O narcisismo na perspectiva de Otto Kernberg

Abstract

Otto Kernberg is a contemporary psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who was interested in the treatment of people with severely disturbed personalities, especially borderline and narcissistic patients. He proposed specific hypotheses about narcissism and proposed technical innovations for the treatment of narcissistic pathologies. Despite the importance of his contributions, Otto Kernberg is an author that has not been studied much. The present work proposes to investigate, in a systematic way, the hypotheses about narcissism elaborated by Otto Kernberg and to analyze to what extent he expands and deepens the Freudian psychoanalytic conception of narcissism and narcissistic pathologies. As a theoretical support, Freudian writings were analyzed in addition to books and articles by Kernberg that deal with narcissism. We seek to demonstrate that the perspective of neurosis and psychosis, adopted by most psychoanalytic theories, is insufficient to address the phenomenon of narcissism. The analysis of the psychological characteristics of narcissistic personality disorders reveals that there is a more complex dimension of narcissism, mainly linked to aggressiveness, which is essential for understanding this phenomenon.