It is fascinating to study the evolution of the concept of narcissism and narcissistic pathology from the phenomenological and experience-near mythological descriptions of the Greeks to the psychodynamic and experience-distant conflict interpretations used to explain the condition by Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysts. Built into this situation is the eventual divergence of Kohut’s contributions and his psychology of the self from the mainstream of Freudian conflict interpretation. (76 pp.)
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Freud and his Followers
We turn now to some of the attempts made by psychoanalysts to understand the phenomena of narcissism in depth.
Melanie Klein and Early Object Relation Theory
Klein recognized that, from birth, powerful innate aggressive drives posed fundamental obstacles to life. She understood and took seriously Freud’s theory that, with the individual as with the species, there is a brief flicker of life and then ultimately extinction and destruction as the death instinct prevails and all organic matter returns to the inorganic form. She attempted to develop a metapsychology to explain that which Freud never made clear: how do the life instincts fight this delaying action? In Klein’s view, this was accomplished by deflecting the death instincts outward in the form of aggression (as Freud said) and then attenuating this aggression through recurring cycles of projection and introjection of “good” and “bad” objects.
