This revolutionary paper of Freud's both identifies a crucial stratum of human psychology – narcissism – and makes far-reaching and compelling claims about the relationship between that trait and other constituents of our mental life. The paper ranges widely in the process, anticipating many later developments of the theory, such as the formation of a superego. Although a bit unwieldy on that account, it compels our attention for those anticipations as well as for its introduction of a novel and critical concept.

Our emotional lives are formed and sustained by our relationships with other people. Primary among these relationships are those with the people we love, our love objects; initially these are our parents or other caregivers. We enter into these relationships from birth, though at first experience only the conglomerate of impressions we will later come to know as self, other, and what happens between them.

Love, in Freud's conceptualization, is a constituent of the sexual instincts. The sexual instincts operate from birth and ultimately organize around reproduction, but, as we saw in Chapter 1, they pass through a number of transitional phases before reaching that point. Freud terms our earliest sexuality autoerotic, in its striving for the attainment of various kinds of pleasure on the body, independent of any external object. Narcissism surfaces as a first integration of the sexual instincts, in which we take ourselves, rather than an external other, as love object. An object relations stage follows whereby sexual activities do assume an external object.

First Freud identifies narcissism as both a disposition in human mental life and a phase in development. He next illustrates the condition via examples from pathology and normal life. He concludes with a case for the continuation of narcissism in our attitude toward what he here calls the ego-ideal and in later writings, the superego.