You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Giovacchini tackles a number of interrelated topics in this stimulating book. His title aptly condenses several of his interests—the impact of narcissism on the patient; the impact of narcissism on the analyst; and the impact that the narcissism of each has on the other. Giovacchini won me over in his preface, where he eloquently laments the loss of what he calls the “intrapsychic focus” in contemporary psychoanalysis. Although the author has himself challenged traditional analytic beliefs during his long and productive career, he feels that we have gone too far in abandoning some of Freud's core discoveries about the role of unconscious conflicts in psychopathology. For example, he cites reductionistic theories of pathogenesis that restrict themselves to childhood trauma alone or organic factors alone. He argues that proponents of some analytic movements are motivated primarily by narcissistic needs to challenge the status quo with their innovations. Although he characterizes his attitude toward classical theory as “ambivalent,” Giovacchini might agree with Leo Rangell (1985), who advocates a total composite theory rather than the pars pro toto fallacy of so many contemporary analytic theories that select one perspective on the mind and dismiss all others. Giovacchini gets impatient when he feels that the proponents of ostensibly new contributions to the field ignore the similar ideas of their predecessors. At the same time, he fails to mention attachment theory and newer thinking about dissociative identity disorder, both of which are relevant to much of his clinical material.
Giovacchini alludes to one of the forces that breed intolerance in our field: the quasireligious nature of various analytic orthodoxies and heterodoxies. He writes of analysts who venerate Freud as an “icon” (p. 8), of the “religious atmosphere” of strict Freudians (p. 13), and of the elevation of Freud or founders of competing schools to “sainthood” (p. 62). One way of interpreting our “cont