NARCISSISM AND THE SELF: AN INTRODUCTION

University of Bristol, 2019

This study emphasizes the shallow connection that has been overshadowed between metafiction and self-reflective literature (also called 'narcissist narratives') and the psychological and cultural aspects of the phenomena of Narcissism. Drawing from Jameson's and Lasch's Postmodernism culture theories, it is speculated that the term 'narcissism' has been a key term to define the sense of loss and unstable identity towards the end of the 20th century. Furthermore, considering Heinz Kohut's Psychology of the Self theories, Narcissism Personality Disorder is defined as a pathological defense against the loss of a stable self-image, leading to an I/Other projection mechanism that attempts to reconstruct its identity. Therefore, this projection mechanism is applied to the comparative frame of 20th-century metafiction works by Italo Calvino, Virginia Woolf, and Miguel de Unamuno, to prove the existence of a diachronic phenomenon enrooted in parallel origins.

British Journal of Psychotherapy, 1988

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1981

The author reviews Freud's (1914) seminal paper 'On narcissism: an introduction'. Freud's paper is briefly set in the historical context of the evolution of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theories, and Freud's metapsychology up to the publication of his Narcissism paper is outlined. A detailed and comprehensive description of the content of the paper is given, accompanied by commentary on, and critical analysis of, Freud's ideas. Freud's applications of his ideas about narcissism in relation to homosexuality, hypochondria and psychosis are elucidated and discussed. The author concludes by considering some of the influences of Freud's ideas about narcissism on Kleinian and post-Kleinian developments in psychoanalytic theory.

The narcissism expression has been often used, both by common sense, as by different fields of knowledge, which demonstrates its polysemic characteristics. Thus, it is extremely important to rescue its conceptions expressed at different historical moments, for the carrying out of counterpoints about its uses and current conceptions. This research aimed to study the "narcissism approach" at different historical moments, in its respective epistemological fields. This is a study of "bibliographic review" on the subject and that is part of the research results of a doctoral project in psychology. The survey results showed that, firstly, the "narcissism theme" would be addressed by psychiatry and psychoanalysis; secondly, by the social sciences; and thirdly, in correlation with elements relating to cyberspace. The study of the different historical moments in which appear the approaches of narcissism has importance for a better analysis and understanding of its appropriations in the contemporary. In this sense, the study of their emergence and provenance, as well as its etymology is fundamental for its non-conceptual overestimation.

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.

The Psychoanalytic Review, 2019

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).

International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 2010

The gaze is originally experienced as a disembodied force. This experience is discussed here from a psychopathological prospective and from a developmental perspective. In certain states of regression, when the boundaries between the self and the others are fading away, the gaze is again experienced as a disembodied force that radiates from the eyes and can dangerously penetrate into the mind. The body and its extensions are usually used as a shelter. The body performs this sheltering function in a natural and silent way, and only when this function is lacking do we become aware of it. Shame then signals the failure of the ordinary sheltering function performed by the body. If the external body is not sufficiently cathected, its sheltering function is also decreased, to the point that the body is experienced as transparent, and the most intimate feelings and thoughts become dangerously available to others. In primitive societies, this situation is reflected in the universal belief in the ''evil eye,'' the most common defense against the evil eye having been a representation of an erect penis. In ancient Rome, the phallus-shaped amulet used to ward off the evil eye was called the ''fascinum'': this magic phallus was supposed to neutralize the attack by fascinating the disembodied gaze, that is, by binding it (from the latin verb fascio, fasciare, to bind). The construction of mastered visibility is an organizer of the ego structure. The fascination of the mythical Narcissus for his own mirror image illustrates a central moment of the dialectical construction of the self: the effort to bind the disembodied gaze that is threatening the self, by giving a body to it and by fixing it to an image. Narcissism is thus the effort to bind an almighty free-floating gaze.