Concept
Narcissism
The investment of libido, of love and interest, in one's own self rather than in others. Freud took the term up from 1910 and set it out in ‘On Narcissism’ (1914), distinguishing a primary narcissism of infancy from a secondary narcissism in which libido withdrawn from objects returns to the ego; later analysts tied it to the regulation of self-esteem, and Kohut gave it a line of development of its own, from archaic to mature forms.
- Narrower concepts
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 12
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1914 The term was coined in clinical sexology (Näcke, 1899, as Freud notes); Freud used it from 1910 and in ‘On Narcissism’ (1914) made it a concept of libido theory, distinguishing primary from secondary narcissism and ego libido from object libido.
reworked by
- Lou Andreas-Salomé 1921 Taking up Freud’s ‘On Narcissism’ (1914), Andreas-Salomé treated narcissism not as a phase to be left behind or as mere self-love but as a lasting accompaniment of every libidinal investment, at once self-assertion and a dissolving of the self back into what is not yet bounded.
- Herbert Rosenfeld 1964 Where Freud saw narcissism as libido withdrawn from objects onto the ego, Rosenfeld recast it in Kleinian terms as an omnipotent object relation that defends against dependence and envy, with a libidinal and a destructive aspect.
- André Green Green wrote on narcissism from the 1960s on and tied it to Freud's last theory of the drives, splitting it into a life narcissism that unifies the ego and a death narcissism that tends to abolish it.
developed by
- Erich Fromm 1964 Fromm extended Freud's concept of narcissism from the individual to the group, describing a social narcissism invested in nation, race or creed that can feed collective violence.
- Otto F. Kernberg 1975 Kernberg distinguished normal from pathological narcissism, traced a gradient of severity from normal infantile narcissism to the narcissistic personality, and explained pathological narcissism as a defensive structure rather than a stage of development that has been arrested.