Healthy narcissism  Healthy narcissism is a positive sense of self that is in alignment with the greater good. The concept of healthy narcissism was first coined by Heinz Kohut. It developed slowly out of the psychoanalytic tradition, and became popular in the late twentieth century. Freud considered narcissism a natural part of the human makeup that, taken to extremes, prevents people from having meaningful relationships. While he recognised the allure of the narcissist for more normal people, he didn't have a concept of healthy narcissism as such. In the 1930s Paul Federn introduced the concept to cover an adequate sense of self-love, but it was not until the 1970s through the work of Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut did the idea come to the fore. Kohut spoke of a child's "normal narcissism" and of normal narcissistic entitlement; and considered that if early narcissistic needs could be adequately met, the individual would move on to what he called a "mature form of positive self-esteem; self-confidence:" healthy narcissism. Neville Symington challenged Kohut's belief in positive narcissism, arguing that "we do not get positive narcissism without self-hatred" or negative narcissism. While one could talk of healthy self-confidence and positive self-esteem or self-confidence, he considered that "it is meaningless to talk about healthy self-centredness" – that being the core of narcissism. Nevertheless, the concept of healthy narcissism is used clinical psychology and popular psychology as an aid to self-assertion and success. It has indeed been suggested that it is useful to think of a continuum of narcissism, from the healthy to the pathological, with stable narcissism and destructive narcissism as stopping-points in between. Healthy narcissism was first conceptualized by Heinz Kohut, who used the descriptor "normal narcissism." In Kohut's tradition, the features of healthy narcissism are:   Ronnie Solan uses the metaphor of narcissism as an emotional-immune system for safeguarding the familiarity and the well-being of the individual against invasion by foreign sensations (1998) and small differences (Freud 1929–1930). The innate immunization vacillates between well-being, in the presence of the familiar, and alertness as well as vulnerability, facing the stranger. In childhood, the familiar is tempting and the strangeness is intolerable from within (illness) or from outside (otherness). Hence, narcissistic immunization might be compared to the activity of the biological immunological system that identifies the familiar protein of the cell and rejects the foreign protein (bacteria, virus).