The salesman revisited: the paradoxes of the “narcissistic rage” in literature and cinema

Abstract

This article seeks to establish a relationship between Asghar Farhadi’s film, The Salesman, and Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman. Based on the psychoanalytic notion of narcissism and the theory of “mode of address”, we seek to develop a discussion around the notion of “narcissistic rage” (Kohut) and its paradoxes. Two intertwined paradoxes mainly stand out: first, the way in which, in this psychic condition, the enemy is an unrecognized part of the Self itself and, secondly, the way in which the other, which serves as a projection screen for feelings of hostility, becomes a present-absent, not perceived in its entirety. In this context, the “narcissistic rage” originates, above all, from the absence of an integrated psychic register of the otherness and, consequently, of its complexities and ambivalences. Following these questions, we hope to show how in both film and play, which serves as an intertext, an “extremely vulnerable narcissism” and its failures get to become elucidated.