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This new book by Phil Mollon is the result of over forty years work, both clinical and theoretical, on narcissistic disturbance. In the foreword to his first book, The Fragile Self, Malcolm Pines notes that while working at the Tavistock Clinic, they shared an interest in the concepts of the self, the diagnoses of borderline personality, borderline states, and narcissistic personality disorder, noting that “… much of their everyday work was concerned with such patients with whom it was, more often than not, difficult to conduct therapies” (Pines, 1993, p. v).
Classical psychoanalysis didn't have a lot to offer in this field, possibly because the preponderance of patients with pathologies of the self, as they are defined, is essentially a post-World War II phenomenon, and a reflection of Western culture as noted by Christopher Lasch, a cultural historian, in his best-selling book entitled The Culture of Narcissism (1979).
Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom. (Lasch, 1979, p. 248)
This is even more true today than it was when Lasch wrote it.
Mollon doesn't refer to Lasch's writings, but in the first chapter of this latest volume he makes links with social and political themes inviting the reader, while not mentioning any names, to consider some of our present-day political leaders who:
… are often rather popular and see