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Dr Rothstein is a New York psychoanalyst and faculty member of the Psychoanalytic Center of Columbia University. He is dissatisfied with the present state of theories of narcissism and narcissistic personality, and proposes a synthesis, based predominantly on the views of Freud, W. Reich, Mahler and Kohut, which he feels clarifies and makes an extension. The term ‘narcissism’ he believes should be limited to a felt quality of perfection which can be experienced whether in self, or object, representations.
His book begins with two quotations from the novels of John Fowles which convey the feelings which pervade Rothstein's analytical approach. ‘We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of homo sapiens’, from The French Lieutenant's Woman, and ‘The moth battered minutely at the lampshade. There were others, loosely constellated on the glass outside the window over the work table, pale fawn specks of delicate, foolish organisms, yearning for the impossible’, from The Ebony Tower.
All narcissism and narcissistic perfection is the same; it is, he writes, ‘a defensive distortion of reality, an affectively laden fantasy based on the original projection of the self-object bliss of the symbiotic phase’. Its loss is a ubiquitous developmental insult from which few, if any human beings ever recover. Freud's 1923 formulations of ego development are