Healthy narcissism

Healthy narcissism is a concept that developed slowly out of the psychoanalytic tradition, and became popular in the late twentieth century.

The healthy narcissist has been characterised as possessing realistic self-esteem without being cut off from a shared emotional life, as the unhealthy narcissist tends to be.

Freud considered narcissism a natural part of the human makeup that, taken to extremes, prevents people from having meaningful relationships. While he recognised the allure of the narcissist for more normal people, he didn't have a concept of healthy narcissism as such. It was in the 1930s that Paul Federn introduced the concept to cover an adequate sense of self-love, but not until the 1970s in the work of Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut did the idea come to the fore. Kohut spoke of a child's "normal narcissism" and of normal narcissistic entitlement; and considered that if early narcissistic needs could be adequately met, the individual would move on to what he called a "mature form of positive self-esteem; self-confidence:" healthy narcissism.

Neville Symington challenged Kohut's belief in positive narcissism, arguing that "we do not get positive narcissism without self-hatred", or negative narcissism. While one could talk of healthy self-confidence and positive self-esteem or self-confidence, he considered that "it is meaningless to talk about healthy self-centredness" – that being the core of narcissism. Nevertheless, pop psychology has taken up the idea of healthy narcissism as an aid to self-assertion and success. It has indeed been suggested that it is useful to think of a continuum of narcissism, from the healthy to the pathological, with stable narcissism and destructive narcissism as stopping-points in between.

Ronnie Solan uses the metaphor of narcissism as an emotional-immune system for safeguarding the and the well-being of the individual against invasion by foreign sensations (1998) and small differences (Freud 1929–1930) was possible.

...
Wikipedia