Narcissistic Fragility in the Process of Befriending the Unfamiliar

But if the elements have passions that rage as they do in our own souls, if death itself is not something spontaneous but the violent act of an evil Will, if everywhere in nature there are Beings around us of a kind that we know in our own society, then we can breathe freely, can feel at home in the uncanny and can deal by psychical means with our senseless anxiety.

—Freud (1927, pp. 16-17)

What do we know about our basic sense of belonging to our own society or to our own soul? What determines what is familiar, uncanny, or strange to us? Why is it that what is familiar to one, is strange and unpredictable to someone else? Why is the sense of well-being of one person linked to times of excitement, and that of another to periods of tranquillity? And why does change bring one person pleasure, whereas for another it means trauma and helplessness?

The psychic apparatus as we understand it today is structured by a self covered by several psychic layers, among them narcissism, ego-skin, superego, object, and object-relation. My aim in this paper is to reformulate the concept of narcissism as not simply a state or trait but as the “primary agency” (Grunberger, 1971) that contains and modulates excitations, functioning as an “immune psychic envelope” (hereafter, the “narcissistic envelope”) of the familiar self (and any part of the self that forms the whole). I include in the notion of the familiar self those bodily experiences and sensations that have been integrated through the processing of perceptions into a unique set of familiar, narcissism preserving, self-codes. According to this perspective, the main narcissistic function is recognition, i.e., deciphering and drawing out the familiar (self-like) out of chaos in order to preserve the constancy and continuity of the self-codes so that “we can breathe freely, can feel at home” (Freud, 1927, p. 17).

Different critical psychic concepts have at various times been described