parental image," or healthy admiration for the powerful selfobject.83 Thus, for Kohut, it is

"the pursuit of values, ideals, and ambitions and the self-esteem accruing from those

activities rather than the establishment of satisfying object relations," Morris N. Eagle

notes, that endows life with worthwhile meanings.84

 If the post-traumatic legacies of oppression are self-doubt and internalized feelings

of inferiority that ultimately lead to feelings of nonexistence, Kohut's self-psychology,

then with its emphasis on the narcissistic values of ideals and ambitions and the

cohesiveness of the self, can shed light on the ways in which a severe lack of social

mirroring can lead to a serious pathology of self.

 In The Bluest Eye the traumatized victim Pecola's self falls apart completely in the

end because of the series of mounting victimizations and shaming she endures as the

weakest and most vulnerable member of the society. The unrelenting domestic and social

aggression against Pecola and her family testifies to the familial and societal failure to

provide an empathic selfobject milieu for its members. As Barbara Johnson argues in her

attempt to extend Kohut's narrow theoretical focus on the nuclear family, it is important

to note that "what is a narcissistic structure for the individual person is also a social,

economic, and political structure in the world" and that race, for instance, can serve as a

selfobject that can indeed "set up an artificially inflated or deflated narcissistic climate."85

In The Bluest Eye, which Morrison admits she wrote to "hit the raw nerve of racial self-

contempt,"86 the deflated racial self and repeated racial trauma poignantly exemplify

Kohut's message that "man can no more survive psychologically in a psychological

milieu that does not respond empathically to him, than he can survive physically in an

atmosphere that contains no oxygen."87