We know that … the [research] of Charles Darwin … put an end to the presumption … that man is a being different from other animals or superior to them; he himself is of animal descent being more closely related to some species and more distantly to others. The acquisitions he has subsequently made have not succeeded in effacing both in his physical structure and in his mental dispositions the evidences of his parity with them. This [discovery] was the second, the biological blow, to human narcissism [Freud, 1917, p. 140].

In these words, Freud described what he called the “three historical blows to human narcissism.” The first was the discovery