In psychoanalytical terms, narcissism refers to a phase of self-love in which the sexual object of desire is the self, representing a regression. The work of post-Freudians, particularly Melanie KLEIN, helped explain the precise process by which this is converted to a continuing disorder. Klein's research with children showed that, in early stages, a child makes no distinction between his/her ego and the surrounding environment. Failure to qualify this in later stages locks the individual into a kind of fusion of self with object images. The inability to differentiate between fantasy arid reality may lead the individual to internalize images of beauty youth, wealth and omnipotence, a ‘grandiose’ conception of the self, which acts as a defence against all that seems bad in the environment.
Sociologically, the term is most recently associated with Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism (1991). Lasch employs the concept to characterize a profound cultural change in which a particular ‘therapeutic outlook and sensibility’ has come to exert an all-pervading effect on modern society. This outlook reinforces ‘a pattern created by other cultural influences, in which the individual endlessly examines himself for signs of ageing and ill health, for telltale symptoms of psychic stress, for blemishes and flaws that might diminish his attractiveness’. There are obvious connections, but also important differences of emphasis, between Lasch's thesis and GIDDENS (1991) proposal of identity crises in late modern society, where an intensified focus on the body and its presentation is a way of creating, sustaining and stabilizing the self (see Shilling, 1993). Thus, for Giddens, unlike Lasch, contemporary ‘regimes of the body’ are often positive.