You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
What is bad, what is alien to the ego and what is external are, to begin with, identical.
Together with “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914) is generally considered one of the most emblematic Freudian texts, an important turning point of psychoanalytical metapsychology, and a significant event in psychoanalytic history (e.g., Laplanche, 1970; Sandler et al., 2012). Although the concept of narcissism was already occasionally mentioned by Freud in the years prior to the publication of “On Narcissism,” the eponymous paper is, beyond any question, its locus classicus. It addresses narcissism in normal development (“falling in love”), pathology, group psychology, and introduces fundamental conceptual innovations (e.g., object-choice, identification, and the ego-ideal) which have led to a profound restructuring of theory. Apart from the fact that “On Narcissism” discloses the clinical field of narcissistic phenomena for the very first time, it is first and foremost the topos where Freud anchors narcissism as a genuine “organizing concept” in Freudian metapsychology.1
In line with Ovid's Metamorphoses (trans. 1975, III, pp. 339-355), left unmentioned by Freud, the Freudian use of “narcissism” initially seems to evoke the “classical” or even common-sense connotation of the concept—namely, extreme self-love. Simultaneously, however, narcissism is linked to the psychoanalytic understanding of the human capacity to (fall in) love and of the object-choice in general.2 In line with Freud's