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In his book, Transforming Narcissism, Frank Lachmann (2008) suggested that Don Quixote is the world's “quintessential searcher” (p. 216). However, Lachmann himself may rival Quixote for this title: Not only does Lachmann tilt at windmills, so to speak, but he seems actually to harness their power. In this book, he fulfills what appears at first to be just an impossible dream: the dream of transforming Kohut's 20th-century theory of narcissism into a broad and deeply satisfying 21st-century understanding of psychological life through its transformations, as they emerge in their dyadic systems contexts of parent–child interactions and the sociocultural surrounds.
The book (Lachmann, 2008) is organized into three sections whose titles are “Transformation,” “Expectations,” and “Reflections.” In Part 1, “Transformation,” Lachmann explores the process of transforming, in general, followed by a chapter on two forms of communication, the implicit and explicit, both of which may contribute to or detract from positive psychological transformations. In these chapters, he brings to bear his extensive
understanding and profound integration of up-to-the-minute infant–caregiver research, emphasizing the transformation of affect as the central process through which all psychic change comes about. He then devotes two chapters to empathy. In the first of these, he posits an inborn, neurologically based developmental forerunner of empathy that operates at the implicit level, involving no linguistic or symbolic capacities. In the second empathy chapter, he describes the possibility (but not the inevitability) for this precursor of empathy to mature into what he calls “empathic understanding”—a complex psychic achievement that requires language, symbolic functioning, declarative memory, imagination, and much more. Lachmann then gives us a chapter on humor in psychoanalysis. In each of these chapters, he offers prodigious clinical material that illuminates his theorizing w