ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic concept of narcissism takes into account the way in which the subject places himself in what Martin Heidegger calls Being-there: that is, existence as the product of a sociality made of discursive practices, institutions, habits, which precede the subject and pre-determine its essence on a bodily and pre-reflective level. Narcissism as a measure of libidinal investments, is always infused with the qualities of the object. In Sigmund Freud narcissism designates the direction of the investment of the libido or sexual energy: towards the object or towards the subject. The hypochondriac shows rather than says, making a spectacle out of the misunderstanding on which our naïve mind/body dualism is based. The hypochondriac’s narcissistic withdrawal is by no means a detachment from the object, but on the contrary an obsessive re-interrogation of it. Hypochondria of the individual and hypochondria of society mirror each other.
