Below is a checklist for assessing features of Freud’s primary (“infantile”) narcissism in mature adults.

Primary Narcissism Checklist

The following heuristic checklist can be used for identifying the psychoanalytic features of primary/infantile narcissism as they appear in adult-observable signs. High scores mean the person still organizes experience as if the infantile position were intact.

Rate each item:

0 = rarely / not characteristic
1 = sometimes / situational
2 = frequent / organizing
3 = pervasive / defining

I. Incomplete self–other differentiation

The other is not fully a separate center of experience.

1. Treats other people’s time, body, attention, or resources as naturally available extensions of their own need.
2. Speaks as if their inner state should be obvious without having to communicate it.
3. Experiences another person’s separate agenda as an attack or abandonment rather than ordinary otherness.
4. Has difficulty sustaining curiosity about what the other actually feels, wants, or thinks apart from how it reflects on them.
5. Uses people as functions (soother, audience, supply, mirror) more than as subjects with their own interior.

II. Omnipotence of wish / thought

Reality is expected to conform to inner demand.

6. Assumes wanting something strongly should be enough to make it happen.
7. Treats limits, delays, and “no” as illegitimate rather than as facts.
8. Explains setbacks as someone else’s failure, malice, or incompetence rather than as constraint.
9. Shows magical or quasi-magical certainty (“it will work because I decided it”).
10. Experiences ordinary frustration as catastrophe or insult, not as information.

III. Preserved infantile centrality

The self is still the unmarked center.

11. Expects priority, exemption, or special handling without reciprocal obligation.
12. Experiences being one among many as humiliation.
13. Needs the environment to confirm uniqueness, brilliance, or exceptionality to stay regulated.
14. Parental/caretaking figures (or current substitutes) are still supposed to exist for them, not as people with their own lives.
15. Praise feels like oxygen; neutrality feels like starvation.

IV. Pleasure principle over reality principle (self-domain)

The self is not fully submitted to shared reality.

16. Rules, queues, timing, and mutuality apply to others more than to them.
17. Can intellectualize reality while emotionally refusing it when it wounds self-feeling.
18. Rapidly rewrites events so they remain the injured or exalted party.
19. Accountability lands as persecution.
20. Comfort, stimulation, and restoration of self-feeling outrank the cost to others.

V. Narcissistic object-choice

Love/attachment is organized around the self, not the other’s separate being.

21. Chooses partners/friends who enhance, reflect, or stabilize their self-image.
22. Idealizes intensely, then devalues when the other shows ordinary limitation.
23. Love is contingent on admiration, compliance, or fusion.
24. Empathy appears mainly when the other is useful to self-regulation.
25. Separation is experienced as annihilation or theft, not as loss of a distinct person.

VI. Narcissistic injury and restoration

The old omnipotent bubble bursts, then is patched.

26. Minor slights produce rage, contempt, collapse, or icy withdrawal.
27. Shame is unbearable and is quickly converted into blame, superiority, or disappearance.
28. After injury, must restore the inflated or fused self (triumph, revenge, new supply, grand plan).
29. Cannot stay in the ordinary depressive position: “I am limited and so are they.”
30. Apology, grief, and repair are thin compared with self-restoration.

How to read it

Add the 30 items (range 0–90).

0–25: ordinary adult residues; everyone has some.
26–45: noticeable infantile organization under stress.
46–65: primary-narcissistic position is still a major regulator of relationships and reality-testing.
66–90: the adult still lives much of the time as if the world were an extension of an unweaned self.

Look at clusters, not just the total. A high score in I + II + V is more specific to primary/infantile structure than a high score only in entitlement or grandiosity (those can come from later, secondary narcissism).

Distinctions that matter

Primary / infantile: the other was never fully constituted as other; omnipotence was never fully given up.
Secondary narcissism: object-love was reached, then withdrawn back onto the self after injury.
Ordinary selfishness: choice, not a structural inability to register the other.

*Use the above tool as a grid for patterns across time and relationships, not as a one-sitting quiz.

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See also: Romantic Chivalry, Gender, and Infantile Narcissism