Destructive Narcissism and Its Vicissitudes in Transference

The notion of destructive narcissism was introduced by Herbert Rosenfeld in the 1960s. I had the opportunity of being in analysis with him and to assist in the birth of this idea and its use within the transference. In this article, I give examples of it in the analyses of a child, adults, and a schizophrenic patient. The way I analyse and interpret the unconscious destructive fantasy and “act”, the patient feels narcissistically injured at the very moment that he feels helped. The ideology of destructive narcissism seems paradoxical : for the patient, defiance of the analysis is more important than being helped or even than living. We can see the implications of this in the psychopathology of today’s political and religious worlds. As a student of Melanie Klein’s, I show in the analysis of a small child, attacks on the mother and father when the paranoid schizoid position is dominant. Then, envious, resentful attacks dominate the scene. All this appears vividly in the transference when unconscious and conscious violence manifest themselves at the very moment that the narcissistic Ego feels injured. It feels injured when finding that the other can give or offer him something that he cannot accept in a position dominated by arrogance and contempt for the enviously admired object.