Freud's 'On narcissism: an introduction'

British Journal of Psychotherapy, 1988

In this article, our goal is to present some elements relatives to the history of appropriation of the myth of Narcissus by medical-psychiatric tradition, so trying to draw the origins of this important psychoanalytic concept. From a psychopathological point of view, the narcissistic phenomenon, defined initially as a particular form of fetish, began to be considered as a medical problem at the end of nineteenth century. The psychoanalytic appropriation of this notion was made in 1905, by Freud, with the introduction of the concept of autoerotism. The first psychoanalytical definition of narcissism itself, suggested by the Viennese psychoanalyst Isidor Sadger, was given in 1908.

British Journal of Psychotherapy, 1986

The specific purpose of this paper is to give a limited appraisal of Freud's account of narcissism, primarily as elaborated in 'On Narcissism: An Introduction' (Freud 1914). My main focus will be on narcissism as a feature of object choice so as to highlight the conceptual similarities and differences with subsequent papers on the concept of narcissism from the perspectives of Klein, Fairbairn and Kohut. The term narcissism was first introduced by Freud in 1910 to describe the object choice made by homosexuals.`They identify themselves with a woman and take themselves as their sexual object. That is to say, they proceed from a narcissistic basis, and look for a young man who resembles themselves and whom they may love as their mother loved them.' (Freud 1905). In 1914 he writes that the strongest reason which led him to adopt the hypothesis of narcissism was consideration of perverts and homosexuals who 'in their later choice of love objects ... have taken as a model not their mother but their own selves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object, and are exhibiting a type of object choice which must be termed narcissistic'. (Freud 1914). He goes on to elaborate that according to the narcissistic type 'A person may love: (a) what he himself is (i.e. himself) (b) what he himself was (c) what he himself would like to be (d) someone who was once part of himself.' (Freud 1914, p. 90) The prevailing feature seems to be an assumption that the subject identifies with the mother and seeks to love aspects of himself in his subsequent object choices. This is contrasted with the anaclitic (attachment) type of object choice, according to which, 'A person may love: (a) the woman who feeds him (b) the man who protects him, and the succession of substitutes who take their place' (Freud 1914, p. 90). Both types are seen as ideal and Freud assumes that in reality both types are available to an individual though he may vary in his preference. As he says 'a human being has originally two sexual objects-himself and the woman who nurses him-and in doing so we are postulating a primary narcissism in everyone, which may in some cases manifest itself in a dominating fashion in his object choice' (Freud 1914, p. 88, my emphasis). The determining prototype of later object choices, both anaclitic and narcissistic, is viewed in terms of the initial prototype of the relationship with the feeding mother. In the anaclitic form the subject makes object choices on the model of the feeding mother which is extended to and influenced by the protective father and the consequent figures who come in their wake with the passage of time. The distinctive feature of the homosexual narcissistic object choice is the identification with the mother and through this 'a seeking of themselves as love objects'.

The Psychoanalytic Review, 2019

Abstract: Loving yourself is not a sin, but being obsessed with one‟s own happiness and letting others to suffer is „Narcissism‟. This disease is unique as the one who is suffering from narcissism may not realize that he is a „Narcissist‟ and in some cases a narcissist fails to cure his disease as he refuses to understand the suffering caused by him to others. A narcissist is dangerous to himself and the society. He can be cured if he discovers of what he is suffering with and realizes that only he can heal himself .i.e. „Narcissists are the cure to their own poison‟. Keywords: Character disorder, ego-strengthening, Ego State Therapy, false self, hypnosis, hypnotic age progression, narcissism, personality

British Journal of Psychotherapy, 1986

Kohut's exploration of narcissistic phenomena has had enormous impact on psychoanalytic thinking in the USA. Controversial though`Self Psychology' is, it has stimulated creative debate and a rethinking of many basic assumptions regarding development, the origins of pathology and the mode of action of psychoanalysis. Kohut's influence in Britain, by comparison, is almost negligible. Perhaps this is partly because Kohut -who died in 1981 -was writing against a background of classical analysis, Freudian and ego-psychological, which is rather different to that prevailing in Britain.

Psychoanalytic Psychology - PSYCHOANAL PSYCHOL, 1990

Of the many concepts that Freud bequeathed us, few have proved as elusive as narcissism. In his first systematic exposition of this concept, Freud (1914) stated, that the term narcissism was coined to refer to a paraphilia in which one takes one's own body, rather than another person, as a sexual object. He proceeded, however, to redefine narcissism not as a disorder of sexual object choice but as a normal process, "the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature" (pp. 73-74). This formulation usually has been rendered as the libidinal cathexis of the ego or, as modified by Hartmann (1950), the libidinal cathexis of the self. Narcissism, according to this essentially economic definition, means self-love and self-esteem. In this framework, narcissism is depleted by libidinal investment in another and is reacquired when one receives love from another or approval from one's ego ideal, itself in turn rooted in narcissism (Freud, 1914).

The Self as Muse: Narcissism and Creativity in the German Imagination, 2011