Concept
Narcissistic object relations
Herbert Rosenfeld's account, in his 1964 paper on the psychopathology of narcissism, of the way narcissistic patients relate to objects: not by withdrawing from them, as Freud's model suggested, but by taking them over omnipotently. Through omnipotent introjection the object's good qualities are claimed as the self's own, and through omnipotent projection unwanted parts of the self are lodged in the object, which is then kept devalued. Self and object are not told apart, so the separateness of the object, and with it dependence on it and envy of it, is never felt. The result is a grandiose self-idealization, later called libidinal narcissism, which in analysis appears as a transference that wipes out the value of the analyst's help.
Read more- Broader concept
- Narcissism
- Introduced by
- Herbert Rosenfeld
- Key works
- 2
- Related
- Projective identification
introduced by
- Herbert Rosenfeld 1964 Rosenfeld's 1964 paper described narcissism not as withdrawal from objects but as an omnipotent relation to them, in which the object's goodness is appropriated by introjection and the self's unwanted parts are projected into it, so that separateness, dependence and envy are denied.
derives from
- Projective identification 1964 The omnipotent narcissistic object relation rests on projective and introjective identification: parts of the self are put into the object, and the object is taken in as if it were the self, so that no separate object is acknowledged.