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The contemporary debate surrounding the theory and treatment of narcissism is the point of departure and unifying thread chosen by Italian psychoanalyst and neurophysiologist Mauro Mancia, in his latest book, in which he links his views on a broad range of theoretical and clinical issues, which include the defensive modalities that operate in narcissistic personalities, the use of countertransference, the function of affects and memory in
psychoanalysis, guilt and its transformations, and creativity and the origins of thought In the Gaze of Narcissus contains a collection of 12 essays, written over a span of 15 years, presented so that they follow the evolution of Mancia's thinking
A historical survey in the first three chapters traces the current conflicting theories of narcissism back to the layering, complexities, and unresolved difficulties in Freud's thought
After he introduced the concept of the death instinct in 1920, Freud referred to narcissism only occasionally Following a path opened by Rosenfeld, Mancia contends that Freud's view in Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915) that the narcissistic ego's first reaction to the external (object) world was repulsion and hate, links the death instinct with the pleasurable narcissistic situation, and pain with the object relation, thereby connecting the 1914 concept of narcissism, the narcissistic neurosis, resistances to treatment, negative therapeutic reaction, and the death instinct in the last phase of Freud's work Mancia discusses the conceptions of narcissism subsequently elaborated by Grunberger, Green, Rosenfeld, Kohut, Kernberg, and others both in Europe and North America, and brilliantly exposes those implicit in Klein's formulations of the paranoid-schizoid position and of envy, and in Bion's elucidation of the operations of the psychotic part of the personality opposing mental growth.
Being of the post-Kleinian fold, Mancia believes that recognizing the impact of primitive defensive modalities like proj