History of narcissism

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The concept of excessive selfishness has been recognized throughout history. The term "narcissism" is derived from the Greek mythology of Narcissus, but was only coined at the close of the nineteenth century.

Contents

Since then, narcissism has become a household word; in analytic literature, given the great preoccupation with the subject, the term is used more than almost any other'. [1]

The meaning of narcissism has changed over time. Today narcissism "refers to an interest in or concern with the self along a broad continuum, from healthy to pathological ... including such concepts as self-esteem, self-system, and self-representation, and true or false self". [2]

Before Freud

In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a handsome youth who rejected the desperate advances of the nymph Echo. As punishment, he was doomed to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Unable to consummate his love, Narcissus 'lay gazing enraptured into the pool, hour after hour', [3] and finally pined away, changing into a flower that bears his name, the narcissus.

The story was retold in Latin by Ovid in his Metamorphoses , in which form it would have great influence on medieval and Renaissance culture. 'Ovid's tale of Echo and Narcissus...weaves in and out of most of the English examples of the Ovidian narrative poem'; [4] and 'allusions to the story of Narcissus...play a large part in the poetics of the Sonnets' [5] of Shakespeare. Here the term used was 'self-love...Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel'. [6] Francis Bacon used the same term: 'it is the nature of extreme self-lovers, as they will set a house on fire, and it were but to roast their eggs...those that (as Cicero says of Pompey) are sui amantes sine rivali...lovers of themselves without rivals'. [7]

At the start of the nineteenth century Byron used the same term, describing how, "Self-love for ever creeps out, like a snake, to sting anything which happens...to stumble on it." [8] while Baudelaire wrote of 'as vigorous a growth in the heart of natural man as self-love', as well as of those who 'like Narcissuses of fat-headedness...are contemplating the crowd, as though it were a river, offering them their own image'. [9]

By mid-century, however, egotism was perhaps an equally common expression for self-absorption: 'egotists...made acutely conscious of a self, by the torture in which it dwells' [10] —though still with 'curious suggestions of the Narcissus legend' [11] in the background.

At the century's close, the term as we now know it finally emerged, with Havelock Ellis, the English sexologist, writing a short paper in 1927 on its coining, in which he 'argued that the priority should in fact be divided between himself and Paul Näcke, explaining that the term "narcissus-like" had been used by him in 1898 as a description of a psychological attitude, and that Näcke in 1899 had introduced the term Narcismus to describe a sexual perversion'. [12]

In 1911 Otto Rank published the first psychoanalytical paper specifically concerned with narcissism, linking it to vanity and self-admiration. [13]

Freud

Sigmund Freud, by Max Halberstadt, 1914 Sigmund Freud, by Max Halberstadt (cropped).jpg
Sigmund Freud, by Max Halberstadt, 1914

Ernest Jones tells us that 'at a meeting of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society on 10 November 1909 Freud had declared that narcissism was a necessary intermediate stage between auto-erotism and object-love'. [14] The following year in his "Leonardo" he described publicly for the first time how 'the growing youngster...finds his love objects on the path of narcissism, since Greek myths call a youth Narcissus, whom nothing pleased so much as his own mirror image'. [15] Although Freud only published a single paper exclusively devoted to narcissism called On Narcissism: An Introduction, [16] in 1914, 'Narcissism was soon to take a central place in his thinking'. [17]

Primary narcissism

Freud suggested that exclusive self-love might not be as abnormal as previously thought and might even be a common component in the human psyche. He argued that narcissism "is the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation," or, more simply, the desire and energy that drives one’s instinct to survive. He referred to this as primary narcissism. [16]

According to Freud, people are born without a sense of themselves as individuals, or ego. The ego develops during infancy and the early part of childhood, only when the outside world, usually in the form of parental controls and expectations, intrudes upon primary narcissism, teaching the individual about the nature and standards of his social environment from which he can form the ideal ego , an image of the perfect self towards which the ego should aspire. 'As it evolved, the ego distanced itself from primary narcissism, formed an ego-ideal, and proceeded to cathect objects'. [18]

Freud regarded all libidinous drives as fundamentally sexual and suggested that ego libido (libido directed inwards to the self) cannot always be clearly distinguished from object-libido (libido directed to persons or objects outside oneself).

An aspect frequently associated with primary narcissism appears in an earlier essay, 'Totem and Taboo,' [19] in which Freud describes his observations of children and primitive people. What he observed was called magical thinking, such as the belief that a person can impact reality by wishing or willpower. It demonstrates a belief in the self as powerful and able to change external realities, which Freud believed was part of normal human development.

Secondary narcissism

According to Freud, secondary narcissism occurs when the libido withdraws from objects outside the self, above all the mother, producing a relationship to social reality that includes the potential for megalomania. 'This megalomania has no doubt come into being at the expense of object-libido....This leads us to look upon the narcissism which arises through the drawing on of object-cathexes as a secondary one, superimposed upon a primary narcissism'. [20] For Freud, while both primary and secondary narcissism emerge in normal human development, problems in the transition from one to the other can lead to pathological narcissistic disorders in adulthood.

"This state of secondary narcissism constituted object relations of the narcissistic type", according to Freud, something he went on to explore further in Mourning and Melancholia —considered one of Freud's most profound contributions to object relations theory, and constituting the overall principles of object relations and narcissism as concepts. [21]

Narcissism, relationships and self-worth

According to Freud, to care for someone is to convert ego-libido into object-libido by giving some self-love to another person, which leaves less ego-libido available for primary narcissism and protecting and nurturing the self. When that affection is returned so is the libido, thus restoring primary narcissism and self-worth. Any failure to achieve, or disruption of, this balance causes psychological disturbances. In such a case, primary narcissism can be restored only by withdrawing object-libido (also called object-love) to replenish ego-libido.

According to Freud, as a child grows, and his ego develops, he is constantly giving of his self-love to people and objects, the first of which is usually his mother. This diminished self-love should be replenished by the affection and caring returned to him.

Later psychoanalysts

Karen Horney

Karen Horney Karen Horney 1938.jpg
Karen Horney

Karen Horney saw narcissism quite differently from Freud, Kohut and other mainstream psychoanalytic theorists in that she did not posit a primary narcissism but saw the narcissistic personality as the product of a certain kind of early environment acting on a certain kind of temperament. For her, narcissistic needs and tendencies are not inherent in human nature.

Narcissism is different from Horney's other major defensive strategies or solutions in that it is not compensatory. Self-idealization is compensatory in her theory, but it differs from narcissism. All the defensive strategies involve self-idealization, but in the narcissistic solution it tends to be the product of indulgence rather than of deprivation. The narcissist's self-esteem is not strong, however, because it is not based on genuine accomplishments. [22]

Heinz Kohut

Heinz Kohut explored further the implications of Freud's perception of narcissism. He maintained that a child will tend to fantasize about having a grandiose self and ideal parents. He claimed that deep down, all people retain a belief in their own perfection and the perfection of anything they are part of. As a person matures, grandiosity gives way to self-esteem, and the idealization of the parent becomes the framework for core values. It is when psychological trauma disrupts this process that the most primitive and narcissistic version of the self remains unchanged. Kohut called such conditions narcissistic personality disorder, 'in which the merging with and detaching from an archaic self-object play the central role...narcissistic union with the idealized self-object'. [23]

Kohut suggested narcissism as part of a stage in normal development, in which caregivers provide a strong and protective presence with which the child can identify that reinforces the child's growing sense of self by mirroring his good qualities. If the caregivers fail to provide adequately for their child, the child grows up with a brittle and flawed sense of self. [24] 'Kohut's innovative pronouncement...became a veritable manifesto in the United States....The age of "normal narcissism" had arrived' [25]

Kohut also saw beyond the negative and pathological aspects of narcissism, believing it is a component in the development of resilience, ideals and ambition once it has been transformed by life experiences or analysis [26] —though critics objected that his theory of how 'we become attached to ideals and values, instead of to our own archaic selves...fits the individual who escapes from bad inner negativity into idealized objects outside'. [27]

Otto Kernberg

Otto F. Kernberg. Otto F. Kernberg, MD.jpg
Otto F. Kernberg.

Otto Kernberg uses the term narcissism to refer to the role of self in the regulation of self-esteem.

He believed normal, infantile narcissism depends on the affirmation of others and the acquisition of desirable and appealing objects, which should later develop into healthy, mature self-esteem. This healthy narcissism depends upon an integrated sense of self that incorporates images of the internalized affirmation of those close to the person and is regulated by the super ego and ego ideal, internal mental structures that assure the person of his worth and that he deserves his own respect.

The failure of infantile narcissism to develop in this healthy adult form becomes a pathology. [28]

Object relations theory

'Melanie Klein's...descriptions of infantile omnipotence and megalomania provided important insights for the clinical understanding of narcissistic states. In 1963, writing on the psychopathology of narcissism, Herbert Rosenfeld was especially concerned to arrive at a better definition of object-relationships and their attendant defense mechanisms in narcissism'. [29]

D. W. Winnicott's 'brilliant observations of the mother-child couple [also] throw considerable light on primary narcissism, which in the young child can be viewed as the extension of the mother's narcissism. [29]

Lacan

Lacan—building on Freud's dictum that 'all narcissistic impulses operate from the ego and have their permanent seat in the ego' [30] —used his own concept of the mirror stage to explore the narcissistic ego in terms of 'the essential structure it derives from its reference to the specular image...narcissism', [31] in his battle against ego psychology.

'Béla Grunberger drew attention to a double orientation of narcissism—as both a need for self-affirmation and a tendency to restore permanent dependency. The active presence of narcissism throughout life led Grunberger to suggest treating it as an autonomous factor (1971)'. [29]

'Under the evocative title Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism (1983), André Green clarified the conflict surrounding the object of narcissism (whether a fantasy object or a real object) in its relationship to the ego. For Green, it was because narcissism affords the ego a certain degree of independence...that a lethal kind of narcissism must be considered, for the object is destroyed at the beginning of this process'; while in a further analysis, 'Green evokes physical narcissism, intellectual narcissism, and moral narcissism' [29] —a set of divisions sometimes simplified into that between 'somatic narcissists who are obsessed with the body...[&] cerebral narcissists—people who build up their sense of magnificence out of an innate feeling of intellectual superiority'. [32]

Psychiatry

Diagnosis

Narcissistic personality disorder is a condition defined in DSM-5, made by the American Psychiatric Association. [33]

The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th Edition (ICD-10), of the World Health Organization (WHO), lists narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) under the category of "Other specific personality disorders". [34] The ICD-11, due to be adopted on 1 January 2022, will merge all personality disorders into one, which can be coded as "Mild", "Moderate" or "Severe". [35]

Online usage

The success of the term narcissism has led to something of an "inflation of meanings....Some in fact exploited it as a handy term of abuse for modern culture or as a loose synonym for bloated self-esteem." [36]

See also

Related Research Articles

In psychoanalytic theory, the id, ego, and super-ego are three distinct, interacting agents in the psychic apparatus, defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche. The three agents are theoretical constructs that Freud employed to describe the basic structure of mental life as it was encountered in psychoanalytic practice. Freud himself used the German terms das Es, Ich, and Über-Ich, which literally translate as "the it", "I", and "over-I". The Latin terms id, ego and super-ego were chosen by his original translators and have remained in use.

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder characterized by a life-long pattern of exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration and a delusional sense of status, diminished ability or unwillingness to empathize with others' feelings, and interpersonally exploitative behavior. Narcissistic personality disorder is one of the sub-types of the broader category known as personality disorders. It is often comorbid with other mental disorders and associated with significant functional impairment and psychosocial disability.

A love–hate relationship is an interpersonal relationship involving simultaneous or alternating emotions of love and hate—something particularly common when emotions are intense. The term is used frequently in psychology, popular writing and journalism. It can be applied to relationships with inanimate objects, or even concepts, as well as those of a romantic nature or between siblings and parents/children.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Otto F. Kernberg</span>

Otto Friedmann Kernberg is an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is most widely known for his psychoanalytic theories on borderline personality organization and narcissistic pathology. In addition, his work has been central in integrating postwar ego psychology with Kleinian and other object relations perspectives. His integrative writings were central to the development of modern object relations, a theory of mind that is perhaps the theory most widely accepted among modern psychoanalysts.

<i>On Narcissism</i> 1914 essay by Sigmund Freud

On Narcissism is a 1914 essay by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis.

Self psychology, a modern psychoanalytic theory and its clinical applications, was conceived by Heinz Kohut in Chicago in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and is still developing as a contemporary form of psychoanalytic treatment. In self psychology, the effort is made to understand individuals from within their subjective experience via vicarious introspection, basing interpretations on the understanding of the self as the central agency of the human psyche. Essential to understanding self psychology are the concepts of empathy, selfobject, mirroring, idealising, alter ego/twinship and the tripolar self. Though self psychology also recognizes certain drives, conflicts, and complexes present in Freudian psychodynamic theory, these are understood within a different framework. Self psychology was seen as a major break from traditional psychoanalysis and is considered the beginnings of the relational approach to psychoanalysis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Narcissism</span> Personality trait of self-love of a perceived perfect self

Narcissism is a self-centered personality style characterized as having an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one's own needs, often at the expense of others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ego ideal</span> Freudian concept

In Freudian psychoanalysis, the ego ideal is the inner image of oneself as one wants to become. It consists of "the individual's conscious and unconscious images of what he would like to be, patterned after certain people whom ... he regards as ideal."

Narcissistic injury, also known as narcissistic wound or wounded ego, is emotional trauma that overwhelms an individual's defense mechanisms and devastates their pride and self-worth. In some cases, the shame or disgrace is so significant that the individual can never again truly feel good about who they are. This sometimes referred to as a "narcissistic scar".

Splitting is the failure in a person's thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both perceived positive and negative qualities of something into a cohesive, realistic whole. It is a common defense mechanism wherein the individual tends to think in extremes. This kind of dichotomous interpretation is contrasted by an acknowledgement of certain nuances known as "shades of gray".

Psychoanalytic theory posits that an individual unable to integrate difficult feelings mobilizes specific defenses to overcome these feelings, which the individual perceives to be unbearable. The defense that effects this process is called splitting. Splitting is the tendency to view events or people as either all bad or all good. When viewing people as all good, the individual is said to be using the defense mechanism idealization: a mental mechanism in which the person attributes exaggeratedly positive qualities to the self or others. When viewing people as all bad, the individual employs devaluation: attributing exaggeratedly negative qualities to the self or others.

In psychoanalytic theory, narcissistic supply is a pathological or excessive need for attention or admiration from codependents, or such a need in the orally fixated, that does not take into account the feelings, opinions or preferences of other people.

Healthy narcissism is a positive sense of self that is in alignment with the greater good. The concept of healthy narcissism was first coined by Paul Federn and gained prominence in the 1970s through the research of Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg. It developed slowly out of the psychoanalytic tradition, and became popular in the late twentieth century.

The true self and the false self are a psychological dualism conceptualized by English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Winnicott used "true self" to denote a sense of self based on spontaneous authentic experience and a feeling of being alive, having a real self with little to no contradiction. "False self", by contrast, denotes a sense of self created as a defensive façade, which in extreme cases can leave an individual lacking spontaneity and feeling dead and empty behind an inconsistent and incompetent appearance of being real, such as in narcissism.

Narcissistic mortification is "the primitive terror of self dissolution, triggered by the sudden exposure of one's sense of a defective self ... it is death by embarrassment". Narcissistic mortification is a term first used by Sigmund Freud in his last book, Moses and Monotheism, with respect to early injuries to the ego/self. The concept has been widely employed in ego psychology and also contributed to the roots of self psychology.

In psychology, narcissistic withdrawal is a stage in narcissism and a narcissistic defense characterized by "turning away from parental figures, and by the fantasy that essential needs can be satisfied by the individual alone". In adulthood, it is more likely to be an ego defense with repressed origins. Individuals feel obliged to withdraw from any relationship that threatens to be more than short-term, avoiding the risk of narcissistic injury, and will instead retreat into a comfort zone. The idea was first described by Melanie Klein in her psychoanalytic research on stages of narcissism in children.

Narcissistic defenses are those processes whereby the idealized aspects of the self are preserved, and its limitations denied. They tend to be rigid and totalistic. They are often driven by feelings of shame and guilt, conscious or unconscious.

Narcissistic elation or narcissistic coenaesthetic expansion were terms used by Hungarian psychoanalyst Béla Grunberger to highlight 'the narcissistic situation of the primal self in narcissistic union with the mother'.

Narcissistic neurosis is a term introduced by Sigmund Freud to distinguish the class of neuroses characterised by their lack of object relations and their fixation upon the early stage of libidinal narcissism. The term is less current in contemporary psychoanalysis, but still a focus for analytic controversy.

The Analysis of the Self is the first monograph by the Austrian born American psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut. His biographer Charles B. Strozier has called it a masterpiece.

References

  1. ↑ Neville Symington, Narcissism: A New Theory (London 1990) p. 5
  2. ↑ Ronningstam, Ed., Elsa (2000). Disorders of Narcissism: Diagnostic, Clinical, and Empirical Implications. Jason Aronson. p. 53. ISBN   978-0765702593.
  3. ↑ Robert Graves, in Symington, p. 7
  4. ↑ Colin Burrow ed., William Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford 2002) p. 19
  5. ↑ Burrow ed., p. 127
  6. ↑ Burrow ed., pp. 387 and 383
  7. ↑ Francis Bacon, The Essays (Penguin 1985) p. 131
  8. ↑ Quoted in Simon Crompton, All about Me (London 2007) p. 87
  9. ↑ Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (Penguin) p. 49 and p. 109
  10. ↑ Malcolm Cowley ed., The Portable Hawthorne <Penguin 1978) p. 167
  11. ↑ Cowley ed., "Editor's Introduction" p. 9
  12. ↑ Editor Note, Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology (PFL 11) p. 65n1
  13. ↑ Millon, Theodore, Personality Disorders in Modern Life, 2004
  14. ↑ Angela Richards, "Editor's Note", Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology (PFL 110 pp. 61–62
  15. ↑ Quoted in Peter Gay, Freud; A Life for Our Time (London 1989) p. 272
  16. 1 2 Freud, Sigmund, On Narcissism: An Introduction, 1914
  17. ↑ Gay, p. 272
  18. ↑ Michel Vincent, "Narcissism, Primary"
  19. ↑ Freud, Sigmund, Totem and Taboo , 1913
  20. ↑ Freud, On Metapsychology p. 67
  21. ↑ James S. Grotstein, "Foreword", Symington, pp. x–xi
  22. ↑ Paris, Bernard J, Personality and Personal Growth, edited by Robert Frager and James Fadiman, 1998
  23. ↑ Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (Madison 1971) p. 282 and pp. 97-8
  24. ↑ Kohut, Heinz, The Analysis of the Self, 1971
  25. ↑ James L. Grotstein, "Foreword", in Symington, p. xiii
  26. ↑ Kohut, Heinz, Forms and Transformations of Narcissism, 1966
  27. ↑ Symington, pp. 108-9
  28. ↑ Siniscalco, Raffaele Narcissism. The American Contribution – A Conversation with Otto Kernberg Journal of European Psychoanalysis, Number 12–13, Winter–Fall 2001
  29. 1 2 3 4 Michel Vincent, "Narcissism"
  30. ↑ Sigmund Freud, Case Studies II (PFL 9) p. 353
  31. ↑ Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (London 1994) p. 74
  32. ↑ Crompton, pp. 28-9
  33. ↑ Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5 (5th ed.). Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing. 2013. pp.  645, 669–72. ISBN   9780890425558.
  34. ↑ WHO (2010) ICD-10: Specific Personality Disorders
  35. ↑ "6D10 Personality disorder". WHO. Retrieved 17 May 2021.
  36. ↑ Gay, p. 340

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