ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud's discoveries of the meaning of transference focused his attention more and more on the relation between self and object. Freud assumed that narcissism exists from the moment the infant has a rudimentary awareness of himself. The connection between narcissism, idealization, and exhibitionism is implicit in Freud's emphasis on self-regard as an expression of the size of the ego and his description of the feeling of being watched. After Freud's narcissism paper the process of internalization gained more and more weight, not as one of the ego functions but as the basic way of psychic functioning. Freud compared the narcissistic hurts that psychoanalysis, through painful insight, inflicted on humanity to those inflicted by Galileo's work. Freud's concept of instinct, as something arising only from within the organism, does not apply to the observation that the formation of object relations is a process of caring involving two people.
