You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dr Rothstein is a faculty member of the Psychoanalytic Center of Columbia University and teaches psychoanalytic theory and technique to undergraduate students, medical students, psychiatric residents and analyst candidates.
Rothstein states that he wrote this book to clarify the theory of narcissism. The first edition seems to have been written early on in his career as an analyst and the illustrative material drawn almost entirely from writings by Tolstoy and John Fowler. The second revised edition, under review here, contains in Part I some of Rothstein's own clinical material and he has added chapters on clinical aspects of narcissistic disorder.
In Part I (122 pp.) the author discusses theoretical considerations. In a scholarly exposition he expounds his views on narcissism in relation to those of Freud and more than fifty other psychoanalytic authors. He gives much attention to the views of Kohut and Kernberg. There are numerous quotations on almost every page. Rothstein defines narcissism as ‘a felt quality of perfection’; ‘an ubiquitous aspect of human experience that facilitates distortion of one's sense of reality particularly … of one's sense of vulnerability and finiteness’. In the ‘pre-individuated era’ narcissistic perfection is felt to be part of a self that includes within it qualities of an object narcissistically perceived as perfect: ‘most knowing, most powerful, most beautiful etc.’ He suggests that narcissism is neither healthy nor pathological but manifests itself along a spectrum from psychotic to normal, according to the manner in which the ego integrates it. ‘It is the goal of analysis to identify the nature of the analysand's