To the Editor

Dr. van den Daele and the contributors to the recent “Symposium on Narcissism” in Vol. 41, No. 4 are to be commended for their helpful elucidations of narcissism, perceived more and more as the disorder of our age. How it has become so was explored by Dr. Rendon in his excellent paper.

Nevertheless, I have reservations, as did Horney, about the real usefulness of the term “narcissism,” believing it to be overextended. Horney hesitated over using the term altogether because in the classical psychoanalytic literature “it includes rather indiscriminately every kind of self-inflation, egocentricity, anxious concern with one's welfare, and withdrawal from others.… Self-idealization occurs in all neuroses and represents an attempt to solve early inner conflicts. Narcissism, on the other hand, is one of several solutions of the conflict between expansive and self-effacing drives” (Neurosis and Human Growth).

Horney's definition of narcissism is consistent, not only with popular usage, but the DSM-III criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. By this definition, narcissism refers to buoyant self-confidence and self-admiration that is pathologically self-centered. For Horney, it is an attempt at reconciling inner conflict through identifying with an unconscious idealized image. As with the perspectives of Kohut and Kernberg, for Horney the narcissist's grandiosity is both fragile as a conscious experience and dependent on predictable patterns of externalization (such as Kohut's “idealizing” and “mirroring transference“).

I regretted that none of the papers presented in the symposium underscored the distinction between Horney's usage of “narcissism” and the usages employed by the other workers. These distinctions arise largely from their metapsychological orientations. In his very illuminating paper, Dr. van den Daele, for example, sought to underscore the parallels between Horney's idealized image and Kohut's grandiose self. From this view, Horney's theoretical frame orga