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While Narcissism may be said to have taken its place in our literature beginning with Freud's attempts (Freud, 1914) to accommodate the not-so-obviously sexual expressions missing from his Sexualtheorie, an explosion of interest in pathological Narcissistic disturbances began some 50 years ago in the Roaring Seventies (aka the Sixties). I was in training in the USA during those years. We candidates would toddle off to packed conference halls to listen to the lightning chess champions of psychoanalytic theory work out their differing manners of thinking of and strategically treating pathological narcissistic states. Freud had considered such disturbances to be lost behind a stone wall of Narcissism and, therefore, inaccessible to his methods. Kohut and Kernberg, Masterson and Meissner, Searles, Volkan and Langs and many others would disagree on specifics of what constituted these personality disorders that didn't fit the conflict model of neuroses that separated Freud from Breuer in the 1890's. Many of mes confrères et mes soeurs found comfort, too, in discovering the origins of much of this thinking in the Middle British Object Relations School (i.e., in between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein) and the growing neo-Kleinian School with Rosenfeld and Segal, Winnicott and the Symingtons and Spillius and Britton and others providing similar syntheses of the old and the new in the UK psychoanalytic community.
Perhaps, it was my previous training as a Mathematician that had me looking for what I perceived as less complex models. I designated my constructs elemental, which in Mathematics describes theories that don't depend on other difficult theorems but rather grow out of experience-near ideas and observations. Some others saw my work as elementary, in the sense of my having missed the point. I concluded that the oedipal, for instance, represented special cases of the difficulty we human-folk have in accepting the subjectivity of another. When the youngster canno