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The book begins with the working hypothesis that omnipotence is a concept as well as a mechanism. Emphasizing that the topic remains undeveloped as a metapsychological subject, Jean Arundale proposes to study this through the clinical experiences of psychoanalysts of differing orientations. Defining omnipotence as a phantasy by the ego, she asks the following questions: Where does omnipotence originate, what purpose does it serve and why is it so difficult to relinquish? The book is divided into three sections: the first concentrates on the chronological appearance of omnipotence, the second deals with the difficulty in relinquishing omnipotence, and the final section examines the influence of omnipotent thought in the wider psycho-social sphere.
The first three chapters, under the section title “In the Beginning … ”, emphasize the point that omnipotence is a natural state. Joan Symington, in her paper entitled “The Survival Function of Primitive Omnipotence”, based on baby observations at the Tavistock Clinic, argues that it is necessary to differentiate the fear of physical disintegration from a more psychological sense of fragmentation and opens the debate of the frontier between the soma and the psyche as well as the dilemma of the origins of anxiety. Lesley Steyn, in “The Thumb-in-the-Mouth Phantasy and the Capacity to Love”, demonstrates how her patient needed to regress to a “garden of Eden” to hide from her shame of not being able to love. Steyn argues that omnipotence arises as a narcissistic regressive response to a lack of belief in one’s own life force that stems from a failure in the developing environment. Kathleen Kelley-Lainé, in “Peter Pan, the Omnipotent Child”, reinforces an idea similar to those of the two previous authors that omnipotence is a natural state of affairs for the human infant. Through a presentation of an adult patient who survived the holocaust as a child, she bases her hypothesis on the premise that there is such a thing as primary