Narcissism and the Sense of Self

The ego has been given continually increasing emphasis in psychoanalytic theory, to the point where ego psychology is today perhaps of equal importance to instinct psychology, and seems likely to continue to grow in importance. The concept of the self, however, which played an important role in academic psychology in the nineteenth century, was essentially ignored by both psychology and psychoanalysis during the first half of this century, and has only recently begun to regain some of its previous status. In this paper I hope to outline some ways in which the concept of the self has been reintroduced into psychoanalytic theory in recent years particularly in connection with attempts to redefine the meaning of narcissism and to suggest one way in which the idea of a self may provide a bridge between psychoanalysis and existential analysis.

Helen Merrill Lynd has said that “the terms ‘self’ and ‘ego’ slide around like the shiny balls under glass in a child's puzzle, which no matter how the board is tilted, refuse to stay lodged in any particular hollows.” This has been nowhere more true than in psychoanalytic writings. In his early work Freud often used “ego” interchangeably with “self.” Later, “ego” came to have a much narrower meaning, which Fingarette has described4 as a “hypothesized metapsychological structure, consisting of a set of dispositions, specifically the dispositions to perceptual, thinking, evaluative, integrative and executive behavior of the person. The ego is therefore not only to be distinguished from id, superego and reality environment, it is to be distinguished from