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This article is the fourth in a series appearing in the British Journal of Psychotherapy on the theoretical concept of narcissism. Earlier papers explored the concept in the work of Freud, Klein, Kohut and Fairbairn, and in her contribution Ledermann discusses the views she has developed as a Jungian analyst. While her primary purpose is to illustrate how the Jungian theory of archetypes and Fordham's extension of that theory to the deintegrative/reintegrative process enables us to understand narcissistic personality disorder, she also touches on, but does not develop, links between her views and those of Kohut, Kernberg, Winnicott, Tustin and Meltzer.
Ledermann considers narcissistic personality disorder to originate within a mother-infant relationship characterised by a ‘disastrously bad “fit”’. This early failure, in which the deintegrating ‘archetypal potential’ is inadequately met by the ‘appropriate piece of (external) reality’, leads to the mobilisation of primitive defences arising out of the self against pain, rage and fear, and an almost ‘impermeable barrier’ is created between the baby and the mother resulting in a ‘grossly defective oral experience’ which is subsequently abandoned in favour of premature, non-object related anality; further deintegration-reintegration is effectively halted, with the inevitable result that the inner world is ‘almost devoid of healthy objects’. Characteristically, power supplants relatedness as the drive and rationale for behaviour, leading, in some cases, to the formation of a ‘robot’ personality or, in others, to the establishment of a ‘head-ego’, comparable to Winnicott's ‘mind-psyche’. Alongside a disastrous ‘fit’ with the mother, Ledermann sees an absent or inadequate father as the second generative factor in narcissistic disorder. She discusses the consequences of such an absence by first describing, in broad terms, how the ‘archetypal parents’ are ‘mediated and humanised’ by the actual parents in normal development an