Narcissism: Is that all Psychoanalysis Is?

Freud used the title Narcissism: An Introduction for his paper on the subject but the use of the word ‘introduction’ belies the fact that these were not his first thoughts on the subject. He had long been searching for a way of explaining how the subject moves from a state of autoerotism to object love and, as early as 1899 in a letter to Fliess, while discussing paranoia as a dissolving of the ego’s identifications, he expresses a curiosity about ‘the special relations of auto-erotism and the original “ego”’.[3] By 1907, in a discussion of the mechanisms of schizophrenia in correspondence with Jung, he seems to have arrived at the concept of narcissism in all but name stating that the ego might be regarded as ‘autoerotic’ in the sense that it has detached all its libido from objects, only applying it to itself. [4] When Isaac Sadger at a meeting the Vienna Psychoanalytical society in 1909 used the term narcissism (already in use among sexologists Paul Näcke and Havelock Ellis) to describe the homosexual object choice as being based on a self-image, Freud recognised the possibility of considering this investment in the self-image as the bridge between autoerotism and object cathexis and immediately put forward the proposal that narcissism was a necessary phase in sexual development common to all.…