Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXI, 2002

A DUAL CONCEPTION OF
NARCISSISM: POSITIVE AND
NEGATIVE ORGANIZATIONS

BY ANDRÉ GREEN

The author explores Freud’s concept of narcissism, as well

as other discussions of narcissism in the psychoanalytic lit-
erature. He introduces the dual conception of positive narcis-
sism and negative narcissism, illustrated by two clinical
vignettes. Subsequent discussion elaborates on these two types
of narcissism, and also addresses life narcissism, death nar-
cissism, and primary narcissism. The latter is considered
in light of the influence of infant observational research on
the prevailing view of this concept and the misunderstand-
ings that arise from that approach.

INTRODUCTION

In the beginning of his work, Freud (1894, 1915) excluded nar-

cissistic neuroses from the indications for psychoanalytic treat-
ment. It is interesting to note that Freud had an intuition about
narcissism even before he had discovered and defined the con-
cept. He saw no possibility of applying psychoanalytic treatment
to patients who suffered from diseases in which they were with-
drawn and showed no interest in other people, believing that no

A shorter version of this paper was presented at the 2002 Psychoanalytic Sym-
posium entitled “Narcissism Revisited: Clinical and Conceptual Changes,” New
York, February 23 and 24.

631
632 ANDRÉ GREEN

transference could occur. Obviously, Freud was thinking of pa-

tients who suffered from what was called at the time dementia
praecox, labeled schizophrenia in 1911. He defined this condi-
tion as due to a stagnation and retention of the libido in the ego.
Later, when Freud (1914) described narcissism, he had in mind
a much wider view of the disorder, beyond the above-mentioned
psychoses. He described a number of features, including certain
types of object choice, and brought to light a basic component
of the personality, reframing his theory into object libido and
narcissistic libido. We usually think of this step as a momentary
one, believing that we are now largely beyond this way of under-
standing psychic phenomena, but it is more correct to say that
our present views are transformations of the views expressed by
Freud in 1914.
Today’s theory embodies the concepts of self and object. To
some extent, we can consider some modern views about the self
as deriving from Freud’s description of narcissism. Before dis-
cussing these issues further, I wish to revisit my personal view
of narcissism, taking as a starting point the relationship between
the work of Freud about object libido and narcissistic libido, and
his last theory of drives, which juxtaposed love or life drives to
death and destructive drives.
For me, narcissism is a concept partly derived from Freud’s work
with his patients, and partly grounded more in a myth than on direct
clinical observations. The convincing evidence of the value of this
concept depends on the coherence of the descriptions and their
match to clinical issues.

OBSERVATIONS

My own ideas emerge from clinical experience and from an in-

vestigation of Freud’s work.

1. Narcissism was not present in Freud’s work from the

beginning. It was preceded by autoeroticism. The
passage from autoeroticism to narcissism requires a
A DUAL CONCEPTION OF NARCISSISM 633
“new psychical action” (Freud 1914, p. 77). At least
thirteen years of prior clinical experience were neces-
sary in order for Freud to formulate and introduce
the concept of narcissism.

2. Narcissism was a major concept in Freud’s work for

six years (at least from 1914 to 1920), until his intro-
duction of the death instinct. It was diminished, and
indeed nearly vanished, as a conceptual tool follow-
ing the advent of the so-called structural model in
1923.

3. A transitional phase occurred, during which narcis-

sism was viewed within the opposition of the ego and
object libidos. This statement became outdated once
Freud introduced his last drive theory, setting up
love or life drives in antagonism to destructive or
death drives.

4. A discussion of narcissism raises many important is-

sues. Let us recall two in particular: the problem of
the existence of primary narcissism as opposed to sec-
ondary narcissism, and the relationship between ob-
ject choice and narcissism.

NARCISSISM IN THE
PSYCHOANALYTIC LITERATURE

Following Freud’s own tendency to push narcissism into the

background of theory, the rise to prominence of Klein’s work
has relegated narcissism to oblivion in our literature, since it is
practically absent from her writings. In fact, the Kleinians ig-
nored narcissism until Rosenfeld rediscovered it in 1971, the year
of the IPA Congress in Vienna, in the form of destructive narcis-
sism. Long before that, Balint (1965), Ferenczi’s heir, denied
the existence of primary narcissism; according to such authors,
object love was present from the beginning. Since the time of
Balint’s critique, nearly all psychoanalysts have agreed that pri-
634 ANDRÉ GREEN

mary narcissism is a fiction. This discussion still needs clarifica-

tion.
Narcissism was also rediscovered by Kohut (1971). However,
he neglected to mention the work of Grunberger (1957), dis-
cussed in France since 1957, and Green (1967). Kohut’s self psy-
chology contrasted with Kernberg’s (1975) conception of object
relations, and the same issues were debated by these two oppo-
nents. The self (narcissism) stood on one side, with the drives
(more or less linked to object relations) on the other. The de-
bate ended without a conclusion. Each side has had followers
who have continued to develop divergent conceptions.
For Freud, narcissism was the result of an orientation of the
drives toward the ego, and was defined as the libidinal com-
plement of the self-preservative instincts. For Kohut, it was
not only a matter of the orientation of the drives, but of the
quality of the cathexis. Here we find two different agendas:
Freud seemed more concerned about approaching the prob-
lem metapsychologically, taking into account an economic ap-
proach to the functioning of the psychic apparatus, while Kohut
addressed mainly the quality of the investments. Kohut’s views
are therefore closer to phenomenology than to metapsychology.
A phenomenological view may give us a more comprehen-
sive description of narcissistic features as they appear to con-
sciousness, but it does not allow for the way in which narcis-
sism is articulated with other components of the psychic world,
at least in my view. In other words, self psychology brings us
back toward the prepsychoanalytic view of the academic ego, with
all the dynamics described seen from the point of view of a uni-
tary approach. This tactic undervalues—as Kohut himself acknowl-
edged—the importance of conflict in favor of developmental ar-
rest.
It is undeniable that Kohut’s descriptions enhanced our
understanding of narcissism through his emphasis on grandiosity
and mirroring relations. It may be debatable whether these fea-
tures are the principal ones involved in the patient’s pathol-
ogy, however. One may have the feeling that Kohut’s descrip-
A DUAL CONCEPTION OF NARCISSISM 635
tion opened a new path, but that his explorations remained in-
complete, and were meant to be transformed into a more compre-
hensive perspective that did not consider the self alone, as seen
by an external observer, but rather in a relationship between two
selves interacting with each other. In this latter view, all other
components of classical theory appear to be of secondary impor-
tance and are consigned to neglect. How can we explain this, giv-
en that the earliest descriptions of narcissism appear in Freud’s
work?
To answer this question, we must appreciate a change in pa-
rameters. The fate of narcissism in Freud’s work after 1920 re-
mains a mystery; one of his last comments about it was that nar-
cissism should simply be included in the final synthesis of love
and life instincts (1940). He failed to elaborate on other possibil-
ities. At least some of the features Freud had previously consi-
dered as related to narcissism could be seen as part of what he
had more recently described as the death instinct.

The transformation of object libido . . . into narcissistic

libido which thus takes place [the ego assuming the fea-
tures of the object in order to substitute it after the id’s
loss] obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a
desexualisation—a kind of sublimation, therefore. [Freud
1923, p. 30]

Freud was aware that this process is not the universal road to
sublimation, but believed that it deserves careful consideration.
What strikes us today in this passage is that the desexualization
Freud observed in such sublimation is a process that follows the
same lines as the so-called death instinct. His explicit mention
of narcissistic libido opens the way for us to consider that at least
some aspects of narcissism may follow along the same lines of
the anti-eroticism involved in the destructive instinct, even if
not accompanied by an open manifestation of destruction. The
point to be underlined here is that a weakening of the concepts
of object libido and erotic object choice was taking place.
636 ANDRÉ GREEN

Later in the same work, Freud (1923) considered in greater

detail the problem of the fusion and de-fusion of the instincts. At
the end of his chapter on the two classes of instincts, he termed
the displaceable energy of love into hate and hate into love desex-
ualized libido, noting that this could also be described as subli-
mated energy (p. 46). Here we find a mixture of Eros functions—
uniting and binding—and desexualization, which is closer to the
aim of the death instinct. Since Freud concluded that sublima-
tion regularly takes place in the ego, we can deduce that the de-
sexualization of sublimation and the contrary process of unbind-
ing also take place, at least partly, in the ego. Freud (1923) wrote
quite explicitly: “The ego is working in opposition to the purposes
of Eros and placing itself at the service of the opposing instinctu-
al impulses” (p. 46).
In short, then, we can view the ego as the seat of the fusion
and de-fusion of instincts. Freud concluded that the narcissism of
the ego is a secondary one that has been withdrawn from the ob-
ject, but he did not explicitly return to the issue of sublimated
energy as linked to narcissism and serving the purpose of the op-
posite aims to Eros. I suppose we have to interpret his last state-
ment about narcissism as a global statement inclusive of compo-
nents that need to be more completely analyzed.
It seems to me that Freud came very close to discovering pos-
sible relationships between narcissism and the death instinct. We
might remind ourselves of Freud’s observation in 1920 that “at
the beginning of mental life, the struggle for pleasure was far
more intense than later, but not so unrestricted: it had to submit
to frequent interruptions” (p. 63). We may understand these in-
terruptions as failures of the pleasure principle, in the service of
Eros, and therefore implicitly turning aims the other way around,
in the service of the death drive.1
To summarize my views, I have made the assumption that,
since the time of Freud’s last theory of drives, we have had to con-
sider the possibility of a dual narcissism: a positive narcissism,

1
For a further elaboration of this discussion, see Green 2001.
A DUAL CONCEPTION OF NARCISSISM 637
whose aim is to reach unity, a narcissism aiming at oneness—the
cathexis of the self being fed, at least partly, at the expense of ob-
ject cathexis; and a negative narcissism, which strives toward the
zero level, aiming at nothingness and moving toward psychic
death. This distinction cannot be simplistically absorbed by the
usual distinctions between healthy and pathological narcissism.
An imbalance in favor of narcissism may be positive and yet nev-
ertheless pathological, because it impoverishes relationships
with objects. It is less destructive than negative narcissism, how-
ever, which aims at the subject’s self-impoverishment nearly to
the point of annihilation.
Narcissistic personality disorders do not encompass all the
clinical outcomes of narcissism. Certain depressions (what I call
moral narcissism; see Green 2001) that are based mainly on as-
ceticism and the negativation of gratification (deprivation of
gratification being of greater value than the gratification itself,
according to common standards of pleasure)—including states
of futility, void, emptiness, anorexia, and extreme idealization—
are examples of the decathexis of drives. One should remember
that one-half of the world’s population, if not more, lives accord-
ing to religious standards that claim the superiority of renuncia-
tion to any type of satisfaction, binding adherents to avoid disap-
pointment and disillusion by way of giving up the illusory quest
for pleasure.

BRIEF CLINICAL EXAMPLES

A Case of Positive Narcissism

Despite the fact that Mr. X was referred to me for psychoanaly-

sis, his explanation for seeking treatment was not very explicit.
He vaguely described global disappointment, both personal and
professional; character disorders; maladjustment in all fields;
and feelings of underachievement. I was young at the time and
not fully aware of either my limitations or those of psychoanalysis.
638 ANDRÉ GREEN

Mr. X complained of feelings of dissatisfaction in several do-

mains, including love, family relationships, and work. He remem-
bered having been left alone for long periods during childhood,
inventing plays and acting endless fantasies alone in the garden.
During adolescence, he had been a gifted piano player. He later
became the youngest lawyer in his native land abroad, but this
was a profession that he never practiced. He had emigrated to
France with his girlfriend, married her, and had two children. He
was well read in literature, knowledgeable about music, and oth-
erwise sophisticated. He expressed himself at a high level of
verbal articulation, and was overtly passionate about artistic top-
ics. A self-centered man, he displayed his talent and erudition at
private dinner parties, where he would fascinate and nearly hyp-
notize other guests, who could scarcely say a word, he so monop-
olized the conversation.
Mr. X was the youngest son of an elderly father, a kindly doc-
tor who was dedicated to the poor, and who had been forced to
emigrate. He was esteemed by work colleagues and loved by
his patients. Mr. X’s father believed in God, and was superstitious
and obsessional. He frequently quarrelled with his wife, especi-
ally when he wanted to have sex with her, which she would refuse
by dissolving into tears, according to my patient’s memory. Mr.
X remembered his father having often been at his own bedside,
praying for the soul of his son; the patient’s father must have
formed the belief early on that something was wrong with him.
Mr. X’s mother, like Mr. X’s wife, was a foreigner. Before my
patient’s birth, his parents had lost a child, a girl of approximate-
ly two years, who—as is frequent in such cases—had become ideal-
ized in the mother’s memory; the little girl’s image was frequent-
ly evoked in a haze of perfection that Mr. X could never hope
to reach in the eyes of his mother. The dead sister was the offi-
cial explanation for the chronic dissatisfaction of the “dead”
mother, who complained of her unhappy marriage, her husband’s
lack of income, her poor social life, and so forth.
Mr. X’s mother spent long hours with her son, exciting his
pride and encouraging his artistic gifts, but isolated him from his
A DUAL CONCEPTION OF NARCISSISM 639
friends by virtue of her belief that they would humiliate him.
She told him frightening stories of her native land, describing
how babies in the fields were ripped apart by peasants with their
scythes who had not noticed them lying on the ground of the
field. She would take Mr. X to the movies, hiding these outings
from his father, who would surely object and punish, she said;
she terrorized her son by pretending that, should he betray
their secret, “your father could die from a heart attack.”
Mr. X’s psychoanalytic treatment revealed many features of
self-idealization, grandiosity, and contempt for the ordinary prob-
lems of life. Soon after the beginning of treatment, he resigned
from his job because he felt the tasks he was asked to perform
were unworthy of him. His wife’s parents agreed to support him
financially without his doing any work. From that time on, he
never worked again in any profession.
He decided to “reconquer” his native language, which was that
of his father (who was of Latin origin, while his mother came
from Eastern Europe). He worked alone in a rented studio, study-
ing to master the language, and eventually decided to become a
poet. The extraordinary result was that he succeeded in publish-
ing his poems in a highly regarded literary review published in
his native language. But after that achievement, Mr. X found
that he could not continue his writing; he had lost his inspiration.
He listened to music endlessly, as competently as any music
critic, but declined professional involvement in the field. He was
a record collector and spent most of his money buying records,
but if he realized after making a purchase that a record had the
slightest defect (this was before the era of compact discs), he
would return to the shop and exchange it, quite as if he had
been stealing it, getting another one that seemed perfect and
hiding the questionable imperfection from the salesclerk. He
spent his days doing only what he liked: reading, writing, listen-
ing to music, and going to movies, while viewing all other ac-
tivities with contempt. He also saw his mistresses, but was still un-
happy.
Mr. X had many love affairs, none of which lasted. Most of the
time, the body of the mistress that had attracted him when she
640 ANDRÉ GREEN

was dressed later revealed, when naked, some imperfection that

he found repulsive: breasts that were too small, distorted legs, un-
attractive feet, or some other flaw.
Throughout the analysis (conducted at a frequency of three
times per week), I observed Mr. X’s grandiose fantasies, solitary
lifestyle, disappointment in and violence toward his wife, total
neglect of his children when they did not fulfill his expectations,
and few friends who were never close. In the transference, I was
sometimes idealized, and at others times I represented a delin-
quent figure whom he would have liked to become had he had
the courage. Eventually, he said that he had to go back to his na-
tive country—a lie—and would therefore have to end treatment.
He could not admit that he wanted to give up.
Mr. X returned to see me for a while some years later, after
the accidental death of his wife. Some years afterward, I met him
at a concert, and he asked to come see me for a personal visit.
I accepted, since the treatment had ended. He came for tea, and
displayed an extraordinary amount of seductive exhibitionism.
He could not stand the idea that he had been only a patient to
me, and so he had to show me how interesting he could be as a
person. This was our final contact.
From this short description, we can see that Mr. X was con-
stantly fighting to maintain his pride and self-esteem, and to de-
fend his image at a sublimatory level in order to seduce his omni-
present mother and to convince her that he was a lovable object.
But these efforts were in vain. His mother’s narcissism remained
unmodified, even in old age.2 Furthermore, Mr. X’s fight had a
self-preservative quality. His self-destructiveness was limited to
attempts to escape any feeling of involvement with his closest
objects, and to his lack of a sense of responsibility for his disap-
pointing children.
I consider the case of Mr. X to be an example of positive
(though unhealthy) narcissism. He survived his wife’s death, ideal-
ized her in his mourning, and failed to take care of his children.

2
She was a dead mother, according to my description (Green 1983, 2001).
A DUAL CONCEPTION OF NARCISSISM 641
I was particularly struck by one feature: he could not accept any
gift from a woman with whom he had an affair. It took some
time to understand that this refusal represented an avoidance of
any obligation to reciprocate, i.e., to have to offer something
in return, which would mean that a relationship had taken place.

A Case of Negative Narcissism

Let us shift to a discussion of negative narcissism, of which

Ms. Y is a case example. She was about thirty when she was sent
to me following a severe depressive episode for which she had
been hospitalized. All biological treatments had failed. The col-
league who took care of her in the hospital decided to send her
to me because he had identified a significant neurotic back-
ground.
I remember well Ms. Y’s first visit to see me, during the time
that I was first starting my psychoanalytic practice. She sat in
front of me, bending her head over her chest, not daring to
look at me, talking in a low voice, clearly in deep sorrow. Nev-
ertheless, some form of contact was established, and she agreed
to start treatment. She stayed in analysis for more than ten years,
until her accidental death—otherwise, I think she would still be
coming.
Ms. Y was a professor of philosophy, but had taught for only
one year before falling ill. I had the opportunity to meet some
of her former pupils socially, and learned that they kept vivid
memories of her outstanding teaching. But according to Ms.
Y’s standards, she was the worst professor who had ever existed.
With dramatic pain, she confessed that she had prepared the lec-
tures for her courses by assembling information from various
textbooks. She was guilty of not inventing philosophy, as Socra-
tes did, but had instead only taught it, leaning on books written
by others.
At the time she started treatment, Ms. Y never went outside
her flat, and in fact, never went anywhere—not to the cinema,
642 ANDRÉ GREEN

theater, or concerts, never socializing with friends. She left her

apartment only to come to our sessions, and went back to it im-
mediately afterward. She had a disability income allowance on
which she lived very cheaply. She never prepared meals for her-
self, eating only ham and yogurt. Her activities seemed to be lim-
ited to reading philosophy with religious undertones, though she
did not practice any religion herself.
Ms. Y had a very strong transference to me as a person, not to
me as an analyst. She very rarely dreamed and never fantasized.
She had essentially broken off relations with her parents; her
mother was someone she never expected to see again in her life-
time, while she had seen her father only once or twice in the pre-
vious ten years. In fact, she had been partly raised by her grand-
parents for some years, returning to her parents’ home only later
on. She did keep a good relationship with her sister, who had
married a modest civil officer and had two children whom Ms.
Y loved. Once a year, she spent a week with her sister and her fam-
ily.
Ms. Y’s analytic sessions seemed repetitive and sterile; no in-
sight ever occurred. No change took place. I felt pity and com-
passion for her suffering. In one session, she created an unex-
pectedly strong reaction in me by appearing totally changed,
dressed in apparently luxurious garments and wearing make-
up so heavy that she was almost unrecognizable. I learned that
while she had been resting in a convalescent home, she had met
a man, a simple laborer with no culture. She went to bed with
him once, but decided after two weeks that he was of no inter-
est to her, and broke off all relations with him. He was not re-
placed by anyone else.
During her treatment, Ms. Y developed an addiction to al-
cohol, which could not be stopped. Her particular addiction
was to “Marie Brizzard,” a liqueur bearing the name of a woman.
Ms. Y eventually died in somewhat mysterious circumstances,
in the context of oral avidity: she suffocated after greedily trying
to ingest an excessive amount of food.
A DUAL CONCEPTION OF NARCISSISM 643
This case could be considered one of chronic depression. But
for me, it is precisely one of negative narcissism, with an aspira-
tion to nothingness in a permanent way. There was no evidence
of any cathexis whatsoever, except to my person, of which Ms. Y
could not make use. Once she was riding in a car as a passen-
ger, and the car had a severe accident; she believed she was go-
ing to die. While waiting for the ambulance, she thought of on-
ly one person: me. The splitting of the transference between the
object as a person and the object as an analyst was striking. She
loved me, but could make use of nothing I could give her—
and in particular, could achieve no understanding of her psychic
world. Her friends, who tried to help her, were soon discour-
aged and abandoned her. I had to confess that I had failed to
help her, although I realized that my becoming a love object for
her was an important step that ensured her survival for some
time.

Discussion of Cases

The two cases presented here were failures in treatment. I

do not mean to convey, however, that narcissism or narcissistic
personalities never respond to psychoanalytic treatment. It hap-
pened that I saw these two patients during the beginning of
my practice as a psychoanalyst; they represent the kind of cases
that more senior clinicians refer to younger colleagues, rather
than take into treatment themselves.
While in the case of Ms. Y, intense suffering was conscious
and at the forefront, in the case of Mr. X (one of positive narcis-
sism), the suffering consisted mainly of a narcissistic injury in
relation to the patient’s social situation. Mr. X, in fact, in suffer-
ing from humiliation, had deprived himself of any personal
achievement in the long run. His grandiose fantasies had re-
mained unchanged since childhood. A mirroring situation was
present; for instance, after certain interpretations, he would ap-
plaud and say loudly, “Bravo, Dr. Green.” But no change oc-
curred.
644 ANDRÉ GREEN

Mr. X finally agreed to end our meetings, at my request, al-

though his first reaction had been to offer to increase his fee if
I would continue to see him. I did not agree to this because I
had the feeling that future encounters would be useless. At the
last session, he said to me, “Dr. Green, you have made all possi-
ble efforts to help me. I have been fixated on my two parents.
Maybe you have liberated me from my identification with my
father, but you failed to detach me from my mother’s influence,
which was stronger.” I had the feeling that he was right.
The case of Ms. Y raised different problems. She had never
been able to cope with her mother, whom she said she hated.
She had more positive feelings about her father, but considered
him weak and totally dominated by his wife. She became a bril-
liant student and succeeded in her academic discipline at the
highest level, but without gaining her mother’s love; in fact, her
mother remained sadistically critical of her.
Ms. Y’s emotional life was impoverished. She fell in love with
an older professor—someone who was probably never aware of
her amorous feelings during the year before she became ill. It
never happened again. Her hatred of her mother was very in-
tense and appeared to be permanent. Ms. Y felt she had been
persecuted by her mother—especially in regard to her sexuality,
and without any reason for this; she had not even been sexual-
ly active. The only interest she was able to muster in life was in
philosophy, but in fact, she had the appearance of a woman much
less educated and sophisticated—looking, perhaps, like a postal
clerk, her mother’s profession. It was as if life had stopped at
the moment she fell ill. I think her disappointment that her
dream of love never came true was highly traumatic for her.

THEORETICAL ELABORATION

Negative narcissism is the form narcissism takes when combined

with self-destructive drives. Drives are at play here; they are not
present in contradiction to withdrawal, but are allied with it. The
A DUAL CONCEPTION OF NARCISSISM 645
impoverishment of object relationships is not indicative of a
narcissism whose aim is to assert one’s own selfhood, or to nour-
ish feelings of grandiosity or mirroring relationships of the kind
observed in Mr. X. In neither case did I witness suicidal attempts.
In positive narcissism, others are seen as being of low value: igno-
rant, vulgar, common, cheap. In negative narcissism, the patient
is the one who is worthy only of universal contempt; he or she
has no right to any respect or satisfaction. The less gratification
that is received, the more the patient believes that his or her
fate is deserved. One might be reminded here of moral maso-
chism, but that would be an incorrect analogy because there is
no search for punishment or humiliation in positive narcissism;
rather, these patients seek less suffering by self-punishment or in-
flicted punishment by others. They do not look for anything,
but merely survive, waiting for death to come. Their lives are
empty. And when such a patient loves someone, such as a treat-
ing psychoanalyst, the patient is aware and accepts that this love
will lead nowhere, without letting him- or herself be caught up
in the illusion of transference. No insight is achieved. Except in
very rare moments, affects are always dull, life holds no joy, and
pain remains a basic tonality made up not so much of suffer-
ing as of sadness or deadness. In fact, these patients seem to
have been crushed by a maternal image against whom they can
rebel socially, but not internally. Negative narcissism is the result
of the combination of narcissism with an orientation toward psy-
chic death.
Life narcissism is a way of living—sometimes parasitically, some-
times self-sufficiently—with an impoverished ego that is limited
to illusory relationships that support the self, but without any in-
volvement with objects. Here I refer to living objects, not those
that are essentially idealized. Death narcissism is a culture of void,
emptiness, self-contempt, destructive withdrawal, and permanent
self-depreciation with a predominant masochistic quality: tears,
tears, tears.
Although it can be schematic to sketch too simple a view, I
shall defend the idea that object relationships and narcissistic
646 ANDRÉ GREEN

relationships are less at odds with each other than complemen-

tary in their beginnings. What we observe between the infant and
his or her primary object clearly demonstrates that there are mo-
ments during which the object, though not distinct, is neverthe-
less present in the child’s psyche. But at other moments, as in
sleep, solitude, or normal withdrawal, the dialogue with the ob-
ject is not the same; rather, it is a situation different from that
during moments of encounter with the object. Therefore, what
I propose is the existence of a variety of psychic states in which
object relationships and narcissistic relationships prevail, alter-
nately, from one moment to another.
During development, in some psychic structures, narcissistic
relationships will dominate the picture (anxiety about object re-
lationships, self-protection, encapsulation), and in these situa-
tions, two lines of development are possible. The first prioritizes
what we call egoism (selfishness, withdrawal, self-sufficiency, a self-
centered personality). But in other instances, the destructive as-
pects will be predominant. It is not only the object cathexes
which will be fought, but even, on a deeper level, the self itself.
In such situations, narcissism and masochism seem at first to be
closely linked. But on deeper examination, the dominant fea-
ture is found to be self-disappearance and disinvolvement. I have
attributed this effect to what I call a disobjectalizing function, which
undoes the transformation of psychic functions into objects (ob-
jectalizing functions). Elsewhere (Green 1999), I have given detailed
descriptions of disengagement and disinvestment (including
such states that are directed toward self-preservation) and of an ob-
scure aim for self-exhaustion that can lead, sometimes, to death.

FINAL REMARKS

Freud’s last theory of the drives—which I find useful in spite of

the frequent denigration of it by some of my North American col-
leagues—helps me to rethink our ideas about narcissism. Freud
abandoned his exploration of narcissism after 1920, implicitly
A DUAL CONCEPTION OF NARCISSISM 647
considering it to be part of the love drives. He did not consider
the possibility of a link between narcissism and the destructive or
death drives. This is what I tried to develop in my work written
between 1964 and 1983 (Green 1983, 2001).3
Why am I saying that I disagree with Kohut’s (1971) concep-
tion of narcissism? The answer is that I had the impression that
the drives played a major part in the background of both the clin-
ical cases presented here. Space constraints prevent further elab-
oration of specific evidence of this here, but I can say that sa-
dism, masochism, perverse behavior, and oral and anal fixations
were strongly rooted in each patient, in different ways.
A final topic I would like to address, at least briefly, is pri-
mary narcissism. It is a common opinion today that we have at
our disposal a large amount of evidence, based on infant ob-
servational research, that disproves Freud’s conception of pri-
mary narcissism, just as it refutes Mahler’s concept of symbiosis.
I agree that babies give reactive signs to their mothers’ behavior,
expressions of mood, and manner of caregiving. But I would
like to emphasize that this does not tell us the whole story. These
observations are behavioral; we still do not know what is going
on in the child’s mind, but only what we can see in what he or
she shows us. The baby’s reactions to the primary object (it is
now fashionable to use the term caregiver) do not prove that the
baby can experience the situation as a separate entity in relation-
ship with another separate entity—-that is, the relationship linking
two persons together.
Winnicott (1971) expressed the idea—a much more convincing
one to me—that when a child looks at the mother’s face, what
the child sees is him- or herself, not the mother. Furthermore, an
early perception of the object as a distinct person is not neces-
sarily an advantage, since the baby could then lose the ability to
experience the creation of a subjective object born out of his

3
On meeting Rosenfeld in 1984 at the Marseilles Symposium on the death
drive, I found myself in agreement with him. That was the beginning of a friend-
ship that lasted until he died.
648 ANDRÉ GREEN

or her omnipotence. An object that is perceived as such too ear-

ly on makes the baby more dependent on the mother’s moods.
The baby probably interprets these moods according to his or
her own internal state, leading to the construction of a false self
in order to comply with the mother. In summary, I believe that
the concept of primary narcissism deserves to be reinterpreted,
rather than rejected without thorough examination.
Narcissism, like any other psychoanalytic concept, is related
to the hypothetical internal world of the child. It is an intra-
psychic concept that must be matched with intersubjective rela-
tionships in the transference.
An appreciation of the concept of the self is not enough to
truly understand narcissism—not even an appreciation of the self
seen as the “I.” We have to consider the subject, a concept much
more difficult to define. In order to define a subject, one needs
another subject, for it is only a subject that can have the concept
of subject. Subjectivity is, by definition, intersubjectivity, in the
philosophical sense of the word. The other subject is not an ob-
ject, nor is it a person. A subject might be thought of as a being
who can ask “Who am I?” even before thinking of asking “Who are
you?”

REFERENCES

Balint, M. (1965). Primary Love and Psychoanalytic Technique. London:

Tavistock.
Freud, S. (1894). The defense neuro-psychoses. S. E., 3.
——— (1914). On narcissism: an introduction. S. E., 14.
——— (1915). Instincts and their vicissitudes. S. E., 14.
——— (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. S. E., 18.
——— (1923). The ego and the id. S. E., 19.
——— (1940). An outline of psycho-analysis. S. E., 23.
Green, A. (1967). Primary narcissism: structure or state. In Life Narcis-
sism, Death Narcissism, trans. A. Weller. London/New York: Free Asso-
ciation Books.
——— (1983). Narcissisme de vie, Narcissisme de mort. Paris: Minuit.
------------- (1999). The death drive, negative narcissism and the disobjectalising
function. In The Work of the Negative, trans. A. Weller. London: Free
Association Books.
A DUAL CONCEPTION OF NARCISSISM 649
——— (2001). Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, trans. A. Weller. London/
New York: Free Association Books.
Grunberger, B. (1957). Le Narcissisme. Paris: Payot.
Kernberg, O. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism.
Northvale, NJ: Aronson.
Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: Int. Univ. Press.
Rosenfeld, H. (1971). A clinical approach to the psycho-analytic theory
of life and death instincts. Int. J. Psychoanal., 52:169-178.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.

9 Avenue de l’Observatoire
75006 Paris, France

e-mail: [email protected]