Annals of Behavioural Science

Mixed' Narcissistic Disorders in Relation to the Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence

Let me develop this line of thought....a short one. It evolved from one of Freud's last essays, and particularly, the paragraph below. This is perhaps my favorite paragraph ever written by Freud and it was written the year before he died, 1938 connecting psychoanalysis to both his/its past 'trauma theory' as well as to much of the future of Psychoanalysis in the form of Object Relations (Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Guntrip...) and Self Psychology (Kohut). But even more spectacularly, but unrecognized and/or unmentioned by Freud, one wonders if what Freud describes below might not be the etiology of the 'splitting of the ego' into 'the ego and the id'. Certainly, if I can put a name to it, 'the narcissistic ego' would seem to be a 'conscious' extension of the unconscious workings of what Freud called from 1923 to his death 'the id'. Certainly, there would seem to be a descriptive overlap between narcissism, hedonism, and the id or in language that Freud did not use relative to discussing narcissism 'the narcissistic ego' as a more conscious 'vicissitude' of the id.

Author(s):

David Gordon Bain

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