The Narcissistic Economy and its Relation to Primitive Sexuality1

THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS HAVE seen considerable research devoted to the concept of narcissistic libido and the conflictual theoretical questions to which it gives rise. These issues are derived from the attempt to conceptualize the clinical problems presented by patients who show manifest disturbance in their narcissistic economy. They have also given rise to a new clinical category: the "narcissistic personality disorder". There is little doubt that our clinical confusions and theoretical dissensions are reinforced during those periods in the history and development of psychoanalytic thought where clinical observation seems to be at odds with established psychoanalytic theory, or appears to be dealing with hitherto unencountered phenomena. The abundant literature on narcissistic problems, while it reveals widely divergent interpretations of these, nevertheless concurs in giving the impression that today's analysands are of a different calibre or indeed structure than those studied in the first half century of psychoanalytic research. The patients of today, with their "psychotic parts", their "narcissistic shields", their "grandiose selves", their "operational thinking" and their "alexithymic defects", seem strangely dissimilar from the "good classical neurotics" of the Belle Epoque.

Is there, in fact, a "new" or "modern" analysand? Or indeed a new or modern narcissism? (Hanly and Masson, 1976) Might it not be more apposite to speak in terms of a new demand made upon