The origins of narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder a

THE ORIGINS OF NARCISSISM 69
Under the weight of the current evidence, constructs like normal
autism, normal symbiosis, primary narcissism, fusion, hallucinatory
omnipotence, and other inaccurate depictions of infancy surely must
give way. The theory of hallucinatory wish fulfillment, as Bleuler and
Vygotsky knew, seems especially implausible, if only because an organism
that normally functioned in this manner would be incapable
of survival. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine attributing to other species,
as a piece of normal development, an infantile stage in which hallucination
is a response to frustration. Equally telling is Stern’s (1985)
argument that preverbal infants, much like nonhuman organisms, perceive
the world literally and are, in the absence of gross pathology,
incapable of distorting reality in a manner suggesting omnipotence of
thought; fantasies of omnipotence-for example, the use of a transitional
object (Winnicott, 1953, 1971/1982)-require symbolic thought
and language (Gramont, 1990). The role of symbolic and linguistic
processes in constituting phenomena like omnipotence of thought and
transitional object usage suggests that, contrary to received ideas about
infantile fantasies, narcissism has its origins in the second, not the first,
year of life.
As with any case of paradigm change, however, old notions do not
just give way automatically, and the replacement of one set of ideas
by another is as much a matter of social processes as it is one of
theoretical conceptions and empirical evidence. In a different context,
it has been said that Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics occurred not
because he converted his colleagues but because he converted their
graduate students. A similar situation exists today with regard to the
impact of new knowledge about infancy on psychoanalytic developmental
theories. Because of space limitations, this chapter cannot treat
in detail the defenses of traditional assumptions. For the interested
reader, some representative writers in this regard are Edgecumbe (1981;
Edgecumbe & Burgner, 1972), Kaplan (1987), and Pine (1979, 1981,
1986). Counterarguments to their defenses of traditional psychoanalytic
developmental psychology can be found in, among many sources,
Eagle (1984), Holt (1967/1989), Horner (1985), Milton Klein (1981),
Lachmann and Beebe (1989), Peterfreund (1978), and Stern (1985).
One received psychoanalytic assumption that needs further discussion,
however, is the continuing equation of the concept of fusion with
that of undifferentiation. Although both merger and undifferentiation
entail an inability to distinguish between self and nonself, any further