Individuals feel obliged to withdraw from any relationship that threatens to be more than short-term, avoiding the risk of narcissistic injury, and will instead retreat into a comfort zone.
[1] Sigmund Freud originally used the term narcissism to denote the process of the projection of the individual's libido from its object onto themselves; his essay "On Narcissism" saw him explore the idea through an examination of such everyday events as illness or sleep: "the condition of sleep, too, resembles illness in implying a narcissistic withdrawal of the positions of the libido on to the subject's own self".
[2] Later, in "Mourning and Melancholia", he examined how "a withdrawal of the libido [...] on a narcissistic basis" in depression could allow both a freezing and a preservation of affection: "by taking flight into the ego, love escapes extinction".
[4] For Melanie Klein, however, a more positive element came to the forefront: "frustration, which stimulates narcissistic withdrawal, is also [...] a fundamental factor in adaptation to reality".
[10] These "fantastic refuges from need are forms of emotional starvation, megalomanias and distortions of reality born of fear" that maladaptively complicate an individual's capacity to enjoy a relationship.