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Surely the uncanny prescience of folkways reached a pinnacle when it designated the psychiatrist as a 'head-shrinker'. Such a characterization leaves no room for doubt that the head to be shrunk must be oversize. Would the untutored populace have come to this vivid and perhaps not necessarily pejorative view of the expert who deals with disorders of the mind if it had not recognized the existence of the condition and process that we designate narcissistic?
However, we may come to the conclusion that human beings are endowed with a limitless capacity for self-love, in addition to an equal capacity for self-deception—whether it be by scientific examination of the inhabitants of the nursery, by following the machinations of politicians, through the works of poets and artists, or by introspection—that conclusion is inescapable.
The problem of narcissism and its treatment has been with us since the inception of psychoanalysis. From the very beginning, the formulations of libido in Freud's writings recognized the nuclear position of self-seeking, self-interest, self-gratification. The concept of ego libido, especially, with its emphasis on self-preservation, implied what we now try to embody in our metapsychological propositions about narcissism—stressing the regulation of self-esteem. Freud, in 1905, said,
Narcissistic or ego-libido seems to me to be the great reservoir from which the object-cathexes are sent out and into which they are withdrawn once more; the narcissistic libidinal cathexis of the ego is the original state of things, realized in earliest childhood, and is merely covered by the later extrusions of libido, but in essentials, persists behind them (p. 218).
Freud's interest in the subject was maintained throughout, through 'On Narcissism' (1914) to 'Analysis Terminable and Interminable' (1937). The problem of narcissism, he said in this last mentioned, set limits to the analysability of patients—its degree being a limiting factor to the susceptibility of