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The essay presents some results of an “archaeological” investigation of the origins of Freud's idea of narcissism, using material mainly from the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society and the Freud/Jung Letters. It demonstrates that an outline of Freud's concept of narcissism is operative in his thinking on the
Dr. Reitan is lecturer at the Institute of Scandinavian Studies, University of Aarhus, Denmark.
Abbreviations used in this paper are as follows: Freud/Jung Briefwechsel—BRW; Freud/Jung Letters—FJL; Protokolle der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung—PRK; Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society—MIN.
Unless otherwise indicated, translations in this essay will be by the author. I shall, as a rule, quote Strachey's translations in The Standard Edition. Although they have a certain bias, in particular where technical terms are concerned, they are the best English translation of Freudian texts available. The translation of the Minutes, however, is not always successful and sometimes wrong, and the translation of FJL too often simply misses the context. Most translations from the Protokolle and the Freud/Jung Briefwechsel will therefore be by the author. Significant deviations from the translations mentioned above will be noted in footnotes, and when needed, I shall explain them. However, I shall always render the German Trieb as “drive” rather than “instinct,” and the German word Anlehnung as a variation of “leaning on (to)” rather than “anaclisis.”
ego from its beginning, though it only starts developing in the period 1906-1908 in connection with his ideas about paranoia. A series of letters to Jung shows that the problematic concept of narcissism had been worked out a couple of years before Freud in a session of the Vienna Society in 1909 gave it a name which he on that occasion took (over) from I. Sadger.
It is furthermore shown how Freud's thinking on the origin of the ego from the beginning is haunted by a certain repression of the “preoedipal (m)other,” and that Freud's texts—at a superficial level—supplant and cover this topic by an implicit conception of a somatico-libidinal body ego, alluded to in terms of “invisibility.” A close reading of texts and exchanges from the period 1895-1920 show, however, how the repressed other returns in twists and glidings of the discourse, producing diffuse and intractable theoretical problems. On a less superficial level of the Freudian discourse we thus find a dynamic and complex—although undeveloped—concept of a narcissism á deux.