Hurt Narcisssism and construction of identity

Abstract: In psychopathology the concept of borderline patients in the early nineties is completely updated nowadays. The clinic of psychoanalytical psychotherapy shows that, today, patients suffer more and more from historical and social fractions. Hundred years ago, the early psychoanalysts thought that sexual liberation would help for more individual freedom but even after the 1968 movement, patients still suffer in the same way. The content has only changed. Narcissism goes together with identity and our modern times encourage the search of our own identity. The general tendency is much more about a struggle for reinforcement of narcissism. Two clinical examples about the transgenerational hurt (German women who were raped in wartime and the historical omerta about these deportations) and the phenomenon of tilt during the games (such as competitions of poker as an international attraction) are compared with some other clinical examples such as the lack of consent, which appeared with the # me too – movement, or the rising of radicalization. At the first glance, these cases are quite different but the nature of emptiness and the feeling of being in pieces are experienced in the same way for all patients. Actually, the interaction of broken narcissism and societal reconstruction is a new phenomenon in psychoanalytical approach. The authors, who are specialized in this kind of clinic, discuss how to deal with the frontiers of a transgenerational and societal unconscious in analysis or psychotherapy, looking for an individual (re)construction of narcissism and the concept of identity.