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Narrow empiricist restrictions on the conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis, limiting theoretical terms to abstractive accounts of clinical data, may in effect hamper the development of psychoanalytic theory, and delay the eventual closure with neurology (E. Wilson, Jr., 1973).
This article is intended to introduce a series of papers concerned with an interdisciplinary investigation of the metapsychological concepts developed by and used in psychoanalysis. Hence, the paper is thought to life metapsychological concepts to an interdisciplinary level as high as possible. In this attempt we are guided by Worden's (1972) conviction that 'carrying psychoanalytic information vigorously into the context of all the neurosciences would bring sophisticated data on the mind into juxtaposition with rapidly developing new informations about the brain'—or, as we would prefer to formulate, into juxtaposition with recent theories of general biology. 'The potential in such a move is not to improve psychoanalysis, but to facilitate another step forward in man's long attempt to understand himself.'
Why we have chosen the concept of narcissism to start our approach will, as we hope, have become obvious at the end of the paper. Pulver (1970) concludes that the unifying concept of all phenomena currently called narcissistic 'seems to be a focus on some aspect of the self on any one of a number of levels'. However, he emphasizes that it is important to keep in mind 'the distinction between the use of the word narcissism to mean the metapsychological concept and its use to refer to specific psychic phenomena, two very different levels of description'. Therefore, 'it is not uncommon to find two authors differing about narcissism on apparently theoretical grounds.' It is the purpose of this paper to take up the challenge hidden in Pulver's paper, and to try to approach an interdisciplinary reformulation and unification of the concept of narcissism.
With its increasing importance the term