---
title: "History of narcissism"
chunk: 1/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_narcissism"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:00:04.509844+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The concept of excessive selfishness has been recognized throughout history. The term "narcissism" is derived from the Greek mythology of Narcissus, but was only coined at the close of the nineteenth century.
Since then, narcissism has become a household word; in analytic literature, given the great preoccupation with the subject, the term is used more than almost any other'.
The meaning of narcissism has changed over time. Today narcissism "refers to an interest in or concern with the self along a broad continuum, from healthy to pathological ... including such concepts as self-esteem, self-system, and self-representation, and true or false self".

== Before Freud ==
In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a handsome youth who rejected the desperate advances of the nymph Echo. As punishment, he was doomed to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Unable to consummate his love, Narcissus 'lay gazing enraptured into the pool, hour after hour', and finally pined away, changing into a flower that bears his name, the narcissus. 
The story was retold in Latin by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, in which form it would have great influence on medieval and Renaissance culture. 'Ovid's tale of Echo and Narcissus...weaves in and out of most of the English examples of the Ovidian narrative poem'; and 'allusions to the story of Narcissus...play a large part in the poetics of the Sonnets' of Shakespeare. Here the term used was 'self-love...Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel'. Francis Bacon used the same term: 'it is the nature of extreme self-lovers, as they will set a house on fire, and it were but to roast their eggs...those that (as Cicero says of Pompey) are sui amantes sine rivali...lovers of themselves without rivals'.
At the start of the nineteenth century Byron used the same term, describing how, "Self-love for ever creeps out, like a snake, to sting anything which happens...to stumble on it." while Baudelaire wrote of 'as vigorous a growth in the heart of natural man as self-love', as well as of those who 'like Narcissuses of fat-headedness...are contemplating the crowd, as though it were a river, offering them their own image'.
By mid-century, however, egotism was perhaps an equally common expression for self-absorption: 'egotists...made acutely conscious of a self, by the torture in which it dwells'—though still with 'curious suggestions of the Narcissus legend' in the background. 
At the century's close, the term as we now know it finally emerged, with Havelock Ellis, the English sexologist, writing a short paper in 1927 on its coining, in which he 'argued that the priority should in fact be divided between himself and Paul Näcke, explaining that the term "narcissus-like" had been used by him in 1898 as a description of a psychological attitude, and that Näcke in 1899 had introduced the term Narcismus to describe a sexual perversion'.
In 1911 Otto Rank published the first psychoanalytical paper specifically concerned with narcissism, linking it to vanity and self-admiration.

== Freud ==

According to Ernest Jones, in 1909 Freud declared that "narcissism was a necessary intermediate stage between auto-erotism and object-love". The following year in his "Leonardo" he described publicly for the first time how "the growing youngster...finds his love objects on the path of narcissism, since Greek myths call a youth Narcissus, whom nothing pleased so much as his own mirror image". Although Freud only published a single paper exclusively devoted to narcissism, called On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914), the concept took on an increasingly central place in his thinking.

=== Primary narcissism ===
Freud suggested that exclusive self-love might not be as abnormal as previously thought and might even be a common component in the human psyche. He argued that narcissism "is the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation."  He referred to this as primary narcissism.
According to Freud, people are born without a sense of themselves as individuals, or ego. The ego develops during infancy and the early part of childhood, when the outside world, usually in the form of parental communications, definitions and expectations, intrudes upon primary narcissism, teaching the individual about the nature of his or her social environment, from which the ego ideal, an image of the perfect self towards which the ego should aspire, can be formed. "As it evolved, the ego distanced itself from primary narcissism, formed an ego-ideal, and proceeded to cathect objects".
Freud regarded all libidinous drives as fundamentally sexual and suggested that ego libido (libido directed inwards to the self) cannot always be clearly distinguished from object-libido (libido directed to persons or objects outside oneself).

=== Secondary narcissism ===
According to Freud, secondary narcissism occurs when libido is withdrawn from objects outside the self, above all the mother, producing a relationship to social reality that includes the potential for megalomania. "This megalomania has no doubt come into being at the expense of object-libido....This leads us to look upon the narcissism which arises through the drawing on of object-cathexes as a secondary one, superimposed upon a primary narcissism". For Freud, while both primary and secondary narcissism emerge in normal human development, problems in the transition from one to the other can lead to pathological narcissistic disorders in adulthood.
"This state of secondary narcissism constituted object relations of the narcissistic type", according to Freud. He went on to explore this further in Mourning and Melancholia—considered one of Freud's most profound contributions to object relations theory, elucidating the overall principles of object relations and narcissism as concepts.

=== Narcissism, relationships and self-worth ===
According to Freud, to care for someone is to convert ego-libido into object-libido by giving some self-love to another person, which leaves less ego-libido available for primary narcissism and protecting and nurturing the self. When that affection is returned so is the libido, thus restoring primary narcissism and self-worth. Any failure to achieve, or disruption of, this balance causes psychological disturbances. In such a case, primary narcissism can be restored only by withdrawing object-libido (also called object-love) to replenish ego-libido.