NARCISSISM, nar-sls'sizm'. In the newer analytic psychology Narcissism is the stage in the development of the human psyche, when the ego derives the gratifications of its libido (q.v.) from the projections of its own mental states. In the development of the child the autoerotic pleasures derived from merely mas turbatory sources in different parts of the body give way, in the average individual near or after the time of puberty, to a need for gain ing satisfactions from activities exercised upon the world of external reality and not upon self. In the love life of the individual this change from autoerotism to the final selection of the love object of the opposite sex passes through a stage called Narcissism. Thus the child takes pleasure in or pain from the treatment it gels from other people in contradistinction to the adult satisfaction of giving pleasure or inflicting pain on other people. That is, the child, re ceiving as it does the pleasure at first solely from its own states and activities, learns event ually through experience to associate pleasur able and painful sensations with certain ex ternal happenings; e.g., from having burned itself it associates pain with the sight of a stove or a match, and from having gotten pleas ure from eating jam, it associates the pleasure with the jam. Or, if it eats too much, and is of the proper grade of intelligence, it may as sociate unpleasant feelings with jam. At any rate there is here a projection (see MECHAN ISMS, MENTAL) of the really subjective pleas ure or pain feeling, which is thereby attributed to the jam as a quality which jam uniformly has. This process, which is psychological, but not logical, is the same as that carried out when the child forms a concept of another person. Therefore the concept of this other person than itself is made up of feelings which really belong to the child but which it irrationally attributes to other persons.
The intermediate transitional stage in the development is where the individual not merely regards his own body as a source of gratifi cation (pure erotism) but with absolute naiveté looks upon his own personality or some other which he identifies with himself in the same light as he will later regard the true object love. That is, the autoerotic satisfaction comes
from an exercise of the child's own body on itself or, as is seen in day-dreaming, or ro mancing of almost any kind, from an exercise of its own mind with its own mental ma terial, uncorrelated with external reality. In the Narcissistic stage of the development of the human psyche the young person shifts from a crassly subjective form of gratification of the libido to a more objective form, without, however, realizing the actual differences be tween the projections of his own mind and the concrete facts of the characters of other people. The narcissistic youth finds some other per son to love, but naively endows that other with his own qualities, not making, or per haps not able to make, the necessary discrimi nations between what he thinks the other is and what the other really is. Thus a young person will find some other personality at tractive and suppose that because some ele ments of the other are agreeable, the rest of the elements are so, and be very much dis turbed, if not disordered, at the occasional out croppings of uncongenial traits. Just as in the legend of Narcissus, who is fabled to have fallen in love with his own reflection which he perchance saw in a pool, and later to have pined away in ungratified desire for the being he saw but could never touch, so the ordinary person of to-day may, through constitution or lack of proper training, become a modern Narcissus, who desires merely the gratification of his projected unconscious wishes. He thinks his own thoughts will be given external reality simply by wishing for it, either unable or unwilling to see the discrepancy between his essentially autoerotic desires and the actual na ture of external reality. The average child is taught by experience to derive satisfaction from exerting the limit of his ability upon ex ternal reality in order to make it conform to his wishes, and to take so much pleasure from the exertion that there will be no pain from the necessary disappointment of his wishes. This the fabled Narcissus never did, but tried again and again to embrace the beautiful being in the pool, where the average youth would have seen the impracticability of such action.