In Psychoanalysis, the narcissism The term is inspired by the myth of Narcissus, who falls in love with his own image reflected in the water and drowns.

Love for oneself is an important aspect of the ego. Without a sufficiently strengthened ego, there would be no self-esteem, and we would not distinguish our psyche from the rest of nature. It is the narcissistic exaggeration that is the danger, for it traps the person in his or her self-truth, prevents empathy, self-criticism, and learning.

What are the three narcissistic wounds of humanity?

In his short text "A Trouble on the Road to Psychoanalysis" (1917), Sigmund Freud mentions three narcissistic wounds of humanity. Freud thus named three important moments in which science "dethroned" the human being from a grander and more omnipotent self-image. Psychoanalysis would be responsible for the third of these moments.

Thus, the human being, although he is the rational animal capable of elaborating these theories, sees himself as someone not so special, in certain respects.

Freud's writings certainly mobilized the society of his time in the direction of breaking paradigms as structured as the historical context itself lived in the transition between the 19th and 20th centuries. In the author's own words, the Psychoanalysis would constitute the third narcissistic wound of humanity.

Freud values these theories (the third one, inclusive, is the psychoanalytic theory itself) as important facts for the knowledge of the human condition itself.

Let's see what these wounds are:

First Narcissistic Wound

From the studies of Nicolaus Copernicus and modern astronomy, one can have the understanding that the Earth, and symbolically man, is not the center of the universe as was believed until then.

Thus, it hurts the human ego to realize that the planet on which the human being lives is part of a much larger Universe, multicentralized in galaxies and systems.

Second Narcissistic Wound

According to Charles Darwin's theory of the evolution of species, the human being is a part of the evolution of species. The physical constitution of the human being resembles that of other species (for example, in relation to the existing organs and body symmetry), which allowed Darwin to construct the theory of the existence of species in common, millions of years ago developing by mutation andnatural selection.

Thus, the human ego is wounded: although it is the species that has achieved rational evolution, it still the human being is an animal species with a history, organs, and mortality similar to other animals.

Third Narcissistic Wound

The third narcissistic wound, according to Freud, is of a psychological nature, that is, it takes off the pedestal the idea that the human has control over his psychic life. The philosopher (Saint) Augustine already said that there is nothing closer to me than myself; yet there is nothing I do not know more than myself .

In short, Augustine's text (separated by centuries from Freud) keeps the same Freudian idea of the third narcissistic wound. There is nothing with which the human being lives more than with himself. In fact, the human being "is" his own psychic experience, that is, only by this psychic self-perception he can affirm "who I am" and can know the world. But he can neither know nor completely dominate hisThis psychic nature is too immersed in itself, unable to look at itself "from the outside", because there is no "outsider .

We can say that the third narcissistic wound of humanity is Psychoanalysis itself, what it brings us. From the conceptual construction of unconscious Freud suggests that man's actions are strongly influenced by an instance that is beyond the control of rational understanding and, in itself, have primitive characteristics.

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That is, our drives and desires are to some extent animalistic, not rational. And our acts are not always consciously exercised. This can be seen even from the social science aspect: productive, cultural, and ideological human acts are passed on from one generation to the next, so that the current generation does not have a complete consciousness of choice.

From the perspective of psychoanalysis, the human being is not a individual (that is, a undivided ). The human being is divided Your mind has a huge non-conscious portion, just as an iceberg hides most of itself in the water.

Freud wrote:

These two discoveries - that the life of our sexual instincts cannot be entirely tamed, and that mental processes are themselves unconscious, and only reach the ego and submit to its control by means of incomplete and unreliable perceptions [...] represent the third blow to man's self-love, what I may call the psychological blow. (Freud, A Difficulty in thepath of psychoanalysis, 1917)

It is important to position that Freud was not an irrationalist But Freud had a difference with modern rationalism, in the sense that he did not conceive of an absolute (much less metaphysical) reason for understanding the human.

Understand "rationalism" as a philosophical line that became stronger in the Modern Age (for example, with Descartes). We can oppose rationalism to empiricism (for example, by Humes), which defended the idea that the senses and experience formed the human.

It may be possible bringing Freud closer to empiricism than to rationalism more from Humes/Aristotle than from Descartes/Platan, although Freud does not adopt the idea (dear to empiricism) that the human being is a "tabula rasa" precisely because the human being would possess (according to Freud) a innate psychic apparatus (that is, originating from its birth), of which the drives are examples.

According to the third narcissistic wound (brought by psychoanalysis), that which we value most and which differentiates us from other species (rationality) is only part of the human mind, and the great part of our mind would not be rational, would not be accessible to conscious reason.

This somehow hurts the human ego, by valuing a non-rational, non-conscious part of our mind .

This analysis by Freud of the narcissistic wounds of humanity is an example of his social psychology. That is, it is an example of psychoanalysis applied to the interpretation of interpersonal and social relationships. After all, Freud applies the concept of narcissism, customarily used for the characterization of an individual, to use it also with an idea of historically shared collective consciousness .

This article about the three narcissistic wounds according to Freud and Psychoanalysis was written by Paulo Vieira He is the content manager of the Training Course in Clinical Psychoanalysis.

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