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This book was very well received in the popular press. Unfortunately, some of the reasons for this popular reception make it less useful than it might be to the professional reader. The book's simplicity, for example, is both an asset and a liability. I admire the author's clarity, which she achieves mainly by avoiding analytic jargon. In so doing, however, she oversimplifies the real complexity of the psyche, and does this to a degree which often is exceedingly misleading. Since this is damning in a book addressed to clinicians, let me elaborate. The author's theme is a simple one, and owes much to Winnicott and Kohut. (She also gives credit to Mahler, but I find her to be quite distant from what I would consider to be Mahler's point of view.) Briefly stated, it is as follows. For the development of a solid sense of self—a healthy narcissism—a child needs an atmosphere of regard and respect for his feelings. Mothers who are emotionally insecure maintain their own narcissistic equilibrium by having the child behave in a particular way, a way not necessarily congruent with the child's own feelings. Children perceive this and respond by unconsciously taking on this assigned role and developing a "false self." Character traits and symptoms are manifestations of one aspect or another of their struggle to maintain this false self and keep their true self undeveloped and out of the realm of conscious experience.
This kind of formulation, in which all psychopathology is seen as originating in one particular aspect of psychic development, lends itself to being simplistic. There are certain patients who, in a very broad way, can be seen as having been treated by their parents primarily as narcissistic objects, whose parents failed to empathize with and to give validity to their own feelings rather than their compliant behavior, patients in whom all of this has led to a central problem very aptly conceptualize in terms of a true and a false self. But all of us ha