A Critical Analysis Of Freud's On Narcissism

In this explanatory essay, I will lead the reader through Freud’s “On Narcissism,” explaining his ideas without the complicated jargon of psychoanalysis so that even a reader with no experience with Freud or post-Freudians could understand. I will also draw from other psychoanalysts and academics who have touched on narcissism in their works. This is not an academic paper with a thesis or even a “logical” flow of ideas. Instead, it is a fragmented collection of short paragraphs of some of the important ideas of Freud’s work, “On Narcissism,” using post-Freudians to add depth and clarity.

Self-love vs loving other people and things

There are two kinds of love that people experience: love of the self (“ego-libido”) and love of another person

While getting sexual gratification from one’s own body is something we are born with—infants feel pleasure when they suckle on their mother’s breast and when they defecate (what Freud called “auto-erotism”), Freud argues that we are not born with narcissism. To move from auto-erotism into true narcissism, human must undergo a “new psychical action.” Narcissism is basically the placement of love in the part of the brain (the Ego) that both finds realistic routes for deep and primitive desires and also judges and critiques the self. Laplanche develops this idea in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, explaining that the ego acts as “an external object…charged with libido (“love”), cathected.”According Jacques Lacan, however, the Ego only develops in a child after they have achieved the “Mirror

This image is revolutionary for an infant because, before this realization, she understands her body only as snapshots of body parts. In the mirror, however, she sees something greater than the sum of its parts (a “gestalt”); she realizes that those contiguous shapes actually belong to one greater concept—a representation of her self, the Ego. Only after this realization, this identification before the infant understands the words that define the ego, can narcissism take place. Freud and Lacan explain further that the infant’s gestalt becomes an ideal image of herself that she aspires to for the rest of her life. The pressure of this lifelong aspiration is diverted later once (and if) the infant takes on her first love-object in the form of a mother or caretaker. It is when children take themselves as objects of love, however, that their mental state becomes