ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author is concerned with primarily healthy narcissism. She explores pathological narcissism, as this is relevant to the exploration of bridges. There is incestuous love, and mastur-batory self-love that goes by the name of narcissism. The very existence of primary narcissism is, of course, questionable, and Michael Fordham has discussed some of the objections in The Self and Autism. Sigmund Freud pursued the concept of secondary narcissism, its causative antecedents, its function, and the confusion of self and objects in his study of Leonardo da Vinci. Healthy narcissism is based on optimum access to a real self, while pathological narcissism results from fixation on a false or incomplete self. H. Kohut’s conception of a transfer of cathexes from the little self to a supra-individual self is really uncannily close to Carl Gustav Jung’s idea of the relationship between ego and self and the process of individuation.
