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Contrary to what Freud apparently implied when he coined his concept of narcissism in 1914, each person’s libidinal cathexis of him or herself is not a primary spontaneous production, internal to the individual organism. Rather, it is a complex organisational process based on how each new subject perceives the quality of the cathexis received from the parents who gave birth to him. This seems to be rather well exemplified in two books published in Paris last year under the title Narcissism: each of the famous “narcissistic personalities” described in them had to endure a very trying parental cathexis. It should also be noted that Freud himself scattered his writings with indications of such a trans-individual and generational genesis of each individual’s narcissism. Moreover, he left us a fine self-analytical illustration of this in his famous 1936 letter to Romain Rolland.