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Emanating from Freud’s (1914) theory of narcissism and developed within a particular cultural context, descriptions of a person’s experience using the concepts of specialness, grandiosity, omnipotence, entitlement, and indulgence have carried, connotatively and denotatively, a pejorative cast. Within Freud’s theoretical framework, these concepts depict the assumed initial experience of a baby in a primary narcissistic phase of development. The baby/child is viewed as reluctant to give up this Garden-of-Eden experience of grandiosity, omnipotence, indulgence, entitlement, and specialness. Over time these infantile experiences, wishes, and fantasies need, gradually, to be renounced to grow up and deal with reality. In terms of drive theory, the libido is initially directed toward the ego (or one’s self) and developmentally must be redirected from one’s ego toward others, demarcating a primary developmental thrust to become object related. Any feeling or wished-for sense of specialness, grandiosity, omnipotence, or entitlement is either a yet-to-be-renounced infantile wish (primary narcissism) or a defensive retreat in the face of frustrations in the object world (secondary narcissism).
Contemporary theories of narcissism and development within a changing sociocultural context are transforming these concepts within both psychoanalysis and our culture at large. Kohut (1971, 1977, 1984) provided an alternative theory of narcissism. Initially, he (1971) proposed narcissism to be a line of self-development, with its own libido, distinct and complementary to Freud’s object relational developmental line. Subsequently, eschewing drive and energy theory, Kohut (1977, 1984) evolved his theory into the psychology of the self in which the development of the self within its selfobject matrices serves as the central developmental scenario within which object relational development takes place. Within his theory, grandiosity (the grandiose self) is part of the original state, similar