Freud's Theory Of Narcissism

To describe someone as narcissistic often implicates one acquires a constellation of negative character traits. The connotations are likely to be that the person is egocentric, grandiose and lacking in empathy for others (Kernberg 1975).

Freud (1914) established that narcissism is healthy during childhood, naturally, young children are quite selfish as they have not yet developed out of Piaget’s (1951) preoperational stage of egocentrism, however, when this selfish behaviour and self-centeredness continues after an adolescence hits puberty, it is then transferred into being a psychological disorder. Narcissistic psychopathology is a result of parental lack of empathy during one’s childhood development. The narcissist does not experience a

The object relations model diverges from the belief of sexual and aggressive drives and instead, focuses on the primary motivation of human contact, exclusively to the understanding of how individuals form and preserve a sense of self and how they are able to relate and internalise relationships with others. Kernberg (1976) formed a system model of psychological development which details the drive theory with the recent developments in the object relations theory in order to create an overview model into both cognition and motivation. He proposed that an infant is built up of collective physiological reactions which are described by Kernberg (1976) to be ‘inborn perceptual and behavioural patterns’. According to the object relations theory, the development of internal representations begins during infancy. Representations of the self is known as self-concept whereas representations of others is known as objects thus, a person’s internal representations of self and object and their representations on the relationships between self and object are collectively known as internal object relations. Without object relations, the infant simply cannot survive. Kernberg (1976) believes the diagnosis of the narcissistic character also depends on the quality of these internal object

From this belief, Kohut (1971) proposed the idea of self-psychology, focusing on concepts such as empathy, mirroring and idealising. His establishment of self-psychology diver ages from the orthodox Freudian reliance on sex and aggression being the drives of emotional life and in contrast, focuses on failure of a child’s sense of self to be the root of narcissism. The concepts involved within Kohut’s (1971) belief of self-psychology are deemed important as Kohut (1971) believed that without empathy and the modelling of how to cope with reality being conveyed to the infant’s from their attachment figure, it can consequence in the infant to evolve with sadistic and masochist traits such as narcissism and depression, with the level of these traits depending, again, on the consistency in which an individual received a lack of parental empathy and mirroring during early