The ego is the part of the psyche that we most readily relate to as the self.
Freud described the ego as the part of the personality that enables the individual to delay immediate gratification.
Psychoanalysts refer to this crucial period of development as the beginning of object relations.
The term object relations may appear contrived, but it accurately describes the fact that the infants first relations are not only to people outside herself, but also to fragmented parts of her own developing mind.
The problem arises because narcissists love and admire themselves for qualities for which there is no adequate foundation.
Rather than being marked by realistic by self-worth, narcissism is characterised by unrealistic self-inflation, masking the absence of a mature sense of self.In very early childhood, when the baby’s mind and brain are still developing, it is thought that the baby is unable to distinguish between itself and the world around it.There is a magical omnipotent quality to the child’s experiences.These characteristics are now understood by psychoanalysts as a failure of the psyche to mature beyond the primitive fragmentation of the childish mind.One of the leading theories on narcissistic disorder, which is based on decades of clinical observation, focuses on how our minds develop from the earliest days of infancy.The child’s dawning, painful, realisation that external reality exists happens when the child’s mind is still a bundle of loosely interacting parts.Two of these parts, the ego and superego, are familiar to us from everyday discourse.Even when the mother is physically absent, she is now there in the child’s mind. It plays the role of the ever present mother, guarding over the thoughts and behaviour of the child, and crucially, comes to act as the source of conscience and guilt.In the infant’s primitive mind, two other psychic parts are also present that are less well known in popular discussion – the ego ideal and the narcissistic self.Physical discomfort from soiled nappies is magically dispelled when the infant cries out for this to happen.In these earliest days of development, the infant’s primitive mind is unable to distinguish between itself and the outside world.