You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Contemporary studies of narcissism illustrate once more the difficulty of integrating the legacy left by Freud. Freud never undertook this monumental task, but he made very clear that he never thought that the earlier ideas should be discarded in favor of the newer ones or that the former had lost their general validity; he himself continued to refine and redefine certain concepts. This attitude is not shared by those who follow him, and most theoreticians have found one approach more to their liking than another. In the United States, it is the structural hypothesis that has generated the greatest amount of literature in the recent past. While some of this work is exceedingly valuable, it has resulted in a relative neglect of a body of work of a different orientation, especially that based on drive theory. This leads to a lack of communication among analysts who are essentially concerned with the same phenomena. If, in addition to the difference in orientation, we add a language barrier, we are confronted with obstacles and resistances which are difficult to overcome and which impoverish our understanding.
It is my purpose to summarize the work of Bela Grunberger,* French psychoanalyst of note, who has concerned himself with the study of narcissism for over twenty-five years and whose book, Le Narcissisme, has just become available in English.
Grunberger takes as his point of departure the state of primary narcissism during which self and object are still fused. He postulates that the goal of all human effort is to re-experience this state. In his own words:
The experience which man seeks to repeat is his prenatal state, which is a situation from which he was driven in a traumatizing way and
* All quotations of Grunberger's work are translated by the author. English translation published by International Universities Press, 1978.
Page 239which he continually wants to re-experience. This is a fundamental tendency and represents the basis for our hypothesis on narcissism…. The f