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Normal and pathological narcissism in adolescence
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The confusion and contradictions imbuing the psychological world of the adolescent are perhaps surpassed only by the formulations created to explain them. Psychoanalytic writings by Blos(1) and A. Freud(2) state that psychic turmoil and regression are not just normative but are also essential for healthy development. Such emphasis led Adelson and Doehrman(3) to quip that, in the psychoanalytic literature, the adolescent is depicted as "miraculously holding on to his sanity, but doing so only by undertaking prodigies of defense" (p. 105). From this vantage point, it is extremely difficult to differentiate the normal crisis of adolescence from the pathological manifestations of disturbed youth.
Conversely, academic psychologists wax eloquently on adolescents' relentless expansion of cognitive, moral, social, coping, and adaptive capacities. The view from the academic perspective reveals young people mostly committed to a quest for truth, intolerant of adult hypocrisy, and feeling passionately and intensely about relationships and ideals. Current theories fail to adequately encompass the paradoxes of adolescence. The study of narcissistic regulation and narcissistic vulnerability does, however, provide a window onto the paradoxes marking normal and pathological development in adolescence. Better understanding these processes promises to illuminate a broad range of clinically and developmentally significant issues.
Perhaps like no other phase of life, the passage through adolescence bears the hallmarks of narcissistic vulnerability: a proneness to embarrassment and shame, acute self-consciousness and shyness, and painful questions about self-esteem and self-worth. How is this vulnerability different from pathological narcissism? To answer this question we must first examine the phenomenon of narcissistic regulation against the background of some evolving ideas about how subjective experience is organized and structured.
MOTIVATIONAL SYSTEMS, INTERNAL REPRESENTATIONAL MODELS, AND NARCISSITIC REGULATION
Over the past two decades, infancy studies(4,5) have produced an increasingly clearer and more coherent picture of the unfolding and structuring of infants' and...