T he ambiguities and transformations of Freud's thought
on the concept of narcissism during the last years of his
life are a good yardstick of the complexity and the
confusion of this concept, of the different views put forward,
and of the various theoretical and clinical applications of the
concept to date.

I shall start with some comments on the work of Béla Grunberger
( 1971), who, of all French writers on narcissism, is
certainly the greatest authority. Grunberger falls directly into
line with Freud's second scheme, which takes narcissism as a
starting point for the development of the mind in the pre-object
and prenatal phases, characterized by a state of beatitude, the
remembrance of foetal reality, an emotional state devoid of
object-relations, a state of unadulterated omnipotence and
immaterial eminence or elation. The original ego-libido and
object-libido relation proposed by Freud in On Narcissism...
( 1914c) has been reversed. The greater the subject's libidinal
ego cathexis, the greater his libidinal availability for the object,
which means that ego-libido corresponds in equal measure to
object-libido.

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