The origins of narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder a

THE ORIGINS OF NARCISSISM 59
affairs is that positions about infancy are staked out on the basis of
uncontrolled case reports of analyses, often of adults, without reference
to the growing body of developmental research. For example, as regards
the seemingly interminable controversy about whether, as egopsychological
theorists maintain, there is a primary indifference to objects
or, instead, as Fairbairn (1952, p. 137) has written, “the libido is
. . . object-seeking,” the findings of attachment researchers, with both
humans (Ainsworth et al., 1978) and infrahuman primates (Harlow,
1958), clearly favor the object-relational position. It would seem safe
to conclude, as does Bowlby (1973, 1980, 1982), that infants are born
with powerful drives for attachment.
Despite, however, the seemingly irreconcilable disputes between ego
psychology and object-relations theory, both schools have constructed
their ideas about infancy around prenatal metaphors, as if the human
baby, unlike the offspring of other organisms, must be born twice. For
ego psychology, the root metaphor is the primary autism of the bird
embryo inside its shell (Freud, 191 1/1958a). For object-relations theory,
the organizing image is the primary relatedness of the fetus that,
in its amniotic world, cannot be differentiated from the placenta (Balint,
1959). Theories about a drive to recover a prenatal state and claims
that intrauterine life is without tensions are empirically untestable,
although current empirical evidence, to be reviewed shortly, that infants
seek stimulation, not tension reduction, indicates that these ideas
are highly dubious. Findings (DeCasper & Spence, 1986) that infants
can recognize-that is, have memory for-certain extrauterine events
that occurred during the last trimester of pregnancy are also highly
damaging to such claims. It is likely therefore that neither of the two
prenatal images accurately characterizes the psychological stage of the
human organism prior to birth.
Narcissism and the Second Year of Life
In addition, one might note that, although all of the theorists reviewed
here have described the first year of life in a manner quite at odds with
the conclusions of infancy research, the comments of these writers
about life’s second year are both more illuminating about the origins
of normal and pathological narcissism and more consistent with research
findings in developmental psychology and social cognition. For
coincident with the emergence, during the second year of life, of sym-