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A brief history of ‘rave’ culture is presented. The creation of an ecstatic drug or dance induced euphoria is considered in terms of Freud's (1930) idea that drug intoxication is an inducement of a feeling of ‘oceanic oneness’. It is argued that there is tension in rave culture between pathological narcissism manifest in social withdrawal and the more normalizing process of an adolescent transitional phenomenon in the working through of self/peer identification and deidentification from parents. A key witness account from a semi-structured interview with a male rayer is contextualized with other accounts of rave drawing from popular culture. Based on the ideas of Herbert Rosenfeld, the authors propose a distinction between benign narcissism and its destructive counterpart, malignant narcissism. The context of rave as a subculture of narcissism is considered in terms of government leadership during the 1980s and the ‘trickle up trickle down’ effect of social stratum reciprocity (Habermas 1989).