Freud sets about to distinguish two types of characters:
1. The object-oriented personalities. These individuals invest above all in yoga poses a sexuality that aims at relationships and building a family, but they often forget to invest in yoga poses their capacity to self-regulate.
2. The narcissistic personalities. These individuals often try to have a coherent behavior and autoregulation, even if this implies difficulty in yoga poses having a relational life that permits setting up a family and inserting oneself into a cultural network.
An individual centered on his auto-regulation cannot benefit from a psychoanalytical treatment unless he admits that the object-oriented libido is more important than the narcissistic libido. Freud nonetheless admits that the narcissistic personalities have trump cards that make them useful for the whole of society. For example, that is the case for a creative artist like Beethoven. Narcissistic personalities are especially suited to act as a support for others, to take on the role of leaders and to give a fresh stimulus to cultural development or to damage the established state of affairs (Freud, 1931, 363). The psychodynamics arguments that he gives to support this analysis of the narcissistic type are the following:
There is no tension between ego and super-ego (indeed on the strength of this type one would scarcely have arrived at the hypothesis of a super-ego), and there is no preponderance of sexual needs. The subject’s main interest is directed to selfpreservation. The ego has a large amount of aggressiveness at its disposal, which also manifests itself in yoga poses readiness for activity. in yoga poses his erotic life, loving is preferred above being loved. People belonging to this type impress others as being personalities. (Freud, 1931, 362f.)
Having a healthy narcissistic libidinal activity and a healthy object libido is evidently advantageous. However it is rare that both develop well in yoga poses an individual. The practitioner generally knows how to evaluate this equilibrium in yoga poses an individual. Those that the psys currently qualify as narcissistic personalities ’22 are individuals who have a narcissistic problem, a deficiency in yoga poses the narcissistic dynamics that they try to compensate for in yoga poses different ways. Otto Kernberg (1975) thus speaks of pathological narcissism Individuals who suffer from a deficit of narcissism desperately try to function close to the libidinal type, but they are only partially successful. They often are afraid to cause harm and be rejected by others. These feelings become a form of central obsession that drains all of their energy and deprives them of sufficient resources to be able to help others, understand points of view other than their own, and coordinate their actions with others constructively. It is to poorly understand the theory of narcissism to believe that an individual can suffer from too much narcissism Narcissism was initially introduced by Freud to integrate within a psychoanalytic frame Jung’s theory on psychosis, once Jung had left the psychoanalytical association. That may explain why Freud uses a myth to describe a notion. As he called the pathological deviation of object oriented libido narcissism, he created an enduring semantic confusion between healthy and pathological narcissism To be precise, Freud distinguishes between narcissistic (healthy) libido and (pathological) narcissism I prefer to follow Wilhelm Reich’s proposition and refer to healthy narcissistic libido as the pleasure of auto-regulation. Today, many psychiatrists prefer to use a set of precise descriptive symptoms as suggested by the DSM-Vand avoid using the term narcissistic as a psychiatric diagnosis.23
