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In this paper I want to explore some of the more recent ideas regarding the concept of narcissism as it has been described and developed since the early part of this century when three papers gave a particular focus to the subject: Freud's ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914), Jones's paper on pathological narcissistic character traits ‘The God Complex’ ), and Abraham's paper ‘A Particular Form of Neurotic Resistance against the Psychoanalytic Method’ (1919).
Even before 1914 Freud had introduced the concept of the existence of a stage in sexual development between auto-erotism and object love. The subject ‘begins by taking himself, his own body, as his love-object’. But it is his paper ‘On Narcissism’ which integrates the notion into psychoanalytic theory as a whole. He puts forward the idea that the ego does not exist from the very first as a unity and that a ‘new psychical action’ has to take place in order to bring about narcissism.
Freud maintains an opposition between a first, objectless narcissistic state and object relations. This primitive state, now called ‘Primary Narcissism’, is supposed to be characterised by the total absence of any relationship to the outside world and by a lack of differentiation between ego and id. He seems however to modify his views on this in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ where he speaks of that state as being a ‘narcissistic identification with the object’. The idea of a narcissism contemporaneous with the formation of the ego through identification with the other person - ‘Secondary Narcissism’ - was put forward in 1923 in ‘The Ego and the Id’ as ‘the libido which flows into the ego owing to the identification with the object’. The narcissism of the ego is thus a secondary one which has been withdrawn from objects. ‘Secondary Narcissism’ can be defined as the love of the self which results from introjecting and identifying with an object.
In fact Freud adopted some of Abraham's ideas in relating narcissism to libidinal cathexes, s