ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some relationships between fantasies of perfection and the calamities of childhood. Narcissism refers to the panoply of fantasies of perfection that are a ubiquitous aspect of the creative activities of the mind. The Narcissistic Pursuit of Perfection efforts at clarification focused on assimilating Freud’s early conceptions of narcissism with The Ego and the Id. Freud’s prestructural conceptions of narcissism were propounded within the context of theory focused on libido and the self-preservative instinct, prior to the introduction of the structural hypothesis and the signal theory of anxiety. From this conceptual perspective, narcissism was defined as the cathexis of the self with narcissistic or ego libido, as contrasted with object libido. In 1923, Freud deleted the qualification of that identification as “narcissistic". In 1915b, the exposition of the identification in melancholia as a “narcissistic identification” had been a central premise and distinction of his explanation of the pathogenesis of that condition.
