Narcissistic defences

[11] Freud also considered social narcissism as a defence mechanism, apparent when communal identifications produce irrational panics at perceived threats to 'Throne and Altar' or 'Free Markets',[12] or in English over-reaction to any questioning of the status and identity of William Shakespeare.

"[14] Fenichel also highlighted "eccentrics who have more or less succeeded in regaining the security of primary narcissism and who feel 'Nothing can happen to me'....[failing] to give up the archaic stages of repudiating displeasure and to turn toward reality".

[19] Herbert Rosenfeld looked at the role of omnipotence, combined with projective identification, as a narcissistic means of defending against awareness of separation between ego and object.

[20] In the wake of Klein, object relations theory, including particularly the American schools of Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut has explored narcissistic defences through analysis of such mechanisms as denial, projective identification, and extreme idealization.

[29] The twenty-first century has seen a distinction drawn between cerebral and somatic narcissists—the former building up their self-sense through intellectualism, the latter through an obsession with their bodies,[30] as with the woman who, in bad faith, invests her sense of freedom only in being an object of beauty for others.