The origin of the word “narcissism”

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the origin of the word “narcissism” beginning with the earliest clinical descriptions and theories associated with this phenomenon. Our purpose is to adopt a diachronic view in order to follow, and interpret, a psychiatric clinical picture from the late nineteenth century, built around the term. For this purpose we take up texts by the first theorists of narcissism — Alfred Binet, Havelock Ellis, Paul Näcke and Richard von Krafft-Ebing — and show how each one conceived this notion. We were then able to examine entries on narcissism and its origins, mostly in dictionaries of psychoanalysis.