On narcissism. The Kleinian approach

This article describes the Kleinian approach to narcissism. During the last 70 years, Klein and her followers came to the conclusion that clinically and theoretically speaking, psychoanalysts are dealing only with more or less severe forms of secondary narcissism. Freud's concept of primary narcissism is considered obsolete. Narcissism, according to the Kleinian approach, is a pathologic defense against the pain caused by the first primitive object relationship: that to the mother breast as described by Klein. Greed, destructive emotions, and impulses that manifest themselves through envy, omnipotent denial of dependence, megalomanic idealization of the self, and confusion with the external object erotization of destructiveness play a fundamental part in narcissism. Of particular clinical importance, in contemporary Kleinian thinking and analytic technique, is the concept of narcissistic destructive organizations as described by Rosenfeld, Meltzer, and Segal.