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Psychoanalytic exploration of the phenomena of narcissism and the theoretical reformulations that study has engendered have stimulated both controversy and growth. The shape of our science is
changing, and the present period of revision and disagreement is part of the process of growth.
Jean Bergeret, a French psychoanalyst from Lyon with considerable clinical experience, offers us another exposition and formulation of these phenomena in his recent work, Depression and Borderline States. His book is divided into three sections. The first spells out his clinical theory, the second outlines a nosology based on that theory, and the third elucidates his clinical approach.
In the theoretical section, the author offers the notion that there are three distinct lines of development—psychotic, neurotic, and borderline. Using Fleiss's ontogenetic table, he assigns a libidinal fixation point to each and holds that the nature of the subsequent evolution is determined by the nature of the psychic apparatus at the point of fixation. The psychotic line of development is quite stable. It stems from a very early (oral to anal-expulsive) fixation when the ego is not yet whole. The psychotic line of development essentially is an evolution of a fragmented ego. Such an evolution can produce either a stable character type, which he calls the psychotic character, or an unstable decompensation of the character organization, a psychosis. This psychotic organization, whether stable or in decompensation, is always characterized by these attributes: denial of reality, primacy of narcissistic libido and the pleasure principle, decathexis of objects, and various projective phenomena.
The neurotic line of development, on the other hand, takes it origin and structure from a full oedipal experience. That experience must include libidinal investment in genitality and the triangular object relations and conflicts resulting from those instinctual vicissitudes. The consequent psychological s