| Abstrakt: |
This article discusses treatment techniques for borderline and narcissistic personalities. Object relations theory has all but taken over ego psychology as theoreticians have turned their attention both to the intrapsychic process of object relations and the personality distortions resulting from early narcissistic traumas, injuries and disappointment in interpersonal relations. These are held to contain the origins of borderline and narcissistic disorders. Since both personality disorders relate to narcissistic injuries in attachment, theorists in the fields of object relations, ego developmental psychology and self-psychology have focused on the subject of narcissism. Sigmund Freud, Edith Jacobson and such object relations theorists as Otto Kernberg describe the early period of life after the child emerges from is autoerotic state as being in a primary narcissistic state in which omnipotent and magical thinking predominate, with object relations emerging as the child's relatedness to the parents and to others in the environment eventually shifts from the pleasure principle to the reality principle. It is an intrapsychic process. In this stage, The child firsts cathected to itself and then, as it becomes a separate self cathects to those who gratify it. |
