Self-Esteem Regulation and Narcissism

In the voluminous psychoanalytic literature there are frequent references to self-esteem. During the first four decades of this century these references appeared mostly in relation to the phenomena of depression, while within the last two decades self-esteem has increasingly been referred to in connection with the elaboration of narcissism, the discussion of character pathology, and the upsurging interest in the self. But with few exceptions (Reich, 1960; Jacobson, 1975), self-esteem as a central subject has been neglected. Moreover, in spite of the common use of the term in the psychoanalytic literature (scientific and otherwise), in only a few instances is an operational definition even attempted (Bibring, 1953; Sandler, Holder, and Meers, 1963; Jacobson, 1964). Additionally noteworthy is the fact that self-esteem, or its synonym, self-regard, fails to appear as a key psychoanalytic concept in the Abstracts of the Standard Edition of Freud (National Institute of Mental Health, 1971), in the recently published indexes and bibliographies of the Standard Edition (Richards, 1974), or in the extensive review of chief concepts of psychoanalysis by Laplanche and Pontalis (1973).1

Initially, it is surprising that a theoretical and clinical phenomenon of such universal importance has not been adequately and specifically dealt with. On closer inspection, this relative neglect seems to stem from the fact