Traversing Narcissistic Pathways: From Freud to Present Times

Abstract

This article begins with Freud’s struggles in dealing with the concept of transference. His struggles were particularly acute with certain types of narcissistic patients. The view presented is that Freud, in some ways, was prototypic of the type of struggles that contemporary analysts have in allowing transference manifestations to effloresce. Kohut is seen as advancing the struggle and setting a new boundary for analyzability that allowed analysts to begin to move into the patient’s world. Bach, Winnicott, Bion, and Klein are then pictured as moving the boundary in a manner that allowed for a greater range of patients to survive in the analytic situation. The difficulties in allowing the transference, and particularly narcissistic and fragmentary transferences, to unfold are discussed in the light of several clinical examples.

Notes

1. ¹Freud (1915a) adds to the theory of narcissism and conceives of the beginning of this stage as coincident with a new concept: the purified pleasure ego.

2. ²I choose to use the term mother to mean the main parent, which may indeed be a man.

3. ³It may be that many “actual neurotics” were narcissistic disorders.

4. ⁴For example, Bach and Kohut.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven J. Ellman

Steven Ellman has authored or co-edited five psychoanalytic books and two books on sleep and dreams. His recent book is When Theories Touch; A Historical and Theoretical Integration of Psychoanalytic Thought, (2010). At IPTAR he was President (twice) and is a training analyst. He was the first President of the Confederation of Independent Psychoanalytic Societies, is a member of IPA, and was previously on the Executive Council of the IPA.