Narcissism and Narcissistic Abuse in Relationships (Part XV)

Early Freudianism

Regarding the adult neurotic's sense of omnipotence, Sigmund Freud said that "this belief is a frank acknowledgement of a relic of the old megalomania of infancy"; and concluded that: "we can detect an element of megalomania in most other forms of paranoic disorder. We are justified in assuming that this megalomania is essentially of an infantile nature, and that, as development proceeds, it is sacrificed to social considerations."

In The Psychology of Gambling (1957), Edmund Bergler considered megalomania to be a normal occurrence in the psychology of a child, a condition later reactivated in adult life, if the individual takes up the vice of gambling.  In The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946), Otto Fenichel said that people who, in their later lives, respond with denial to their own narcissistic rage and narcissistic injury, and usually undergo a similar regression to the megalomania of childhood.

Object relations

In the second half of the 20th century, in contrast to Freud's perspective that megalomania is an obstacle to psychoanalysis, in the U.S. and in Britain, Kleinian psychologists used the object relations theory to re-evaluate megalomania as a defense mechanism, a circumstance that offered the psychotherapist access to the patient for treatment. Such a Kleinian therapeutic approach built upon Heinz Kohut's view of narcissistic megalomania as an aspect of normal mental development, by contrast with Otto Kernberg's consideration of such grandiosity as a pathological distortion of normal psychologic development.

Society and culture

In popular culture, narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is also known as megalomania.

Criticism

The Norwegian study, Validity Aspects of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Narcissistic Personality Disorder Construct (2011) concluded that narcissism should be conceived as personality dimensions pertinent to the entire range of personality disorders, rather than as a distinct diagnostic category. In the study Debates on the Narcissism Conundrum: Trait, Domain, Dimension, Type, or Disorder? (2012) examining the past literature about NPD, the researchers Renato Alarcón and Silvana Sarabia concluded that narcissistic personality disorder "shows nosological inconsistency, and that its consideration as a trait domain needed further research would be strongly beneficial to the field."