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goal, he tended to view narcissism as something the child needs to grow out of. However presaging some of the findings of self-psychology, Freud did come to view the ongoing power of infantile narcissism as related to the maintenance of self-esteem which is achieved by the fulfillment of one’s ego ideals, loving an other who possesses qualities found in that ideal, or by being loved. In the paper “On Narcissism” Freud indicates, among the object choices “according to the narcissistic type …someone who was once a part of himself” (1914, p.90), as being among the ways that bring the human being toward the choice of the object. The hope and expectation from analytic treatment on part of the patient then become the hope for “the cure by love” (ibid, p.101). In the 1930s the term Self is again introduced as an equivalent to the Ego, when Freud, as pointed above, states: “Normally, there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, of our own ego” (1930a, p. 65). By claiming that, in “setting up the object inside the ego …”, through introjection, incorporation and identification, “the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object cathexes”, Freud (1923, p.29) seemed to indicate that what later theorists would term “the self”, developed through the gradual replacement of the child’s libidinal strivings for the parents, with identifications. This is in consonance with the earlier papers “On Narcissism” (Freud 1914), and “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud 1917). Thus the concept of identification provides for a link between the intrapsychic and interpersonal world of the child. Identification also allowed for “reality” to play a more major role in self-development, paving the way for post-Freudian schools and conceptualizations of the Self and its development within Ego Psychology, British and North American Object Relations, Self-Psychology, and Interpersonal-Relational perspectives. III. Bb. Roots in Sándor Ferenczi A forefather of relational/interpersonal psychoanalysis, Sándor Ferenczi (1913; 1929; 1932/1949) split with Freud over their differences as to the role traumatizing reality plays in the creation of psychopathology. Ferenczi viewed traumatic experience as that which is generally perpetrated on a child by malevolent others and viewed the pathology that follows as caused by a split in the self (dissociation) which serves to protect the child from unbearable thoughts and feelings. This view of a trauma as generating dissociation psychopathology, viewed by some as an elaboration of the ‘seduction hypothesis’ proposed by Freud in 1896, is remarkably close to contemporary relational theories of Philip M. Bromberg and Donnell Stern. Ferenczi is also credited for perhaps presaging self-psychology, in his emphasis on the pivotal role of the empathic caretaker in the development of a healthy sense of self. Overall, Ferenczi viewed pathologies of the self as resulting from empathic failures the most extreme of which constituted trauma.
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