Response to Dr Britton's paper

Dr Britton has defined the field he finds pertinent to his clinical practice. In doing this he has added an original thought of his own that the relationship between self and ego ideal in narcissistic states displaces the relationship between ego and super ego. He describes this as a defensive response to a super ego that cannot be faced. And he asked the question: Is a narcissistic state therefore an evasion of the super ego and an alternative to seeking love from the super ego? This is one of the gems of this paper and it shifts thinking about narcissism away from its predominantly envy based roots in the Kleinian development.

Where Dr Britton's paper pushes on our understanding of this is in his careful elucidation of what the patient in such a state of mind is really fearing by elaborating the quality of the transferences, thin-skinned, thick-skinned, as-if and linking them to what is being defended against. All these transferences share the attribute that the analyst cannot be both significant and separate.

In Dr Britton's earlier work on narcissism, which had more underpinning in envy and the avoidance of the experience of envy, he described a Miltonic and a Blakean view of narcissism. In a nutshell the Miltonic view has the source of truth God, and narcissism is the devil incarnate. Milton's God was unforgiving and Satan became proud and his pride was a defence against envy. The Blakean view was that the source of truth was in our own divinity. The danger came for him from being enslaved to other men's minds. Dr Britton described this as epistemic narcissism, meaning a condition in which someone believed only in his own ideas (Belief and Imagination, Britton 1998). Jung's position might well have been closer to the Blakean; that is to a realization of the self through a process he called individuation. Can we compare Blake's ‘knower’ of ultimate truth with Jung's self? Fordham's work which eschews a state of primary narcissism leans more