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In his review of the history of narcissism as an analytic concept, which forms the initial chapter of this book, David Livingstone Smith makes the observation that psychoanalytic theory does not present itself as a clear and articulated whole, like a Georgian city, but rather as something which has grown organically, over time. In reading through this excellent collection of papers one has the sense of gaining an enormous wealth of insight and understanding, which accumulates, in a similar fashion, organically from one paper to another, but which is never forced into the form of an overarching, general conceptualization.
The concept of narcissism itself is a particularly complex one, having evolved over decades of analytic thinking from a single metapsychological category to include what can be a bewildering range of theories and assumptions, which both characterize and explain a variety of clinical phenomena. The strength of this particular study lies in the directness with which the authors have approached the phenomena of narcissism and have evoked the quality of narcissistic preoccupations and relationships in generous clinical vignettes, and in the sense of authenticity which one feels in each author's struggle to formulate an understanding of his or her experience with patients.
The book is made up of thirteen chapters which are organized in three sections: ‘Overviews’, ‘Narcissism in the Life Cycle’ and ‘Clinical Aspects of Narcissism’. In his chapter on the historical background of the concept, Livingstone Smith provides both a summary of how key figures such as Freud, Klein and Ferenczi conceived of narcissism and a lucid account of the function which this had for each of them in the dynamics of their understanding of the human mind and its motivation. The chapter is particularly useful because it brings into focus from the start the question which runs through the book: how much we may think of the narcissistic insistence of the patients described, and of ou