ABSTRACT
The emergence from narcissism is one of the major tasks of psychological development, and it is difficult because, amongst other things, the awareness that one's life depends on others over whom one has ultimately little or no control is a source of terrible anxiety. In the psychoanalytic literature pathological narcissism is sometimes seen as an expression of an innate hostility to that which is other, separate, and different from the self, sometimes as a defence against vulnerability and a terrifying dependency on others. It was Freud (1914c) who first developed a clinical theory of narcissism as a way of understanding some universal tendencies in human development and mental functioning and in extreme character pathology. Freud's conceptualisations of narcissism and melancholia, in introducing the central psychoanalytic notion of an internal world consisting of relationships between different parts of the self, provide a further conceptual bridge between the individual and the social.
