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in ‘On Narcissism’ (1914), distinguishing a primary narcissism of infancy from a secondary narcissism in which libido withdrawn from objects returns to the ego; later analysts tied it to the regulation of self-esteem, and Kohut gave it a line of development of its own, from archaic to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.
Development
1914
introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
In On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914)
1921
reworked by Lou Andreas-Salomé
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.
In The Dual Orientation of Narcissism (1921)
1939
critiqued by Karen Horney
Horney rejected narcissism as a libidinal investment of the ego and redescribed it as self-inflation, a neurotic trend that stands in for lost self-esteem.
In New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939)
1964
developed by Erich Fromm
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.
In The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (1964)
1964
reworked by Herbert Rosenfeld
Where Freud saw narcissism as libido withdrawn from objects onto the ego, Rosenfeld recast it in Kleinian terms as an omnipotent object relation that defends against dependence and envy, with a libidinal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.
In A Clinical Approach to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Life and Death Instincts: An Investigation into the Aggressive Aspects of Narcissism (1971);On the Psychopathology of Narcissism: A Clinical Approach (1964)
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1975
developed by Otto F. Kernberg
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.
In Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (1975);Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities (1970)
Undated
reworked by 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.
In Against Lacanism: An Interview With André Green (1995);Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism (1983)
Relations
introduced by
- 1914 Sigmund Freud
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
- 1921 Lou Andreas-Salomé
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.
- 1964 Herbert Rosenfeld
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.
critiqued by
- 1939 Karen Horney
Horney rejected narcissism as a libidinal investment of the ego and redescribed it as self-inflation, a neurotic trend that stands in for lost self-esteem.
developed by
- 1964 Erich Fromm
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.
- 1975 Otto F. Kernberg
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.
gave rise to
- 1971 Narcissistic transference
Kohut gives narcissism a line of development separate from object love and names the transferences after it: the analyst is invested with narcissistic rather than object libido. Freud had held that narcissistic patients form no transference at all.
diverged into
- Idealized image
Horney held that Freud's ego ideal, narcissism and superego each caught only one aspect of the phenomenon she described whole as the idealized image.
Works
- 1914
On Narcissism: An Introduction
Freud's 1914 essay, published in the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, treats narcissism as a normal state of the libido. It sets the libido invested in the ego against the libido invested in objects, and primary narcissism against secondary narcissism. It contrasts two types of object-choice, the anaclitic and the narcissistic, introduces the concept of the ego ideal, and separates sublimation, which concerns the drive, from idealization, which concerns the object.
- 1921
The Dual Orientation of Narcissism
An essay in four parts that reads narcissism as running in two directions at once: toward the assertion of a bounded self, and back toward an undivided state in which self and world are not yet separate. Narcissism is thus not a stage that is left behind but a lasting accompaniment of all libidinal life, at work in object love, in sublimation, in art and in religious feeling. Published in English as “The Dual Orientation of Narcissism” (Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1962).
- 1939
Horney's second book takes up Freud's theory point by point, to separate what she held to be its lasting findings from the premises she thought had hampered it. She keeps what she calls Freud's fundamental findings: that psychic processes are strictly determined, that actions and feelings may have unconscious motives and that resistance guards them, the role of emotional forces and conflict, repression and the other defences, the meaning of dreams, the formative power of early experience, transference and free association. She rejects his instinct theory and the mechanistic and evolutionistic thinking beneath it, together with his neglect of culture. Her thesis is that psychoanalysis should outgrow the limits set by its being an instinctivistic and a genetic psychology. She says that she is not founding a new school. Successive chapters re-examine the libido theory, which she judges unsubstantiated, the Oedipus complex, narcissism, feminine psychology and the death instinct. They also treat the emphasis on childhood, transference, culture and neurosis, the ego and the id, anxiety, the super-ego, neurotic guilt feelings and masochistic phenomena. In place of instinctual drives she puts neurotic trends. These are strivings for safety and satisfaction, such as the need for affection or for perfection, by which a person who feels helpless in a hostile world copes with it in some measure of safety. Anxiety arises when such a safety device is endangered. The last chapter, on therapy, sets as its aim restoring the patient to themself, so that the safety devices are no longer needed and spontaneity returns. Horney acknowledges debts to Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Harald Schultz-Hencke and Max Horkheimer. She credits Fromm with showing how central the loss of self is to neurosis.
- 1945
Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis
In this book Horney sets out a theory of neurosis centred on conflict between incompatible attitudes toward other people. In the introduction she traces her path away from Freud. It began with doubts about his feminine psychology and led, with Erich Fromm's help, to the cultural conditions of neurosis. She came to hold that neuroses are generated by disturbances in human relationships, and that the libido theory was no longer tenable. The ten neurotic trends she had listed in Self-Analysis are here regrouped into three basic attitudes: moving toward people, moving against them and moving away from them. Each overstresses one element of basic anxiety: helplessness, hostility or isolation. Their clash is the basic conflict, the dynamic centre of neurosis. Freud saw conflict as a battle between repressed and repressing forces, universal and in principle insoluble. Horney places it between contradictory neurotic trends and holds that it can be resolved where it arises. The book then examines the neurotic's attempts at a solution. One side of the conflict may be suppressed, or the person may withdraw into detachment. The idealized image is the most important attempt: in it the conflicting trends appear not as conflicts but as aspects of a rich personality. Externalization is the tendency to experience inner processes as though they occurred outside oneself. It is wider than projection, and Horney calls it an active process of self-elimination. Further auxiliary approaches, among them arbitrary rightness, rigid self-control and cynicism, serve to keep up an artificial harmony. A second part describes what unresolved conflicts cost: fears, impoverishment of the personality, hopelessness and sadistic trends. The conclusion holds that neurotic conflicts cannot be resolved by rational decision, but only by changing the inner conditions that brought them about. Against what she calls the pessimism of Freud's psychology, Horney affirms that a person can change and go on changing as long as they live.
- 1964
On the Psychopathology of Narcissism: A Clinical Approach
Rosenfeld's first paper on narcissism, in which he recasts it in Kleinian terms. Where Freud had described narcissism as libido withdrawn from objects onto the ego, Rosenfeld describes the omnipotent object relations of narcissistic patients. Through omnipotent introjection the self claims the good qualities of the object as its own; through omnipotent projection it lodges its unwanted parts in the object, which is then kept devalued. The result is a grandiose idealization of the self. This structure defends against recognizing the separateness of the good object, which would arouse dependence, envy and destructive impulses, and anxieties of confusion, fragmentation and disintegration. In analysis it appears as a transference that discounts the value of the analyst's help. The paper was reprinted in Psychotic States (1965) and Rosenfeld in Retrospect (2008), and Otto Kernberg later named Rosenfeld's approach among those he drew on.
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- 1970
Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities
In this paper Otto Kernberg describes a group of patients whose central disturbance is the regulation of self-regard, bound up with a characteristic pathology of their object relations, and considers how they can be treated psychoanalytically. Narcissistic personalities show an unusual degree of self-reference, grandiosity alongside feelings of inferiority, an insatiable need for admiration, little empathy, intense envy, and an emotional life that is shallow and lacks the capacity for genuine sadness and mourning. They idealize those from whom they expect admiration and depreciate those from whom they expect nothing. Many of them function socially much better than other patients with severe character pathology, yet Kernberg argues that beneath this surface they share the defensive organization of borderline patients, dominated by splitting, denial, projective identification, omnipotence and primitive idealization. Their distinctive feature is a pathological grandiose self, a fusion of the actual self, the ideal self and the ideal object, which shields them from dependence on others while the devalued images of self and others are projected outward. He traces this structure to early experiences with cold yet overprotective parental figures and to intense oral rage and envy. He sets it against normal infantile narcissism and against Heinz Kohut's recent view of it as an arrest in normal development. In treatment, the grandiose self is activated in the transference: the analyst is alternately idealized and devalued or treated as nonexistent, and is often left bored or reduced to an extension of the patient. Kernberg recommends standard psychoanalysis for most of these patients, but for those who function on an overtly borderline level he proposes expressive psychoanalytic psychotherapy. In both he calls for the systematic interpretation of the grandiose self and of the envy, rage and fear of dependence it wards off, rather than accepting the idealization, and he reviews the factors that bear on prognosis.
- 1971
An invited contribution to the 27th Congress of the International Psycho-Analytical Association in Vienna in 1971, in which Rosenfeld approaches the theory of the life and death instincts through clinical work with narcissistic patients. He distinguishes the libidinal aspects of narcissism, in which the self is idealized through the omnipotent possession of good objects, from its destructive aspects, in which the omnipotent destructive parts of the self are themselves idealized. In destructive narcissism these parts turn against any loving dependence on an object, the analyst included, and against the parts of the self that want it. Rosenfeld likens the narcissistic organization to a gang, run like the mafia, that holds the dependent self captive and punishes any move toward help. The paper introduced the term destructive narcissism; it was reprinted in Melanie Klein Today (1988) and was later taken up by André Green and Otto Kernberg.
- 1975
Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism
Kernberg's first book gathers and reworks the papers he wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely out of his clinical and research work at the Menninger Foundation, into a single account of the patients who fall between the neuroses and the psychoses. Its first part argues that these patients have a borderline personality organization: a specific and stable structure, not a passing state on the way to psychosis. Behind a wide range of symptoms (diffuse anxiety, multiple phobias, perverse and impulsive trends, addictions, lower-level character disorders) Kernberg finds a common structure: nonspecific ego weakness, a pull toward primary-process thinking, primitive defences centred on splitting, and a pathology of internalized object relations that leaves the patient without an integrated identity, while reality testing is largely kept. He traces it to excessive early aggression, especially oral aggression, which prevents the loving and hating images of self and others from being brought together and draws pregenital conflicts into the oedipal ones. The book draws practical conclusions from this. It weighs the factors that make the prognosis better or worse, and sets out an expressive psychoanalytic psychotherapy for most of these patients: the primitive defences are confronted and interpreted as they emerge in the transference, the negative transference is taken up in the here and now, and acting out is limited, with the patient's life structured from outside when necessary. A chapter on countertransference argues for treating the analyst's whole emotional response as a source of knowledge about such patients. The second half turns to the narcissistic personality, which Kernberg sees as a special form of the same organization, its surface held steady by a pathological grandiose self that fuses the real self, the ideal self and the ideal object and wards off envy, rage and dependence. He distinguishes it from normal adult and normal infantile narcissism, describes its idealizing and devaluing transferences, recommends psychoanalysis proper with systematic interpretation of the grandiose self for those who do not function at an overt borderline level, and sets his views against Heinz Kohut's.
- 1983
Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism
A collection of André Green's essays on narcissism, some previously unpublished, by an author who had worked on the subject since 1963. Freud introduced narcissism in 1914 and let it recede after the revisions of around 1920: the opposition of life and death drives, the second topography and a new theory of anxiety. Green ties narcissism to that last drive theory. Beside the positive narcissism of the life drives, which seeks the unity of the ego, he postulates a death narcissism, which he calls negative narcissism, aiming at the ego's abolition in an aspiration towards zero. A first part treats the theory of narcissism (the same, the other and the neutral; primary narcissism as structure or state; anxiety), a second describes clinical forms (moral narcissism, the neutral gender, the dead mother), and a postface on the ego as mortal and immortal ends on the figure of a Janus-faced Narcissus. Published by Éditions de Minuit in 1983, it appeared in Andrew Weller's English translation as Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism (2001).
- 1995
Against Lacanism: An Interview With André Green
A long conversation between André Green and Sergio Benvenuto, recorded in Green's Paris office in May 1994 and published in English translation in the Journal of European Psychoanalysis (no. 2, 1995–96; reprinted in no. 24, 2007). Green retraces his relations with Lacan: their meeting at the Sainte-Anne hospital in 1953, his attendance at the Seminar from 1960, and the break of 1967, which he ties to a long paper of his on narcissism that did not cite Lacan. Alongside this he recalls discovering British psychoanalysis at the Edinburgh congress of 1961. Against Benvenuto's repeated objections, he argues that Lacan's theory cannot be separated from his practice: the short, arbitrarily ended session, the exploitation of patients' masochism and the cult of the master show a turn away from clinical experience toward a logic of the pure signifier. He also asks why Lacan won over French intellectuals, to whom he offered a Freud without drive, sexuality or childhood, and discusses Dolto, Derrida, Ricoeur and the reception of psychoanalysis among philosophers.
See also
References
- The Analysis of the Self1971Evidence for a relation
- Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism1975Evidence for a relation
- Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities1970Evidence for a relation
- New Ways in Psychoanalysis1939Evidence for a relation
- Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis1945Evidence for a relation
- The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil1964Evidence for a relation
- Against Lacanism: An Interview With André Green1995Evidence for a relation
- Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism1983Evidence for a relation
- A Clinical Approach to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Life and Death Instincts: An Investigation into the Aggressive Aspects of Narcissism1971Evidence for a relation
- On the Psychopathology of Narcissism: A Clinical Approach1964Evidence for a relation
- On Narcissism: An Introduction1914Evidence for a relation
- The Dual Orientation of Narcissism1921Evidence for a relation