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Jorge Maldonado's eminently clinical collection of essays is a readable, thoughtful, quite original work. Some of Maldonado's papers have been published in English in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, so readers may already be familiar with some of his ideas (1984, 1987, 1989, 1993, 1999, 2003, 2005).
Maldonado belongs to a generation of Argentine psychoanalysts who, having been immersed in Freud, Klein, and the post-Kleinians, opened themselves to influences from a wide spectrum of French authors beyond Lacan, such as Didier Anzieu and André Green. Thus, his exquisite attunement to clinical problems comes from a varied and profound theoretical background. As Horacio Etchegoyen notes in a warm and laudatory prologue, Maldonado approaches the problems narcissistic patients pose by emphasizing that the greatest difficulty is their manifest lack of interest in investigating their psychic reality. The world of representation is inaccessible to them, or meaningless. They live in a world of action; their curiosity, only apparently extinguished, is transformed into voyeurism focused on the analyst and the analyst's task. The narcissistic patient seems impermeable to knowledge.
As Maldonado points out, psychic reality emerges from the tolerance of the object's absence, which then permits creation of the symbol. Further, Maldonado stresses that beyond Freud's delineation of the opposition love/hate (1915), there is indifference, the hallmark of narcissistic personalities. However, in a highly original formulation, Maldonado maintains that the narcissistic personality desperately needs the object, the other who will show he is affected by the contempt implied in the indifference.
The book is divided into three sections: Theoretical Aspects; Narcissism in Clinical Experience; and Disturbances in the Analytic Process. There is in addition an appendix, Problems regarding Mourning and Trauma.
In the first part, Maldonado addresses the general characteristics and varieties