Genealogy of Narcissism

Wherefore he [the father creator] resolved to have a moving image of eternity […] he made this image eternal but moving according to number […] and this image we call time.

PLATO, Timaeus, 37D

The considerations in this paper focus on the genealogy of narcissism and its implications with regards to the formation of the ego and of the psychic apparatus. They are based on reflection on a few pages — four to be precise — from On Narcissism: an Introduction (Freud, 1914, 90-94), at the end of which Freud presents the ideal ego and the ego ideal as successive moments of a single psychic formation of a narcissistic nature:

This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego. The subject's narcissism makes its appearance displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of every perfection that is of value. As always where the libido is concerned, man has here again shown himself incapable of giving up a satisfaction he had once enjoyed. He is not willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood; and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal (1914., 94).

Freud is summing up his considerations here, emphasizing the loss of infantile narcissism in adult life and relating it to not perfectly explained processes of structural transformation of the ideal ego (Ideal-Ich) into the ego ideal (Ich-ideal). In taking up this secondary perspective, he throws a different light on the nature of narcissistic phenomena. In particular, by attributing the ego with the adjective «ideal» and by pointing to the ego ideal as the representative of the «narcissistic perfection of […] childhood»,