Introduction
The notion of narcissism was fertile ground for combining psychological, political, and sociocultural critique for much of the twentieth century. In the 1970s and 1980s, narcissism became a key psychosocial trope, understood to be the psychological manifestation of a malaise running through capitalist consumer society. The concept has lacked serious academic scrutiny in the last 20 years or so, but it arguably needs rescuing from being cyclically rolled out as a tired conservative heuristic, and repositioned as a serious social psychoanalytic concept that can still contribute to meaningful critical dialogue about psychosocial realities in contemporary capitalist societies.
Definition
Freud was responsible for converting the metaphorical potential of the mythical figure of Narcissus into psychological currency, developing the concept in the essay “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1915). Freud distinguished between primary and secondary narcissism. Primary narcissism is a...
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Adams, M. (2014). Narcissism, Overview. In: Teo, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_590
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