THEOLOGY, IMAGE & EMOTION

In narcissistic psychology, the concepts of love are all-consuming: one loves the other like the fisherman loves fish, or like the hungry loves and desires meat. This is aesthetic love, free of any ethical or religious aspect. When this model appears as part of a Theological relationship, that is – emotions or movements of the psyche directed towards God, narcissistic love will merge with the experience of religious worship, or the awakening of “interiority”.

Among the many differences separating Jewish from Christian religious practice, two stand out: the attitude towards visual images, and the understanding of “interiority.” The concept of “interiority” involves a binary view of internal and external states. According to this approach, the subject is a kind of container with an external covering; sheltered inside is his “self,” which is separate and divided from the rest of the world. This structure underlies the concepts of self-expression and identification: expression is an event wherein interior contents emerge from the closed container, while identification indicates the opposite process: the introduction of external, “other” material into the container’s interior.

With regard to “image” and “interiority,” it is safe to say that the more Judaism negates these elements or deems them unimportant, the more Christianity elevates their standing. Jewish theology, which is based on the negation of the image, requires shattering the statue or the visual representation and emphasizes divine transcendence, rather than the immanence that Christianity seeks to stress through the Incarnation. Jewish theology aims to preserve the praxis and the sacred words of ritual, rather than the world of emotion and identification venerated by Christianity.

In Judaism, unlike in Christianity, the Halakhic obligation is not a dogmatic one, and is therefore never applied to the “inner” world in the sense that “you must feel so-and-so” or “you must believe and think such-and-such.” Jewish prayer, for example, necessitates the production of signifiers, but does not require the worshiper to identify with the signified. In this sense, Jewish prayer, as opposed to Christian prayer, does not obey the structure of “expression,” nor the structure of catharsis that can ensue from it.

The two elements of “image” and “interiority” appear together in the framework of narcissistic experience. In Lacanian terms, narcissism belongs to an imaginary register wherein the individual is unable to meet the other as “other,” but only as the projection of his inner world. When the “self” is reflected in the mirror represented by another person, an experience of identification with one’s own self is produced through that person. 

There is no empathy involved, since empathy requires stepping outside oneself to meet the “other.” In narcissistic identification, by contrast, the self takes pleasure in itself by using (or abusing) the other.

According to Itzhak Benyamini, narcissism is first and foremost a theological event. In his book Subject-Screen, Benyamini describes the four stages of the birth of the subject in Christianity/Western culture: first, the subject sees the other as a crucified martyr – a spectacle that he finds fascinating. Second, the martyr is seen by the spectator and sacrifices himself for the spectator. Third, the spectator identifies with the martyr, who suffers, sacrifices himself, and is seen by the spectator. Fourth is an imaginary merging of the seeing subject with the seen martyr. The subject is, at one and the same time, the spectator and the object of his own spectatorship.

We thus see that “image” as representation and as the act of imagination (the double meaning of “image” as noun and verb is also inherent in the French word – the language of Lacan) can imprison the subject inside a sealed-off, imaginary container divorced from reality, a hall of mirrors that only shows him his own reflections. In this state, even libidinal emotions such as love or passion are nothing but narcissistic feelings activated by the self and directed towards the self.

Consequently, I would like to propose a model wherein the combination of an aesthetic experience (devoid of any ethical or religious dimension) that is activated by an external other necessarily produces a narcissistic event. Let us examine the narcissism activated by an image in two religious experiences: worship and sacrifice.

In narcissistic psychology, the concepts of love are all-consuming: one loves the other like the fisherman loves fish, or like the hungry loves and desires meat. This is aesthetic love, free of any ethical or religious aspect. When this model appears as part of a theological relationship, that is – emotions or movements of the psyche directed towards God, narcissistic love will merge with the experience of religious worship, or the awakening of “interiority”.

the narcissist is unable to separate objective reality from the meanings he attaches to it, which originate in his subjective world. Narcissistic theology will fall under the category that Judaism calls “idolatry” (avodah zarah), since it is unable to see the object of its adoration through the projective screening in which it clothes that object based on his own world.   

The Jew will observe the Christian worshipper with suspicion and ask: How can we know whether the worshipper undergoing a cathartic experience is not simply using God, placing his god at the receiving end of his religious passion only in order to fuel his own experience of worship?

Likewise, the concept of sacrifice (which generally carries a religious flavor, whether Jewish or Christian) can appear in a narcissistic mode when it occurs as part of the model – an aesthetic experience combined with an “other” who activates it. As discussed above, according to Benyamini, the third stage in the emergence of the Western/Christian subject as based on sacrifice: the spectator identifies with the crucified martyr, who is suffering, sacrificing himself, and seen by the subject. In the fourth stage, the seeing subject merges in his imagination with the seen martyr. In Benyamini’s words, this is an act of “sacrifice for myself.”

In its postmodern, contemporary, and secularized configuration, aesthetic-narcissistic sacrifice is expressed as “sacrifice for myself” in daily life. Many theories on the subject note the subject’s inner split between “I” and “myself.” When the “I” is aware of itself, he treats the self as an object, as an other. I argue that in the postmodern age, the split between “I” and “myself” as other is not only epistemological, but also ethical. Today, in the age of “selfization” and "aestheticization", the split between “I” and “myself” is taken to extremes. The “self” can fulfill the function of the “other” on the ethical level as well. What if we think of the “self” as that which fulfills for us the figure of the ethical “other,” to whose needs we should attend and for whom we must sacrifice ourselves? 

Suppose a certain individual is a narcissist, and therefore “loves himself.” We may ask: is the narcissistic subject located in the lover (of himself) or in the beloved (loved by him)? The common stereotype holds that the narcissist is unable to love, but only to be loved and demand love from others. But observation of our everyday culture shows that, on the contrary, today’s narcissist is a lover. He loves… himself. He was supposed to love an “other,” but for some reason, the position of the other has been radically emptied, and is now taken by the “self.”

In its postmodern, contemporary, and secularized configuration, aesthetic-narcissistic sacrifice is expressed as “sacrifice for myself” in daily life. Many theories on the subject note the subject’s inner split between “I” and “myself.” When the “I” is aware of itself, he treats the self as an object, as an other. I argue that in the postmodern age, the split between “I” and “myself” as other is not only epistemological, but also ethical. Today, in the age of “selfization” and "aestheticization", the split between “I” and “myself” is taken to extremes. The “self” can fulfill the function of the “other” on the ethical level as well. What if we think of the “self” as that which fulfills for us the figure of the ethical “other,” to whose needs we should attend and for whom we must sacrifice ourselves?

Similarly, as part of the praxis of “sacrifice,” the narcissistic subject takes the position of offering a sacrifice; the object for whom he is making the sacrifice is “himself.” The following example is as edifying as it is trivial:

The headline of an article published in a popular online YNET column reads:
“I’m not a Cheat, I’m Faithful to Myself: This is how I Broke Up Two Families.”

At first sight one might think this is an act of aestheticization in the simple sense of the term: the speaker no longer cares about “ethics,” about the moral aspect of her deeds; “She only cares about herself.” But after reading the article, one realizes that what we are witness to is a different kind of ethics. The headline “I’m not a Cheat, I’m Faithful to Myself” indicates that the term “fidelity” as suspending the self for the other, suspending “concern for myself” – an act that is essentially ethical, is transformed into a new kind of ethics: a narcissistic ethics in which I do, indeed, suspend my self for the sake of another, but that other is me, in other words – “myself.”  

The article reveals the (implicit, or denied) theological roots of the speaker’s discourse: she is quoted explaining her great love for her first husband, the fact that she still loves him, and the courage involved in relinquishing him and her family to pursue her love for another man, the father of a girl in her daughter’s kindergarten. She speaks of herself in the religious-theological terms of a crucified martyr: in a heroic act, she sacrificed all she had, her beloved husband, her children, her family, in the name of a “self” that demanded this sacrifice.

To conclude, it would seem that Christian theology, which emphasizes the image and interiority, laid the Western foundations that enable the “self” to achieve transcendence and find a place outside itself. Thereby, the subject is able to transfer, by means of a pure aesthetic act, his love, passion, and devotion to an object that is, in fact, his or her own self.