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Heinz Kohut taught us to understand ourselves as narcissists, all, more or less, vulnerable to fragmentation depending on our early relational luck and later selfobject resources. Thinking developmentally, he stretched the reach of our empathic grasp, and thus of psychoanalysis, to include treatment of many sufferers† previously excluded as unanalyzable. Now comes Daniel Shaw (2014), writing in his own firm voice but with resonances also from Ferenczi, Suttie, Balint, Fairbairn, Loewald, and Winnicott,† describing the narcissist run amok. He tells us that, when despotic parents, cult leaders, totalitarians in political systems, or authoritarians in psychoanalytic institutes wreak their havoc, the next generation will need our care and understanding in ways quite specific to these “relational systems of subjugation.”
This book belongs on my shelf between Leonard Shengold’s Soul Murder (Shengold, 1989) and Bernard Brandchaft’s pathological accommodation work (Brandchaft, Doctors, and Sorter, 2010). To these irreplaceable resources, Shaw adds not only his extensive studies of the precise mechanisms of soul destruction in cults and cult-like groups (such as allegedly therapeutic cults and the large group awareness trainings
The Latin root of “patient” is patior, to suffer.
This group seems to comprise his most fundamental group of influences, starting with his influential article on analytic love (Shaw, 2003), although he now seems more surefooted in, and committed to, the “relational canon” (Harris, 2011) of Aron, Benjamin, Bromberg, Ghent, Harris, I. Z. Hoffman, and Mitchell.
[LGATs])† as well as his own description of cult-like families ruled by traumatizing narcissists. Like Brandchaft, he bravely points out the traumatizing pitfalls involved in psychoanalytic training, even in institutes without the perilous training analyst system. Supervisors with the best of intentions can, instead of helping each younger clinician to develop a personal style or idiom, become na