The Wandering Soul: Narcissism and the Failure to Integrate the Self-Soothing Function

Pathological narcissism can be defined as a pathological personality constellation traceable to both structural and interpersonal deficits. Structurally, Freud has written that primary narcissism is the original nonpathological state of the infant in which the whole available amount of libido is at first stored in the ego. He stated (1940), “it continues until the ego begins to connect the presentations of objects with libido—to change narcissistic libido into object libido” (p. 150). In his later writings he discussed secondary narcissism as the withdrawing of the object libido back into the service of the ego (1923). Interpersonally, the “narcissistic personality” has been described in many forms including an exaggerated sense of self-importance, a belief that one's problems are unique, an almost desperate need for attention and special treatment, phantasies of special powers, feelings of entitlement and a denial of personal responsibility, lack of empathy, and unprocessed affective states of envy and rage. All of these characteristics are usually said to be defensive and help to contain, ward off, or deny a frightened, ashamed, needy, helpless, hopeless, and affectively inferior representation of self. Kernberg (1976) has stated that these patients have “an unusual degree of self-reference in their interactions with other people, a great need to be loved and admired by others, and a curious apparent contradiction between a