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This is one of a series of Essential Papers books by the New York University Press; like the others, respectively devoted to borderline disorders, object relations, and depression, it is a collection of previously published papers devoted to divers aspects of its complex and controversial subject—narcissism in its various psychoanalytic meanings, definitions and usages. Like any other such work, the book contains those prior publications that convey its editor's preferences, biases and overall grasp of the subject. In this case, the editor's selections represent a felicitous balance of theoretical and clinical approaches and points of view developed over the years by some of the leading contributors to its subject and to the phenomenology and metapsychology of ego and self and their pathology. The timeliness of the editor's task in assembling the book's contents is underscored by the expanding impact, within psychoanalytic theory and praxis, of the so-called object-relations/deficit model, epitomized by latter-day self psychology (Kohut, 1977) in contrast to the “classical” drive/defense/structure model (Arlow and Brenner, 1964) and approaches that combine the two (Kernberg, 1982). The book is comprised of 17 previously published works organized in four parts: Part I—Landmark Contributions (three papers); Part II—Overviews (three papers); Part III—Differences in Theoretical Emphasis (eight papers, two under subhead “Self and Identity,” four under subhead “Object Relations,” two under subhead “Affective States”); and Part IV—Diagnostic and Therapeutic Applications (three papers). As is increasingly frequent in assembled works of this kind, each part is preceded by an editor's prefactory review and all four of these, plus the editor's introduction, are succinct, informative statements that deserve nearly as much reader attention as do the papers themselves.
The three “landmark” contributions of Part I are (of course) Freud's “On Narcissism—An Introduction,” Annie Reich