Self-Love

Genuine love is an expression of productiveness and implies care, respect, responsibility and knowledge

The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth, freedom is rooted in one's capacity to love, i.e., in care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge.

Selfish person does not love himself; in fact he hate himself. ~ He seems to care too much for himself, but actually he only makes an unsuccessful sttempt to cover up and compensate for his failure to care for his real self. Freud holds that the selfish person is narcissistic, as if he had withdrawn his love from others and turned it toward his own person. 

It is easier to understand selfishness by comparing it with greedy concern for others, as we find it, for instance, in an oversolicitous mother. While she consciously believes that she is particularly fond of her child, she has acutally a deeply repressed hostility toward the object of her concern. She is overconcerned not because she loves the child too much, but because she has to compensate for lack of capacity to love him at all.