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Giorgio Sassanelli is a member of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society who lives and works in Rome. His latest book continues his personal in-depth theoretical and clinical exploration of the subject of narcissism. In Le basi narcisistiche della personalità [The narcissistic foundations of the personality] (1992) and L'Io e lo specchio [The ego and the mirror] (1989), he had concentrated on the place of narcissism in normal and pathological early development, whereas, in his more recent La psicoanalisi e i suoi miti [Psychoanalysis and its myths] (1997), narcissism is re-examined mainly from the point of view of its manifestations within the analytic relationship. However, this new book shows the author adopting a more system-atised theoretico-clinical approach to narcissism.
It is surely not easy to make an original contribution to the body of psychoanalytic research on narcissism. Apart from the commonly accepted definition, which does not greatly differ from Freud's notion of a libidinal tendency directed towards the self, the theory of narcissism is one of the most controversial issues in psychoanalysis.
This tendency of libido towards the self in fact calls for multiple definitions. First, it must be defined in terms of intrapsychic dynamics—of the rebalancing of the various psychic agencies to which it necessarily gives rise (its relations with the ego, the ego ideal and so on). Second, there is the drive aspect: to what extent can this drive be treated as such, given its particular aim? Third is the psychogenetic viewpoint: what are the engine and purpose of this tendency? And last but not least, what of the relations between normal and pathological narcissism (cf. the well-known Kohut-Kernberg controversy)? This raises the question of narcissistic pathology, which has not yet been unequivocally systematised: the term ‘narcissistic personality’ is used in a strict sense by Kernberg, who distinguishes it from the borderline personality; Green uses it in a wider