• DOI:10.1177/000306517001800103
• Corpus ID: 9499780

Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities

@article{Kernberg1970FactorsIT,
  title={Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities},
  author={Otto Kernberg},
  journal={Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association},
  year={1970},
  volume={18},
  pages={51 - 85}
}

• O. Kernberg
• Published 1 January 1970
• Psychology
• Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association

N THIS PAPER I shall discuss the etiology, diagnosis, prognosis, and some factors in the treatment of patients with narcissistic I personality structure. I do not expect to treat the subject exhaustively, but I hope to shed new light on certain areas. This paper deals mainly with the clinical problem of narcissism, and such metapsychological considerations as will be presented shortly have to do only with the etiology of pathological narcissism and not with the broader issue of the theory of narcissism in psychoanalysis. I suggested in an earlier paper (8) that narcissistic as a descriptive term has been both abused and overused, but that there does exist a group of patients in whom the main problem appears to be the disturbance of their self-regard in connection with specific disturbances in their object relationships, and whom we might consider almost a pure culture of pathological development of narcissism, It is for these patients that I would reserve the term narcissistic personalities. On the surface, these patients may not present seriously disturbed behavior; some of them may function socially very well, and they usually have much better impulse control than the infantile personality.