'Original narcissism' or the shadow of a philosophy of history.

Abstract

Upon reading again the third chapter of Totem and Taboo it becomes clear that it was the English eighteenth-century philosophers and their followers who inspired in Freud his conception of a universal history of man's evolution. This paper analyses, in particular the links between this Weltanschauung and notions such as narcissism, omnipotence of thoughts and the Freudian 'history of the libido's development' (Entwicklungsgeschichte der Libido), the latter usually being considered as the results of clinical observations.