Sigmund Freud On Narcissism Analysis

We all have at least some idea about what narcissism is. Narcissism is the quest for satisfaction from vanity or self important reverence of one's own traits. The term began from Greek folklore, where the youthful Narcissus became hopelessly enamored with his own picture reflected in a pool of water. It was prevalently presented in Sigmund Freud's exposition “On Narcissism”. "On Narcissism: An Introduction" begins with Freud referring to a psychological state exclusively called auto-eroticism-and suggests that it might actually be a condition common in the psychology of all human beings.. "Loving oneself," Freud argues, is the "libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation" We all have impulses to cater for ourselves and protect ourselves from danger and we all love ourselves and as these impulses are bound with our desires, we can’t really separate our sexual desires from our inwardly directed desire to care for ourselves.

Freud calls this basic, sexually charged desire directed at the self "primary" or "normal" narcissism. Then he compares this primary narcissism with a more lethal form of it called “secondary narcissism in which the person becomes so obsessed with himself that he withdraws his object libido from and this world and direct it all towards himself, now freud describes that a person since he is a child possess two types of libido, ego-libido and object libido. The ego-libido being the love for the self and the object libido develops when the child becomes too overwhelmed with the self and direct their libido on a certain object mostly one of their parents. The ego-libido can be best described as the child’s ability to think that whatever they are imagining will magically happen. This kind of behaviour in which the child imagines itself powerful he believe is a part of human development. Secondary narcissism happens when the object libido and ego libido are both directed at one’s own self