We have utilized the differing approaches, clinical and theoretical, of Kernberg and Kohut, in the area of narcissistic personalities, to demonstrate the effects of the assumptions of reductionism and non-reductionism on the ways of observing, ordering, conceptualizing, and applying psychoanalytic data. We have further attempted to sketch briefly the advantages, psychoanalytically, of a model of a hierarchically organized psychic system of man—including a supra-ordinate self. Such a model is explicitly compatible with non-reductionism as a mode of scientific explanation.