
6. Beauvoir follows Descartes remarkably closely when she notes that the malheur
in man’s having been a child lies in the “deep complicity” (1948, p. 38) with the
status quo that infantile protection from the demands and responsibilities of
freedom involuntarily harbours: powerless to effect change, the child, for her,
is at the mercy of worldly conditions it did not will, much like Descartes’ child
was at the mercy of “preconceived opinions” that the senses erroneously com-
municated as “the truth of things.”
7. Gray Kochhar-Lindgren also develops a reading of the Meditations in terms of
narcissism in the first chapter of Narcissus Transformed (1993).
8. The underlying logic is that repetition compulsion is usually the sign of a dis-
avowed trauma, which repeats in a bid to re-enter consciousness so as to become
available for “working through.”
9. I owe this insight to Joanne Faulkner.
10. Withers (2008) attributes this piece of information to Anthony C. Grayling’s 2005
biography of Descartes.
11. Useful extended discussions of the dreams are offered by, inter alia, Feuer (1963),
Dyer (1986), and Withers (2008). Expressing “an impression of dismay” at being
asked to “examine some dreams of Descartes’,” Freud, by contrast, offers only the
sketchiest of remarks, justifying his reluctance by pointing to the obvious problem
that without the physical presence of the dreamer no free association can take
place: “working on dreams without being able to obtain from the dreamer himself
any indications on the relations which might link them to one another or attach
them to the external world—and this is clearly the case when it is a question of
the dreams of a historical figure—gives, as a general rule, only a meagre result”
(1929, p. 203).
12. According to his biographer Adrien Baillet, to whom we owe the record of the
dreams, Descartes went to bed on the night in question “full of enthusiasm,
convinced he had discovered the foundations of a marvelous science” (cited in
Descartes, 1985, p. 4n1).
13. This is a breakdown, as Winnicott will argue in “Fear of Breakdown,” which has
already happened: “clinical fear of breakdown,” he says, “is the fear of a breakdown
that has already been experienced. It is a fear of the original agony which caused
the defence organisation which the patient displays as an illness syndrome”
(1963/1989, p. 90, emphasis in original).
14. This is the very problem, of course, with which the Cartesian meditator struggles,
and which necessitates him to “prove” God’s existence.
15. A similar reading could also be developed through the earlier trauma theory of
Sándor Ferenczi (1926), whose dream image of the “wise baby” is particularly
pertinent in this context. What commentator Jay Frankel describes as Ferenczi’s
pervasive sense regarding trauma, namely that “emotional abandonment” is the
traumatic situation that is “ultimately the most destructive” (1998, p. 44), also
has application. I draw on Winnicott rather than Ferenczi, because Winnicott
provides a far more direct engagement with Descartes in his two essays, “Mind
and Its Relation to the Psyche-Soma” (1954/1984) and “New Light on Children’s
Thinking” (1965/1989).
16. Precisely such fear of breakdown or madness pervades the Meditations (most
directly, perhaps, in the meditator’s suspicion of dreams, owing to their associa-
tion with madness), making the heavy investment in the mind—“I am a mind,
or intelligence, or intellect, or reason”—readable as an over-determined defense
against just this fear. In fact, if we remind ourselves that Descartes’ “recovery” after
breakdown was symbolized in the discovery of the “foundations of a marvellous
new science” (and the third dream’s endorsement thereof), we perhaps understand
more fully why he should carry a notebook of his dreams with himself—like a
charm against breakdown—for the rest of his life.
17. Given that this loss is misremembered—suggesting it is vaguely “unreal”—we can
assume that it was likely, in Shabad’s distinction, not just painful but traumatic,
which points to an emotional aloneness at the time of the loss.
18. This profound uncertainty is of course precisely why Descartes needs to prove
that God exists: God guarantees the objective validity of subjective experience.
In Winnicott’s version, the task is one of establishing a reality that lies outside
the infant’s aura of omnipotence: allowing “object-relating” to transform into
“object-usage.”
19. Stephen Frosh (2012) explains the thought process behind this paradoxical kind
of aloneness when he writes that the capacity to be alone “describes how the ability
to be alone and to retain the kind of curiosity that is required to reach out to the
world depends on having previously internalized a sense of being thought about
by another. This results in the conviction that we are never truly alone: we are
always in the presence of someone who cares, even if that person is not actually
there at the time” (p. 135).
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Arguing, in her 1947 text Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté, that

of subjectivity (particularly in its renunciation of childhood),

Recast as “Cartesian narcissism,” Cartesian philosophy

“I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason”

Reflecting on some of the less overt or conscious reasons

as a philosophical Bildungsroman, in which the author’s quest

I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks;

And at the opening of the famous third meditation, this “think-

I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all

What Descartes seems to be describing here, in his prioritiza-

“he unconsciously sensed his vulnerability”

I am by no means the first to suspect that something a

Pushing beyond the observations of Oksenberg Rorty,

The “real” world is full of dangers. Limitless occasions

With “symptoms” as clear-cut as “narcissistic rage,” “paranoia,”

The meditations of the Cartesian ego exemplify the

Although Levin is quick to point out that he is offering this

“the most important thing to know about narcissism”

While finding Levin’s “diagnosis” thought-provoking, I

Ever since Freud’s abandonment of the theory of in-

Following contemporary relational psychoanalytic theorizing (in

from the relational matrix” (Mitchell, 1988, p. 201), but instead

To put all this in the simplest possible terms: the develop-

Offering two utterly fraught “paths for survival,” narcissism

terms, “doer/done to” (2004)—that are its relational trade-

in other words, to see historical continuities between our cur-

“unique personal experiences”

In turning to the question of trauma, I am asking, ulti-

How might one psychologically understand the original

In seeking answers to such questions, they agree with schol-

Descartes’s thought” and drawn attention to the “extreme

field in which the Meditations took shape—might allow us, in

“the most intimate of creations”

In making a case for the relevance of psychobiographi-

Descartes claimed that his new philosophy, which has

knower were not part of the world. This way of view-

What Dyer establishes here is that Cartesian philosophy, and

as Memorials to One’s Lonely Suffering.” In this essay, Shabad

narcissistic withdrawal—serves the function of “memorializing

Perhaps it is this very transformation of experienced

Trauma, in other words, is the result of aloneness in the face of

It is not just that the camera has taken a picture that is

own injury; it needs to be fully developed, operational,

The result of the camera being unable to photograph its own

To return to the metaphor of the camera photographing

Note these two words: “uncertainty” and “doubt.” A question

point as well—while clearly an indication of underlying un-

“Man’s unhappiness, says Descartes . . . ”

With these thoughts in mind I return to Descartes. Taking

time of suffering, thereby transforming a painful experience

I take the further liberty of adding that I found by

With reference to this passage, Gaukroger wonders “why Des-

It is not at all surprising that he should have strong feel-

in nature, thereby giving the mind significant power over the

“Cogito, ergo in mea potestate sum”

With the thought of trauma in mind, and drawing on Win-

through the very early developmental stages; mind is then no

Let us assume that health in the early development of the

Problems arise if the environment is not perfect, or not even