Abstract

In this article, I point Arendtian scholarship to important elements in the history of psychoanalysis that are relevant to explain Hannah Arendt’s known aversion to the discipline. I show how the political theorist relied on psychoanalytically-relevant concepts from her intellectual heritage—from Aristotle and St. Augustine to Hegel and Nietzsche. Afterward, I argue that Hannah Arendt’s critique of Adolf Eichmann was simultaneously a critique of his narcissism, or lack thereof. I show how her critique was truer to Freud’s original understanding of the concept than that of psychoanalysts writing in postwar America; a time in which the term narcissism itself became misused. I finally marry Freudian and Arendtian concepts together to think about the banality of narcissism.