In Psychology
Early Freudianism saw a feeling of omnipotence as intrinsic to early childhood. 'As Freud and Ferenczi have shown, the child lives in a sort of megalomania for a long period...the "fiction of omnipotence"'. At birth. 'the baby is everything as far as he knows - "all powerful"...every step he takes towards establishing his own limits and boundaries will be painful because he'll have to lose this original God-like feeling of omnipotence'.
Freud considered that in a neurotic 'the omnipotence which he ascribed to his thoughts and feelings...is a frank acknowledgement of a relic of the old megalomania of infancy'. In some narcissists, the 'period of primary narcissism which subjectively did not need any objects and was entirely independent...may be retained or regressively regained..."omnipotent" behavior'.
D. W. Winnicott took a more positive view of a belief in early omnipotence, seeing it as essential to the child's well-being; and "good-enough" mothering as essential to enable the child to 'cope with the immense shock of loss of omnipotence' - as opposed to whatever 'prematurely forces it out of its narcissistic universe'.
Read more about this topic: Omnipotence
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