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.
Our current longitudinal study, under the leadership of Beata Rank and Marian Putnam, is focused on the investigation of the development of object relationships, and more specifically on the development of communication. In an effort to gain a more precise understanding of the deviant pattern that became so painfully obvious in one of the infants, we were stimulated to re-examine the concept of narcissism as it applies to the study of personality structure in infancy. In his paper "On Narcissism" (1914) Freud stated: "The disturbances to which a child's original narcissism is exposed, the reactions with which he seeks to protect himself from them and the paths into which he is forced in doing so—these are themes which I propose to leave on one side, as an important field of work which still awaits exploration" (p. 92). It is our hope that an examination of Daphne's early development may shed some light on the vicissitudes of narcissism in infancy.
To avoid semantic confusion of theoretical concepts, we follow Hartmann (1950b) who has differentiated the terms ego, self, and personality; I shall insert the appropriate terms in Freud's last definition of primary narcissism (1940): "… the ego [self] in which the whole available amount of libido is at first stored up. We call this state of things absolute, primary narcissism. It continues until the ego [infant] begins to cathect the presentations of objects with libido—to change narcissistic libido into object libido. Throughout life the ego [self] remains the great reservoir from which libidinal