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Combining a sweeping synthesis of analytic perspectives, attachment theory and neuroscience together with theory building on identity and affect, Marcus West in this book offers a rich, thoughtful model for analytic work with various personality types. The broad scope of the text also seeks to reconcile different analytic schools through a careful and precise set of descriptions of the self and the ego. Grounded in a minimum set of basic principles he endeavours to explain a large range of complex clinical and spiritual phenomena as well as arguing for a unified view of the root cause of the major personality disorders-all are postulated to derive from narcissistic difficulties.
The first chapter opens with a discussion of the clinical work that served as the impetus to write this book. West reveals his personal struggles with his patient Rachel and his attempts to understand the suffering occurring in the analysis despite his application of various theories and the painful limitations he experienced, which caused him to undergo his own explorations for what is truly mutative in analysis. The result is a unique amalgam that clearly had benefit for Rachel and others of his patients (a number of vignettes from other cases help to bring the theoretical material to life throughout the text) as well as for himself. If an archetypal pattern informs this book, it is the wounded healer; this reader feels West has earned knowledge of this pattern first hand.
Once the dangers and dilemmas of Rachel's case are put forth, such as the tendency to become stuck in malignant regression, the reader is invited to view the problems through a range of analytic lenses. A number of key concepts from different analytic perspectives are introduced at various points, e.g., from Freudian, Kleinian, Bionian, Lacanian, Jungian, and attachment theorists, but it is the work of Alan Schore that brings together the analytic and neuroscientific thinking that is key to West's model. This leads to a ce