Narcissistic supply
Template:Short description In psychoanalytic theory, narcissistic supply is attention or admiration that is pathologically or excessively needed from codependents, or such a need in the orally fixated, that does not take into account the feelings, opinions or preferences of other people.[1]
The concept was introduced by Otto Fenichel in 1938, to describe a type of admiration, interpersonal support or sustenance drawn by an individual from his or her environment and essential to their self-esteem.Template:Sfn
History
Building on Freud's concept of narcissistic satisfaction[2] and on the work of his colleague the psychoanalyst Karl Abraham,Template:Sfn Fenichel highlighted the narcissistic need in early development for supplies to enable young children to maintain a sense of mental equilibrium.Template:Sfn He identified two main strategies for obtaining such narcissistic supplies—aggression and ingratiation—contrasting styles of approach which could later develop into the sadistic and the submissive respectively.Template:Sfn
A childhood loss of essential supplies was for Fenichel key to a depressive disposition, as well as to a tendency to seek compensatory narcissistic supplies thereafter.Template:Sfn Impulse neuroses, addictions including love addiction and gambling, were all seen by him as products of the struggle for supplies in later life.Template:Sfn Psychoanalyst Ernst Simmel (1920) had earlier considered neurotic gambling as an attempt to regain primitive love and attention in an adult context.[3]
Personality disorders
Psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg considered the malignant narcissistic criminal to be coldly characterised by a disregard of others unless they could be idealised as sources of narcissistic supply.[4] Self psychologist Heinz Kohut saw those with narcissistic personality disorder as disintegrating mentally when cut off from a regular source of narcissistic supply.[5] Those providing supply to such figures may be treated as if they are a part of the narcissist, in an eclipse of all personal boundaries.[6]
See also
- Flattery
- Narcissistic mortification
- Narcissistic rage and narcissistic injury
- Narcissistic withdrawal
References
Citations
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- ↑ Sigmund Freud, Case Histories II (PFL 9) p. 380.
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- ↑ Heinz Kohut, The Chicago Institute Lectures (1996) p. 37
- ↑ Hotchkiss, Sandy & Masterson, James F. Why Is It Always About You? : The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism (2003) p. 28
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Sources
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