Narcissism: shame, rage and addiction

This paper employs perspectives from Self psychology to illuminate our understanding of narcissism. Striving for complete independence and autonomy, a goal of classical psychoanalysis, encourages the disavowal of narcissism. Instead, narcissism is viewed as necessary for the survival of a sense of self and not on the same continuum with object love. The concepts of self-object and self-object functions are defined. Shame and rage are explained as byproducts of self-object failure. It is postulated that shame emerges out of self-depletion and that narcissistic rage emerges out of self-fragmentation. Countertransference and treatment implications are discussed. Following Lichtenberg, addictions are viewed as deriving from the quest for self-object experience, regardless of the long-term detriment.