Chapter 8. Inherent Contradictions

These three theories, primary object love, primary auto-erotism, and primary narcissism, apparently contradict one another. Still, as far as I know, Freud never discussed this contradiction in writing; on the contrary, there is printed evidence as late as 1923 that he held all these three theories concurrently. This can only mean that he did not feel them to be contradictory or mutually exclusive.

Before starting out on the discussion of this puzzling problem, we ought to remind ourselves that psychoanalysis, faithfully following Freud, uses the term narcissism to describe two similar but far from identical states. One of them — called by Freud primary or absolute narcissism — is a hypothesis, not a clinical observation; we assume that in the beginning all libido is stored up in the ego — or in the id. The other, as a rule called simply narcissism, although it should properly be called secondary narcissism, can be observed clinically; it denotes a state in which some, or even a very large part, of the libido that has previously cathected external objects, is withdrawn from them and cathects now the ego — definitely not the id. This distinction will prove of great importance in the subsequent chapters of Part II.

Freud, without even mentioning the need for resolving or, at least, reconciling the inherent contradictions just mentioned, had attempted a synthesis of all three theories already in his Introductory Lectures, in 1917. In the Twenty-sixth Lecture, which has the sub-title, ‘Libido Theory and Narcissism’, he writes: ‘Hitherto I have had very little opportunity of talking to you about the foundations of erotic life so far as we have discovered them, and it is too late now to catch up on the omission’. This much, however, I can emphasize to you. Object-choice, the step forward in the development of the libido which is made after the narcissistic stage, can take place according to two different types: either according to the narcissistic type, where the subject's o