The origins of narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder a

60 JOHN S. AUERBACH
bolic thinking (Kagan, 1981; Piaget, 1945/1962; Stern, 1985) is the
consolidation of children’s ability to recognize themselves in the mirror
(Amsterdam & Levitt, 1980; M. Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979). It is this
ability to construct an image of one’s body, per Freud’s (1914/1957)
early theory, that brings about narcissism. Thus, to cite the ideas of
but a few of the theorists just discussed, Mahler et al.’s (1975) rapprochement
stage, Winnicott’s (1953, 1971/1982) transitional object
stage, Grunberger’s (1971/1979; cf. Freud, 1917/1955) emphasis on
the anal stage as the period in which narcissistic and object-related
wishes first come into conflict, and Kernberg’s (1975, 1976) reformulation
of Melanie Klein’s (1935) depressive position as emerging in the
second year of life constitute alternative perspectives for delineating
the momentous, potentially traumatic consequences of the infant’s discovery
of the self. The transitional object, insofar as it is an illusion
that helps a toddler cope with separation from mother in particular
and with the discovery of separateness in general, is perhaps the most
evocative example of the origin of narcissistic fantasy. To these various
conceptualizations, one can add Lacan’s (1948/1977,1949/1977,1953)
mirror stage, to be reviewed briefly before this discussion moves on
to consider the infant as seen through the eyes of empirical research.
Because Lacan’s (1948/1977, 1949/1977, 1953) views of narcissism
and early development derive chiefly from Freud’s (1905/1953, 19141
195 7) earlier, empirically sounder writings on these topics (Laplanche,
19701 1976) and involve, perhaps uniquely among major psychoanalytic
theoreticians, a rejection of the notion of a monadic infant undifferentiated
from and unaware of its surroundings (Laplanche & Pontalis,
1967/1973; Ragland-Sullivan, 1986), they can be squared, most
surprisingly, with the findings of current infancy research much more
readily than can the ideas of thinkers who hold that narcissism involves
an inability to differentiate between self and other (Muller, 1982). Lacan
(1949/1977, 1953), following Freud (1914/1957), argues that narcissism
involves the emergence of the ego as a self-representation-that
is, as a unified self-image that is constituted through self-inflation. The
mirror stage, a developmental phase occurring between ages 8 and 18
months and during which infants first come to recognize themselves
in the mirror, is clearly an elaboration of Freud’s first theory of narcissism.