analyst narcissism
Narcissism occupies a privileged and contested place within the depth-psychology corpus, traversing terrain from Freud’s foundational libido theory through Kohut’s revisionary self-psychology to Hillman’s archetypal re-reading and Moore’s mythopoetic reclamation of the Narcissus legend. Freud established the term by borrowing from Näcke’s description of a perversion, then elevated it to a universal developmental condition from which object-love emerges without necessarily dissolving the underlying narcissistic substrate. Horney complicated Freud’s account by distinguishing narcissism from self-idealization and situating it within her broader topology of neurotic solutions. Kohut performed the most radical rehabilitation, legitimating narcissism as a developmentally healthy need for object-relatedness and grounding its pathological variants in failures of empathic attunement. Kernberg offered a competing clinical picture, reading the grandiose self primarily as a defense against archaic envy and calling for interpretive confrontation rather than empathic resonance—a debate Jacoby maps with particular clarity. Moore, drawing on Ovid, inverts the conventional reading entirely: narcissism is not excess self-love but its absence, a failure to discover the deeper pool of selfhood. Epstein triangulates the Narcissus myth through Buddhist anattā, arguing that even ‘healthy narcissism’ retains the seeds of clinging. Taken together, these voices reveal narcissism as a fulcrum for broader disputes about self-structure, developmental deficit, therapeutic technique, and the cultural pathologies of late modernity.
Narcissism is a condition in which a person does not love himself. This failure in love comes through as its opposite because the person tries so hard to find self-acceptance.
Moore inverts the common understanding by arguing that narcissism is not self-love but its failure, the compulsive striving for self-acceptance revealing the absence of genuine self-regard.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992thesis
Narcissism is not about giving this ‘I’ too much attention. If we can be instructed by the myth, narcissism is the unlucky situation in which we have yet to discover that we have a pool in us where a deeper sense of ‘I,’ another ego, may appear.
Moore reframes narcissism mythopoetically as a failure to discover the soul’s deeper dimensions rather than an excess of self-attention.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992thesis
It is probable that this narcissism is the universal original condition, out of which object-love develops later without thereby necessarily effecting a disappearance of the narcissism.
Freud establishes narcissism as the foundational libidinal condition that precedes and persists beneath all object-love, making it a structural feature of psychic life rather than merely a pathological symptom.
, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1917thesis
Kohut legitimated narcissism as a normal, developmentally healthy, and age-appropriate need for object relatedness. From Kohut’s perspective, narcissistic needs are not regarded as selfish, but reflective of a dis
Flores summarizes Kohut’s paradigm-shifting reconceptualization, which transforms narcissism from pathological self-absorption into a legitimate developmental need whose frustration, not its presence, generates disorder.
, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997thesis
Kohut is of the opinion that the grandiose self constitutes a fixation at the level of the infantile illusions of omnipotence and omniscience… Kernberg sees the grandiose self with its tendency to devalue the analyst mainly as a compensatory defence against a flood of archaic envy.
Jacoby maps the fundamental technical divergence between Kohut and Kernberg, the former prescribing empathic resonance and the latter interpretive confrontation of defense, in the clinical treatment of narcissistic grandiosity.
, The Analytic Encounter: Transference and Human Relationship, 1984thesis
The phrase pathological narcissism has developed to distinguish the debilitating emptiness and fragile self-esteem of a person such as Dorothy from the healthy narcissism of the less obviously disturbed. Yet to the Buddhist teacher, the idea of ‘healthy narcissism’ is something of an oxymoron.
Epstein employs a Buddhist perspective to challenge the psychoanalytic concept of healthy narcissism, arguing that all narcissism contains the seeds of pathological clinging to the extremes of existence and nonexistence.
, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, 1995thesis
The cure for narcissism, certainly a way of caring for the soul, is to be open to these other images. Narcissism, like the neurotic Narcissus, is hard and impenetrable. But Narcissus at the pool recovers his natural moisture.
Moore locates the therapeutic movement out of narcissism in an opening to alternative self-images encountered in the reflective pool, a shift from rigid self-identification to fluid, soulful multiplicity.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
I would be inclined to differentiate now between self-idealization and narcissism, using the latter in the sense of feeling identified with one’s idealized self.
Horney refines her earlier formulation by distinguishing narcissism from self-idealization, reserving the former for the state of actual identification with the glorified self-image rather than mere striving toward it.
, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950supporting
shame or humiliation is always the underbelly or the driving force behind a narcissistic defense… grandiosity, self-centeredness, and lack of humility are the most difficult obstacles to overcome in addiction.
Flores, drawing on Morrison, argues that narcissistic grandiosity in addicted populations is a defense against underlying shame, a dynamic recognized by AA pioneers before Kohutian theory formalized it.
, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997supporting
When we are narcissistic, we are not on solid ground (earth) or thinking clearly (air) or caught up in passion (fire). Somehow, if we follow the myth, we are dreamlike, fluid, not clearly formed, more immersed in a stream of fantasy than secure in a firm identity.
Moore reads the mythological parentage of Narcissus as a diagnostic key, characterizing narcissism as a liquid, unformed condition of fantasy that precedes stable identity and secure elemental grounding.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
The narcissistic individual is like the magician in the circus sideshow, who is constantly employing sleight of hand as a distraction to get others to pay att
Flores diagrams the structural balance between shame and narcissism, showing how narcissistic disorder emerges when grandiosity functions as a performance to distract from concealed inadequacy and shame-prone vulnerability.
, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997supporting
The story begins with rigid self-containment and ends with the flowering of a personality. Care of the soul requires us to see the myth in the symptom, to know that there is a flower waiting to break through the hard surface of narcissism.
Moore reads the metamorphosis of Narcissus into the daffodil as the alchemical image of narcissism’s own cure, the rigid symptom containing within it the seed of soulful flowering.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
the self wants to live its ‘experiment in life’ and if this does not happen the self will manifest negatively; this is what is happening in narcissism.
Samuels summarizes Schwartz-Salant’s Jungian contribution, framing narcissism as the negative manifestation of a thwarted self seeking expression, and notes that this requires a cultural as well as clinical perspective.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
Freedom from the Other switches into narcissistic self-relation, which occasions many of the psychic disturbances afflicting today’s achievement-subject. The absence of relation to the Other causes a crisis of grat
Han offers a socio-philosophical diagnosis in which the late-modern achievement-subject’s emancipation from the commanding Other collapses into narcissistic self-relation, generating the psychic disturbances characteristic of contemporary burnout culture.
, The Burnout Society, 2010supporting
Healthy parental role models provide the other necessary component of idealization that leads to healthy narcissism, which is basic to emotional health and consists of a subjective sense of well-being and confidence in ones self-worth.
Flores, drawing on Kohut and Wolfe, positions healthy narcissism as the developmental outcome of adequate parental attunement and idealization, contrasting it with the fragile self-worth underlying addictive behavior.
, Addiction as an Attachment Disorder, 2004supporting
Enamored of his own image, unable to tear himself away from his reflection in a pond, Narcissus died of languor. The power of his image was such that Narcissus gave himself over to it.
Epstein reads the Narcissus myth through a Buddhist lens, identifying the captivating completeness of the self-image as the mechanism of narcissistic entrapment and connecting it to the illusion of a substantial self.
, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, 1995supporting
an awareness of the qualities of soul—the distance Narcissus feels from his love object—may help transform narcissism into genuine love of self. Narcissism, by the way, is not always the condition of a person.
Moore extends the concept beyond the individual, arguing that buildings, artworks, and cultural objects can carry narcissism when they fail to embody genuine self-regard, thereby socializing the clinical concept.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
Narcissism as a Source of Sexual Resistances… the patients have normal feelings in so far as their l
Abraham identifies narcissism as the dynamic source of sexual resistances in patients with libidinal inhibition, situating it within the early psychoanalytic framework of incomplete development toward object-love.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
Narcissism, that absorption in oneself that is soulless and loveless, turns gradually into a deeper version of itself. It becomes a true stillness, a wonder about oneself, a meditation on one’s nature.
Moore traces the therapeutic movement within narcissism itself, showing how the symptom can deepen from empty self-absorption into genuine reflective wonder, making the pathology its own initiatory process.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
The narcissistic type, being most likely to be swayed by his imagination, shows all the above criteria in a flagrant manner. Assuming approximately equal gifts, he is the most productive among the expansive types.
Horney characterizes the narcissistic subtype of the expansive neurotic solution as imaginatively driven and highly productive but vulnerable to scattered energies and imperviousness to criticism.
, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950aside
NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER. Narcissism is frequently misunderst
Flores introduces the clinical discussion of narcissistic personality disorder within the context of Kernberg’s object-relations approach to addicted populations, emphasizing the need for full examination of interpersonal distortions.
, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997aside
psychoanalysts have developed an interest in the self and self-psychology. This arose out of clinical necessity and, particularly, work with more disturbed patients for whom the orthodox structural theory and object relations approaches alike seemed inapplicable.
Samuels contextualizes the emergence of psychoanalytic self-psychology, including its engagement with narcissism, as a clinical response to patient populations that exceeded the reach of classical structural and object-relations models.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985aside
narcissism, 13, 21, 37, 43-55
Jacoby’s index entry signals that narcissism is a sustained thematic preoccupation of the text, particularly in relation to mirror transference, omnipotence, and the work of Kohut.
, The Analytic Encounter: Transference and Human Relationship, 1984aside