Argument on the Theme

The theme of this year’s issue, Narcissism, tries to capture the multiples facets of its manifestations in our life and furthermore, all over the world. Nowadays, we live disturbing times, with ongoing wars and many other conflicts around us. The “Narcissism of minor differences”, inevitable in any group, the intolerance for differentiations, for other opinions and solutions, lacks of differentiations, the illusion of supremacy of a nation toward others and so on, risks to create problems that could prove very difficult to be overcome.

Freud, in his work “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), said that: A person may love: (1) According to the narcissistic type: (a) what he himself is (i.e. himself), (b) what he himself was, (c) what he himself would like to be, (d) someone who was once part of himself. (2) According to the anaclitic (attachment) type: (a) the woman who feeds him, (b) the man who protects him, (c) the succession of substitutes who take their place (p. 55).

In the narcissistic love, the love for others is turned towards him/herself into self-love, because the person believes that this love is deserved. The others are seen like “protrusions of a protoplasmic animal”, (pp. 39-40) meant to satisfy his desires. They are not seen like separate and distinctive objects, with their own desires and needs, with separate lives. They are desirable only in these conditions, otherwise, they lose their value and meaning, even if they assure and preserve the self-esteem of the narcissistic person.

Later, in 1917, in his work “Mourning and Melancholia’’, Freud wrote that: “…the shadow of the object fell upon the ego’’, (p. 201) showing the importance of the lost object for the narcissist person. It is about an inner world with the inner objects and their relations with parts of self, in which the boundaries between self and others, internal and external are erased, confused, not well differentiated. The difficulty to contain the emptiness and the loneliness of this kin