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In this paper I am considering and discussing a hypothesis about the roots of narcissistic personality disorder. My thoughts arose out of clinical work with two patients who showed many features of this disorder. I was greatly helped in my understanding of the origin of their psycho-pathology by Jung's theory of archetypes, the work of the London analytical psychologists and in particular Fordham's concept of the defences of the self (FORDHAM 3, 4), and by the work of some psychoanalysts.
The two patients who, in particular, gave rise to the thoughts expressed in this paper, made inordinate demands on my capacity to suffer intense denigration, loneliness and depression; at times I experienced considerable hate in the countertransference. These experiences brought home to me the indispensability of agape in the analyst's equipment, to which Lambert has drawn our attention (LAMBERT 14). Agape was reinforced in me by both patients' desperate longing for object relations and wholeness which were deeply buried beneath many defensive layers of detachment, denial, negativism and fragmentation.
This longing aroused in me the urgent wish to understand their plight so as to assist their in born archetypal striving towards becoming individuals. Jung's belief in the original potential wholeness in every person, however damaged and fragmented, gave me the courage to persevere (JUNG 7, p. 108). Although I describe these patients as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, I recognise that in clinical work we do not find syndromes in pure culture. Certain pathological features pointed to areas of infantile autism and other infantile psychoses.
Several definitions of narcissistic disorder have been put forward. Kohut, in his book The analysis of the self, expressed the view that patients with narcissistic personality disorder ‘remained fixated on archaic grandiose self configurations and/or on archaic, overestimated, narcissistically