Narcissistic supply

Building on Freud's concept of narcissistic satisfaction^[3] and on the work of his colleague the psychoanalyst Karl Abraham,^[4] Fenichel highlighted the narcissistic need in early development for supplies to enable young children to maintain a sense of mental equilibrium.^[5] He identified two main strategies for obtaining such narcissistic supplies—aggression and ingratiation—contrasting styles of approach which could later develop into the sadistic and the submissive respectively.^[6]

A childhood loss of essential supplies was for Fenichel key to a depressive disposition, as well as to a tendency to seek compensatory narcissistic supplies thereafter.^[7] Impulse neuroses, addictions including love addiction and gambling, were all seen by him as products of the struggle for supplies in later life.^[8] Psychoanalyst Ernst Simmel (1920) had earlier considered neurotic gambling as an attempt to regain primitive love and attention in an adult context.^[9]

Psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg considered the malignant narcissistic criminal to be coldly characterised by a disregard of others unless they could be idealised as sources of narcissistic supply.^[10] Self psychologist Heinz Kohut saw those with narcissistic personality disorder as disintegrating mentally when cut off from a regular source of narcissistic supply.^[11] Those providing supply to such figures may be treated as if they are a part of the narcissist, in an eclipse of all personal boundaries.^[12]

• Flattery
• Narcissistic mortification
• Narcissistic rage and narcissistic injury
• Narcissistic withdrawal