ABSTRACT
Of the various possible approaches to the problems of narcissism, Ron decided to centre his paper on the role of narcissism in personality disorders. I shall follow suit, since it is in this area that Herbert Rosenfeld made his fundamental contribution to problems of narcissism. In his 1971 paper he linked narcissism to the death instinct and described the narcissistic organisation ± a narcissistic structure which is both a defence against and an implication of the death instinct and its manifestation in envy. As in all such organisations both libidinal and destructive elements, of course, play a role. In his later work Herbert tried to distinguish between what he called libidinal narcissism and destructive narcissism. I think his description of destructive narcissism, a structure based on projective identi®cation with an internal object which dominates the personality (as, for example, in his classic description of the gang), is generally accepted as uncontroversial and has inspired much of our later work. But this is not the case in relation to his description of libidinal narcissism. There are some disagreements about the actual interplay of the libidinal and destructive forces in narcissism.
