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A main psychological developmental process, from birth onwards, consists in the gradual abandonment of our original narcissistic omnipotence. Babies, who are at first entirely dependent on those caring for them, feel overwhelmed by primary needs such as being fed, being kept warm, being touched and hugged, being looked at and talked to. These needs have to be met without delay, as tolerance of frustration is at this early stage minimal.
As, inevitably, the environment will fail to always provide immediately or satisfactorily what is required, babies will have to find ways of coping with their disappointments for instance, by “hallucinating” the feeding breast or replacing it autoerotically by sucking their fingers. Such solutions, however, have only limited effectiveness and only serve as stop-gaps before the child's needs are properly satisfied. Gradually, the original sense of narcissism (His Majesty the Baby at the Centre of the World) and of omnipotence (I Can Get Everything I Want, Whenever I Want It) give way to a more realistic attitude that takes into account the limitations of the environment.
Central to this process is a capacity to mourn one's losses - without denying the suffering involved, but also without being overwhelmed by it. In parallel with the development of a sense of time, from an original omnipresent to a temporality that includes a first reservoir of memories and a tolerable future of expectations, children, and later adolescents and adults, become progressively independent from others and approach their life vicissitudes in ways more reliant on reality and less on grandiose fantasies of narcissistic omnipotence. This, at least, is what tends to happen in so-called normal human development.
However, two main considerations must be made here: the first is that, even in such normal cases, healthy narcissistic feelings (for instance, valuing oneself enough to set ambitious goals and to achieve them) and “limited omnipotent” (!) fantasies persist i