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NARCISSISM HAS BECOME A CENTRAL CONCEPT in contemporary psychoanalytic inquiry, used increasingly by post-Freudians to clinically define the fundamental human problems of singularity, issues of self, individuality, and individuation; relatedness, questions of love, union, dependency, and community; significance, the core concerns of self-esteem and self-love or, more generally, of human value; and limitation, questions of human ideals, perfectibility and finiteness. This burgeoning interest in narcissism reflects a paradigmatic turn in psychoanalysis—from drive to interpersonal to self theory and from an impersonal to interpersonal to personal model of analytic inquiry—evidenced in a growing awareness of the clinical centrality of interpersonal (object) relations and problems of the self and a growing awareness of the therapeutic efficacy of coparticipatory forms of clinical inquiry.
The unifying thematic of narcissism, as a contemporary psychoanalytic concept is, most broadly, the self. The modern study of narcissism and the self has, in recent years, been associated primarily with the Self-psychology of Kohut and the object relations