In this highly image-conscious, social media-driven, and mechanistic epoch, individuals have perhaps never felt so disconnected and lonely. The We-psychology of Fritz Kunkel can help us to understand and navigate these times.
According to the Greek myth, Narcissus was a handsome young Thespian with whom the nymph Echo fell in love. Deprived of speech by Hera, the wife of Zeus, Echo could only repeat the last syllables of words she heard. Narcissus had only to say ‘I love you’; Echo could repeat those words; and Narcissus would feel loved.
However, Narcissus prioritised appearance over inner feeling. And so, unable to express her love, Echo was spurned by Narcissus and died of a broken heart. The gods then punished Narcissus for his callous treatment of Echo by making him fall in love with his own image. Catching sight of his own reflection in the waters of a fountain, Narcissus became enamoured of his own image and refused to leave the spot. He died of languor and turned into a flower – the narcissus that grows at the edges of springs.
This is a prescient myth for our times. We are increasingly hearing only the echo of what we think or believe, told what we want, who we should or ought to be, with the dopamine hit being what people think of us. Social media reflexively demands the projection of an inflated image of ourselves to gain approval and status. Consumerism feeds us images and a wealth of possibilities, none of which really deliver happiness or satisfaction; instead this cornucopia results in more disconnection, loneliness, frustration, overwhelm, dysregulation – the bitter emotional fruits partaken at the dining table of our culture, a tsunami of anxiety and depression that has become the real pandemic.
In his classic book on narcissism, Alexander Lowen describes the term as “both a psychological and cultural condition. On the individual level, it denotes a personality disturbance characterized by an exaggerated investment in one’s image at the expense of self.” 1 The narcissism of the individual can be seen as paralleling that of the culture: we shape our culture according to our image, and in turn are shaped by that culture.
On a cultural level, within the context of consumer capitalism, narcissism can be seen in a loss of human values, a lack of concern for the environment, for quality of life, for fellow human beings. Lowen goes on to say: “We need to understand the forces in the culture that create the problem and the factors in the human personality that predispose the individual to it. And we need to know what it is to be human, if we are to avoid becoming narcissists.” 2
This is where depth psychology, birthed around a century ago by Sigmund Freud with his discovery of the unconscious, closely followed by Alfred Adler’s reframing of it as “the unknown” and by Carl Jung’s concept of a collective unconscious, comes in. Another lesser known contemporary of these founders of depth psychology is Fritz Kunkel, who built on the great insights of these founding fathers.
Badly wounded on the battlefield in World War One, Kunkel, who was training to be a doctor, had a spiritual experience which ultimately led him, having lost an arm and unable to follow the expected trajectory of his life, to retrain as a psychotherapist. Kunkel identified what he called ‘egocentricity’ (by this he meant narcissism – Kunkel said that he wanted to establish a more democratic, universal, less pathologising term) as being central to the understanding of the human condition.
Kunkel believed that the egocentric patterns that shape our later life began in childhood. While Freud saw children as perverse creatures who had to be shaped by education and social pressure into degrees of agreeability, Kunkel saw children as naturally tender and trusting, until betrayed by egocentric adults into their own egocentric patterns.
Kunkel called his psychology the “We-Psychology”, and in this he was completely original. For Freud there was no Self in which others could be included; and while the thought is implicit in Jung, Jung only spoke of the importance of others in terms of the individual’s own needs being met. As John Sandford, the Jungian analyst and significant interpreter of Kunkel, wrote: “Kunkel goes beyond this notion. Other people are necessary in our lives because the emergence of the Self necessarily includes them as it brings about a vital change in our frame of reference from egocentricity – which is always concerned with “I” – to the creative life – which always embraces others in a creative “We”.’ 3
Kunkel describes a state he calls the “Original-We”, whereby the child is so wholly dependent on the mother they do not realise that they are a separate being. A separation towards more initiative and responsibility – what Kunkel calls the “Maturing-We” – is scaffolded by an inclusive expansion to include all members of the family and a widening circle of friends, or tribe – a living social group, a “dynamic reality”. However, as Sandford points out: “Such is the ideal, but in practice it is never realised. The transition from the Original-We to the Maturing-We does not come about without the child’s suffering from a more or less serious injury to this sense of harmony.” 4 Kunkel calls this “the Breach-of -the-We.”
Fast forward eighty years. There has never been such a prescient need for We-Psychology. The tribalism of culture wars, the cult of celebrity, deep faultlines of inequality, the saturation of social media, the casual prevalence of pornography, time spent on screens, dissociation around what is happening with the natural world, fuel an urgency for authentic connection, empathy, and feeling.
According to World Health Organization figures from 2023, depression affects around 280 million people worldwide. Lowen made distinct links between narcissism and depression: “Narcissists lack a sense of self derived from body feeling. Without a solid sense of self, they experience life as empty and meaningless. It is a desolate state.” 5 While there can be complex motivational problems working with narcissists in therapy, I have found that Lowen’s direction to help this client group connect with their bodies by recovering suppressed feelings to be most effective.
Both Lowen and Kunkel spoke about approaches that work to reduce muscular tensions and rigidities held in both body and mind. Kunkel, who saw creativity as the anithesis of anxiety, particularly focused on unlocking the creative life: “The human predicament is obvious. We misunderstand, misuse and repress the creative powers which are entrusted to us. They turn into the negative and destroy us, unless we find a way out.” 6 I would also highly recommend the wonderful collaborative work of Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay about the potential of the arts to reconnect us with both our bodies and one another. “To live ‘well’ is an art that grows from how fully we perceive and inhabit our worlds, and our ability to respond creatively to what we find. Imagination is an integral and essential part of our being. Our sense of being alive in each moment depends on our capacity to play and imagine with what is there and to meet events with flexibility, curiosity, wonder, humour and passion.”7
Individually and collectively, as we seek to find our voice in the echo chamber of the twenty-first century, to find both a love for ourselves and the other, I am reminded of these words:
By prioritising connection, by paying attention, creating, imagining, dreaming, playing, finding our voice, being in our bodies, speaking out, let’s prioritise feeling over image, and wake up from a collective cultural disassociation so that we may not, like Narcissus, die of languor, of a general malaise. Let’s remember what it is to be human; which starts, as Fritz Kunkel said, not with “I”, but “We”.
Main Image: Photo by Nigel Tadyanehondo
Citations:
- Alexander Lowen. Narcissism, p. ix, Macmillan, 1985
- Ibid., p. ix
- Fritz Kunkel: Selected Writings, ps. 65-66, edited by John A. Sanford
- Ibid, p. 82
- Alexander Lowen. Narcissism, p. ix, Macmillan, 1985
- Fritz Kunkel: Selected Writings, p. 269, edited by John A. Sanford
- Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay, A Widening Field, p. ix.
- Ben Okri, Mental Fight