The origins of narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder a

THE ORIGINS OF NARCISSISM 79
(1965) 8-month stranger anxiety, with its shyness, lowered head, and
lowered eyes, may also be a preverbal shame display.
These prereflective shame phenomena, along with experimental
demonstration that infants can become extremely distressed when their
parents are emotionally unresponsive for even brief periods (Tronick
et al., 1978), indicate that the traditional psychoanalytic hypothesis of
infantile omnipotence (e.g., Ferenczi, 1913/1950; Freud, 1900/1953,
1911/1958a, 1913/1955; Grunberger, 1971/1979; Mahler et al., 1975;
Winnicott, 1960) is in error (see Holt, 1967/1989; Horner, 1985; Peterfreund,
1978). According to this dubious notion, infants less than 6
months old, when frustrated, satisfy their needs through hallucination,
and preverbal infants older than age 6 months resort to wishful or
magical thinking.
Aside from the sheer implausibility of normal hallucinations in neonates
(Holt, 1967/1989; Horner, 1985) and the likelihood that magical
thinking requires capacities for language and symbolic thought (Gramont,
1990; Stern, 1985), it is certain that the prereflective infant, like
any other nonverbal mammalian organism, experiences failure, inefficacy,
affect misattunement, and frustration and is unable to wish away
these states. Because even prereflective shame calls attention to defects
and limitations of the self and to disruptions of interpersonal relatedness
(H. B. Lewis, 1980, 1987), shame is the crucial narcissistic affect
(Wurmser, 1981, 1987), the opposite of pride (Nathanson, 1987) and
an attenuator of interest and enjoyment; it constitutes the affective core
of narcissistic injuries-of blows to self-concept and self-esteem (Broucek,
1982; Kinston, 1983; Wurmser, 1987).
The absence of objective self-awareness during the first year of life,
however, means that infants, although not living in a world of omnipotence,
do manifest a certain elevation of mood, much as Duval
and Wicklund’s (1972) analysis of self-reflexivity in adults suggests.
This euthymia emerges in the practicing subphase (ages 9 to 15
months), when the achievement of upright locomotion propels the
child to separate from mother, expands the infant’s horizons, and provides
a sense of exhilaration (Mahler et al., 1975). The emergence of
objective self-awareness brings to a close the euphoria of the practicing
stage and calls forth for the first time shame affect proper. The concurrence
of these developments is no coincidence. The ability to regard
oneself as an object-as indexed by the capacity for self-recognition in
the mirror, in photographs, and on videotape-is consolidated between