ABSTRACT
It is impossible to ‘un-know’ what is already known. Therefore, we can only imagine, speculate, deduce, or reconstruct how it must have been for Freud to deal with discoveries that he did not even have the vocabulary to adequately express. This difficult situation created several psychoanalytic propositions that were later misconceived. Because after the theory matured and acquired better vocabulary to express it, those propositions looked wanting and deficient, if not right-out wrong. This is what necessitates revising them. Narcissism is one of those propositions, but in an unusual way. It is a term that Freud used as early as 1910 to ‘give’ a meaning to homosexual object choice, which he considered to be narcissistic in a sense similar to what is implied in the myth of Narcissus (Freud, 1910h). The tendency to borrow from something known – even in a myth – to describe something totally newly discovered was one of Freud’s ways of compensating for the lack of ‘better words’, as we have seen with the Oedipus complex. Notwithstanding, the major problem with the psychoanalytic theory in general is Freud’s need to use the term ‘libido’ as a theoretical solution to all his discoveries. Narcissism is one of the conceptions that has been difficult to define or explain properly because of its libidinal configuration.
