This paper reviews conceptual, developmental, and clinical distinctions implicitly present in the psychoanalytic notions of narcissism and mourning. Those notions are discussed in the chronological range spanning from Freud's basic papers on those topics, to Winnicott's and Kohut's principles, to contemporary relational and intersubjective psychoanalytic theories. The text is organized so as to follow differences between narcissism and mourning on three levels: 1) through distinction between narcissism as a state of merging with the other who represents merely an object of desire, and mourning as a state of recognition of the other as a separate subject with independent agency and initiative; 2) through studying the sense of subjective time, where persons with narcissistic (pregenital, preoedipal) structures typically have problems in projecting their own future, delaying gratification, and gaining insight into differences between generations, while developmentally more mature personality types, besides the capacity to mourn, show capacities to experience time as linear, to function outside 'here and now,' and to face personal transience and mortality; 3) through comparison of reactions to phenomenon of mental pain: this experience defines mourning, whereas narcissism is one of the ways to evade it; furthermore, improvement in the capacity to bear mental pain is one of the indicators of developmental or clinical improvement and forms a basis for creative processes.