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Like any other upper middle-class lad growing up in 1950s post-colonial India, I was deeply engrossed in cricket. Playing the game was only one part of the immersion. One played the game, memorised all sorts of records, developed transferences to various teams and players, and made up acronyms and alliterations for cataloguing one's fund of knowledge. Two such formulas that stand out in mind even today were the ‘Three Ws’ (Worrell, Wolcott and Weeks) and ‘Three Ss’ (Sobers, Solomon and Smith) representing the six great cricket players of West Indies.
All this comes to mind as I note that the book under review belongs to a sort of series by the ‘Three Gs’ of Chicago, that is, Goldberg, Gedo and Giovacchini. Boyish cleverness aside, the fact is that these three senior and distinguished analysts from one particular institute in the United States have recently written books with many common elements. Goldberg's The Prisonhouse of Psychoanalysis (1990) is a robust critique of orthodoxy, hero worship and ritualism rampant in psychoanalysis and its institutions. Gedo's Spleen and Nostalgia (1997) is a no-holds-barred account of how psychoanalysis has evolved during his long and outstanding career in the field. Giovacchini's Impact of Narcissism has shades of both these books. To be sure, there are differences in the three books. Goldberg's book is a plea to overcome stagnation and think anew our cherished propositions and practices. Giovacchini's book, in contrast, is a reminder to us of the explanatory power inherent in models he feels we might be leaving behind. Gedo's book is more of a professional autobiography than a theoretical tract. It is more colourful than the books by Goldberg or Giovacchini. Despite such differences, the three books have a lot in common. All of them show the impact of a common setting, especially in the way the figure of Heinz Kohut (a teacher and senior colleague of the three authors) looms in their backgrounds. All are personal in nature, fill