Revista Brasileira de Psicanálise
Print version ISSN 0486-641X
Abstract
NEVES, Leticia Tavares. Narcissism: according to Heinz Kohut and intersubjectivity. Rev. bras. psicanál [online]. 2014, vol.48, n.3, pp.57-68. ISSN 0486-641X.
The term “narcissism” served as an adjective for the culture in which we operate, in the 20th and 21st centuries, as a synonym for emotional shallowness, egotism, arrogance, emotional detachment, hedonism, etc. These discourses have provided an opening for the questioning about the impact of social changes in our subjectivities. However, what we observed was the spillover of the negative and pathological view of the concept to cultural processes. This reinforced the moralistic and discriminatory view of the term. In this paper, complying to the invitation I was given, I will write about Heinz Kohut and his conceptualization of narcissism, adding the notions of context and of co-creation that were added to psychoanalytic self psychology by theorists of intersubjectivity and relational psychoanalysis.
Keywords : narcissism; selfobject; selfobject transferences; intersubjectivity; context.