WorkSigmund Freud

On Narcissism: An Introduction

Love for oneself becomes a stage everyone passes through, and the source of the ideal a person then tries to live up to.

by Sigmund Freud55 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Zur Einführung des Narzißmus
First published: 1914(aged 58)
Original language: German

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Overview

The word came from the clinic: in 1899 the psychiatrist Paul Näcke used narcissism for the perversion of a person who treats his own body as others treat a lover's. Sigmund Freud's essay of 1914 takes the word out of the catalogue of perversions and makes it a normal stage of growing up. Every infant, he argues, first loves itself, and the love it later sends out to other people is drawn from that store and can be pulled back into it. The two flows rise and fall against each other: a person in love gives so much away that the self grows poor, while someone in pain withdraws interest from the world, like Wilhelm Busch's poet with toothache, whose whole soul lives in the hollow of one tooth. Parents' devotion to a baby is their own abandoned self-love, revived and placed on the child. And the adult who can no longer admire himself sets up an ideal to admire instead, watched over by an inner observer that measures him against it — what, Freud says, we call conscience. Part of the occasion was a quarrel. Carl Gustav Jung had declared that Freud's theory of the sexual drive could not explain dementia praecox, the illness now called schizophrenia, and Freud wrote that Jung had forced him into arguments he would gladly have spared himself; a closing section takes on Alfred Adler, the Viennese doctor who had left Freud's group in June 1911, and his idea of what he called the masculine protest. The essay appeared in the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse in 1914, and in English in 1925 as "On Narcissism: An Introduction". Nine years after it, the observing agency returned in The Ego and the Id as the super-ego.

Key concepts

What is the difference between primary and secondary narcissism?

Primary narcissism is the infant's original state, in which all its love is directed at itself before anyone else is loved. Secondary narcissism comes later, when love that had gone out to other people is withdrawn and turned back on the self, as Freud sees in schizophrenia with its delusions of grandeur. The second builds on the first, which normally stays hidden in adult life.

What are ego-libido and object-libido?

They are the same sexual energy in two places: invested in oneself, or sent out to other people and things. Freud pictures the self as a tiny single-celled creature that pushes out feelers towards objects and can draw them back in. The more is spent on one side, the less remains on the other, which is why being in love seems to empty the self.

What are the two types of object choice?

Freud distinguishes loving on the model of the people who fed and protected us, the mother or the father, from loving on the model of oneself. The first he calls the anaclitic or attachment type. The second, the narcissistic type, loves what one is, what one was, what one would like to be, or someone who was once part of oneself. Everyone, he says, has both paths open.

What is the ego ideal?

The ego ideal is the image of perfection a person sets up inside himself to receive the self-love he enjoyed as a child. Criticised by parents and later by others, the adult can no longer admire himself as he is, so he admires an ideal and tries to meet it. Repression, Freud says, starts from this ideal: what clashes with it is pushed away.

Why does hypochondria matter to Freud's theory of narcissism?

Hypochondria shows the same shift of interest as a real illness, but without a physical cause. A sick person withdraws love from the world into the aching organ; the hypochondriac does the same around an organ that is healthy. Freud uses this to argue that any part of the body can draw libido to itself, and that a store of love dammed up in the self becomes painful.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Store of Self-Love

Is loving oneself a perversion, a sickness, or where all love begins? Freud takes a clinical term and makes it a stage every person passes through.

Before it loves anyone, Freud argues, the infant loves itself, and the love it later sends out to others is drawn from that store and can flow back. The sick and the hypochondriac pull their interest home to an aching body; someone in love empties the self into the beloved. People choose love objects either on the model of the parent who cared for them or on the model of themselves, what they were or want to be. Parents' devotion to a child is their old self-love revived.

narcissism
libido
ego libido
object love
love
object choice
hypochondria
psychosis
schizophrenia
body

Enter a dialogue

The Ideal and Its Watcher

What happens to childhood self-admiration when life refuses it? It moves into an ideal, and a watcher inside measures us against it.

No one willingly gives up a satisfaction once enjoyed, so the adult who can no longer admire himself as he is sets up an ideal to admire instead. An inner agency watches the actual self and compares it with that ideal, and it is what we call conscience, first the voice of the parents' criticism, later of society's. Patients who hear voices commenting on their every move describe this observer in distorted form. Self-regard rises and falls with how near the ideal seems, and with being loved.

ego ideal
self-esteem
conscience
self-observation
sublimation
paranoia
repression

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 55
distinct concepts: 96
by passages held, corpus-wide: #642

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “libido” and “narcissism”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 7 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 53 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
libido	narcissism	10
libido	psychoanalysis	6
love	narcissism	6
libido	neurosis	5
ego ideal	narcissism	4
ego ideal	libido	3
ego ideal	love	3
ego ideal	self-esteem	3
libido	self-esteem	3
love	self-esteem	3
narcissism	psychoanalysis	3
narcissism	self-esteem	3
ego ideal	neurosis	2
libido	love	2
neurosis	psychoanalysis	2
ego ideal	psychoanalysis	1
love	neurosis	1
love	psychoanalysis	1
narcissism	neurosis	1
neurosis	self-esteem	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)
Begun from his own dreams in the 1890s and enlarged in edition after edition, this is where Freud sets out the method of interpretation that his later books apply to slips of the tongue, jokes and myths.
DE
1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)
The dream book's method carried into waking life; its slips and forgettings became the opening part of the lectures Freud later gave to beginners in Vienna.
DE
1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)
Freud's only book-length study of comedy, and the one most built from borrowed material: puns, anecdotes and Jewish jokes, each taken apart in turn.
DE
1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung
Two early excursions from the clinic, gathered here in one volume: the seed of Freud's later books on religion, and his short account of where a writer's stories come from.
DE
1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten
Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.
DE
1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos
Two essays from 1913 and 1917, gathered here in one volume, that show Freud the reader of Shakespeare and Goethe: the dream-book method applied to a stage motif and to the first page of a famous autobiography.
DE
1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)
The first of Freud's books on society and religion, where he moves from the patient to the human species; Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion and his last book, on Moses, all build on its story of the murdered father.
DE
1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus) you are here DE
1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale)
The paper that opens Freud's 1915 theoretical series by defining its basic term; the companion essays on repression and on the unconscious build on it.
DE
1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg
Freud's direct responses to the First World War, gathered in one volume on this site: a long essay of 1915 on disillusionment and death, and a short one of 1916 on transience and mourning.
DE
1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)
Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.
DE
1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)
Freud's own introduction to his work, and the closest thing he wrote to a textbook: his books on dreams and on everyday slips retold for listeners, then carried on into a general theory of neurosis.
DE
1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche)
A rare venture by Freud into aesthetics, a field he says psychoanalysts seldom feel drawn to, written in 1919 beside the first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
DE
1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)
The hinge of Freud's later work: the 1920 book that introduces the death drive, followed within three years by the new map of the mind in The Ego and the Id.
DE
1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse)
The bridge between Freud's speculations on prehistory and his new model of the mind: its chapter on a "grade in the ego" sets out the ego ideal that The Ego and the Id would rename two years later.
DE
1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es)
The book in which Freud's later model of the mind takes its final shape; the essays and books that follow it, on anxiety, religion and civilisation, all speak its language of ego, id and super-ego.
DE
1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie
Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.
DE
1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)
Written three years after The Ego and the Id, it rebuilds the theory of neurotic symptoms in that book's terms, starting from the difference between a symptom and an inhibition, a restriction the ego places on itself.
DE
1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion)
Freud's most direct case against religion, written fourteen years after Totem and Taboo had traced it to the murdered father, and the opening of the late cultural writings that continue in Civilization and Its Discontents.
DE

— or open another of their works