The Narcissist Walt Whitman:A Psychoanalytic Analysis

By Christina Campbell

ThesisWalt Whitman’s autoeroticism and

preoccupation with becoming the poet that would heal an entire nation are evidence of his narcissistic personality. Whitman’s narcissism is especially relevant in relation to his close relationship with his mother, his tendency to act as a father to his siblings, and his experience tending wounded soldiers in the Civil War hospitals.

What would Freud say?

Whitman’s narcissism began when, as an infant unable to idealize his father or detach from his mother, he became his own love-object.

Whitman and Autoeroticism“I dote on myself….there is that lot of me,

and all so luscious” Song of Myself (51)Freud says:“The term narcissism…denotes the

attitude of a person who treats his own body in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated-who looks at it, that is to say, strokes it and fondles it till he obtains complete satisfaction through these activities” (57).

Louisa and Walt or Jocasta and Oedipus?“I kiss and kiss convulsively again the sweet old lips, the

cheeks, the closed eyes in the coffin; to her, the ideal woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth, life, love, to me the best”- As at Thy Portals Also Death 604

Freud says:“By repressing his love for his mother he preserves in it

his unconscious and from now on remains faithful to her. While he seems to pursue boys and to be their lover, he is in reality running away from the other women, who might cause him to be unfaithful” (463).

Whitman’s Sublimated Desire

I am faithful, I do not give out, The fractured thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen, These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame.)” –The Wound Dresser (445)

Freud says:“Narcissistic libido is constantly being transformed

into object-libido, and vice-versa. An excellent instance of the length to which this transformation can go is afforded by the state of being in love, whether in a sexual or sublimated manner, which goes so far as involving a sacrifice of the self” (35).

Other considerationsWhitman’s obsession with being

absorbed by the nation.Whitman’s insistence on

“proofreading” the work of his biographers.

Whitman’s tendency to act as the family’s patriarch.

Works Cited

Bauerlein, Mark. "Whitman's Language of the Self." American Imago 44.2 (1987): 129 48. Print.

Cavitch, David. My Soul and I: The Inner Life of Walt Whitman. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. Print.

Edmundson, Mark. "'Lilacs': Walt Whitman's American Elegy." Nineteenth-Century Literature 44.4 (1990): 465-91. Print.

Fredrickson, Robert S. "Public Onanism: Whitman's Song of Himself." Modern Language Quarterly 46.2 (1985): 143-60. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: Norton, 1989. Print. Killingsworth, Myrth Jimmie. "Whitman and Motherhood: A Historical View." American

Literature 54.1 (1982): Layton, Lynne. "From Oedipus to Narcissus: Literature and the Psychology of Self." Mosaic

18.1 (1985): 97-105. Print. Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Vintage,

1996. Print. Whitman, Walter. Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of

America, 1996. Print. Zweig Paul. “The Wound Dresser.” Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views: Walt Whitman.

New York: Chelsea House, 1985.