History of narcissism
Today narcissism "refers to an interest in or concern with the self along a broad continuum, from healthy to pathological ... including such concepts as self-esteem, self-system, and self-representation, and true or false self".
The story was retold in Latin by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, in which form it would have great influence on medieval and Renaissance culture.
[6] Francis Bacon used the same term: 'it is the nature of extreme self-lovers, as they will set a house on fire, and it were but to roast their eggs...those that (as Cicero says of Pompey) are sui amantes sine rivali...lovers of themselves without rivals'.
[7] At the start of the nineteenth century Byron used the same term, describing how, "Self-love for ever creeps out, like a snake, to sting anything which happens...to stumble on it.
"[8] while Baudelaire wrote of 'as vigorous a growth in the heart of natural man as self-love', as well as of those who 'like Narcissuses of fat-headedness...are contemplating the crowd, as though it were a river, offering them their own image'.
[9] By mid-century, however, egotism was perhaps an equally common expression for self-absorption: 'egotists...made acutely conscious of a self, by the torture in which it dwells'[10]—though still with 'curious suggestions of the Narcissus legend'[11] in the background.
[14] The following year in his "Leonardo" he described publicly for the first time how "the growing youngster...finds his love objects on the path of narcissism, since Greek myths call a youth Narcissus, whom nothing pleased so much as his own mirror image".
[17] Freud suggested that exclusive self-love might not be as abnormal as previously thought and might even be a common component in the human psyche.
According to Freud, secondary narcissism occurs when libido is withdrawn from objects outside the self, above all the mother, producing a relationship to social reality that includes the potential for megalomania.
[19] For Freud, while both primary and secondary narcissism emerge in normal human development, problems in the transition from one to the other can lead to pathological narcissistic disorders in adulthood.
He believed normal, infantile narcissism depends on the affirmation of others and the acquisition of desirable and appealing objects, which should later develop into healthy, mature self-esteem.
[27] 'Melanie Klein's...descriptions of infantile omnipotence and megalomania provided important insights for the clinical understanding of narcissistic states.
[30] 'Béla Grunberger drew attention to a double orientation of narcissism—as both a need for self-affirmation and a tendency to restore permanent dependency.
