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J. Fiscalini and A. L. Grey, eds., Narcissism and the Interpersonal Self. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
THE PSYCHOANALYST MEETS A very real human struggle in each clinical hour. Unfortunately, the romanticism of psychoanalytic commentary mystifies the difficulty of this struggle by imposing upon it a loftiness of mythic proportion. The struggle is in adequately joining the other, who is the patient, as he or she wrestles with the deceptively knotty task of self recognition. The mystification is that our explanations for the particulars of what we do in the talking therapy are anchored firmly in imaginative but potentially restrictive metapsychological constructs. As analysts, we chose exigetical paths which channel our thoughts and actions. Finding ourselves in unfamiliar territory, we look for familiar trailmarkers, less interested in learning the lay of the land than in allaying our discomforts as we negotiate our progress.
The title of John Fiscalini's and Alan Grey's important collection of essays, Narcissism and the Interpersonal Self, reflects the tension between the competitive arguments of psychoanalytic explanatory traditions and analysts' anxieties within the daily work of late twentieth century psychoanalysis. The persuasively subversive subtext which connects the essays is that American psychoanalysis, despite institutional and individual diversities, is on a recognizably common road. Contemporary attention to the clinical problems of narcissism has moved the evolving center of clinical psychoanalysis to the explicit study of interpersonal relations.
Each of us struggles with the task of defining a personal perspective in relation to that shifting but critical criterion, the viewpoint of the other. The conscious or unconscious defensive operations which secure the uncertainty of the interpersonal self within