In his work of 1921 ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, Freud, not uncharacteristically, deploys an animal metaphor to describe the form of narcissism. Arthur Schopenhauer’s ‘company of porcupines’ crowding themselves close together ‘one cold winter’s day’ proves an apt image for describing the dynamics of group identification. As soon as the porcupines […]

What can we say with certainty about the scene of Narcissus’ fate, except that Narcissus is perched by the edge of a pond staring at an image of himself? Certainly Echo knows this, and perhaps the psychoanalyst knows it too, but does Narcissus? The idea that Narcissus is unaware that the image he is staring […]

Winnicott’s famous assertion that ‘there is no such thing as a baby’, as well as his preference for the expression ‘environment-individual set up’ as opposed to the term primary narcissism, stays close to the cen­tral tenet of Balint’s position emphasising the primacy of the relation (2004, 99). However, with Winnicott, much more so than with […]

In his work of 1968, The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression, Michael Balint rejects the clinical accuracy and theoretical usefulness of Freud’s account of primary narcissism and attributes its persistence in the psychoanalytic lexicon to the erroneous belief that ‘the logically simple is necessarily the chronologically earlier’ (1968, 30). Balint’s the­ory of ‘primary love’ […]

From his earliest writings on sexuality, Freud posited a structure of repetition as integral to the experience of love. At a time at which the first beginnings of sexual satisfaction are still linked with the taking of nourishment, the sexual instinct has a sex­ual object outside the infant’s own body in the shape of his […]

It is an historical coincidence that just as Freud proposed his theory of narcissism as a treatise on love, which is of course a treatise on self-love, the old aggressive impulse was finding a new level of cultural expres­sion with the First World War. Freud’s paper, although we cannot say it is a direct response […]

Freud held that his paper ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ displayed all the signs of a difficult labour, an appropriate metaphor no doubt when we consider narcissism’s troubled adoption within the broader psychoanalytic community.3 In Chapter 1 I begin with a reading of Freud’s paper of 1914, identify some of its major difficulties, and explore some […]

I shall begin this book with a warning: there is little in the follow­ing pages to affirm the presentation of the narcissist as found in the contemporary clinical literature or among the array of self-help books dedicated to healing from narcissistic relationships. The narcissist that we shall consider here will not be reduced to a […]

My reading of Freud’s ‘Little Hans’ case history in Chapter 2 of this book was first published as ‘Freud’s Wissbegierde and the Research Projects of Childhood: Revisiting Little Hans’ in Sitegeist: A Journal of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, No. 5, Winter 2010. This book evolved from my Doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge. From this […]