ABSTRACT
Herbert Rosenfeld made a fundamental contribution to problems of narcissism. His 1971 paper272 linked narcissism to the death instinct and described the narcissistic organisation as a narcissistic structure which is both a defence against, and an implementation of, the death instinct and its manifestation in envy.As in all such organisations both libidinal and destructive elements play a role. In his later work,273
Rosenfeld tried to distinguish between what he called ‘libidinal narcissism’ and ‘destructive narcissism’. I think his description of destructive narcissism, a structure based on projective identification 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.274
