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Few topics offer greater potential to reduce the world's suffering and misery than one that helps us better understand the role of greed, envy and narcissism at work in the underground cauldrons of the human psyche. It is somewhat helpful and not so difficult to develop an understanding of these factors with respect to the behaviour and attitudes of other people. But the great hope is we can go beyond this and begin to see the same forces at play within our groups and ourselves. The more subtle and complex manifestations of these are truly a challenge to unravel, and we would have little incentive to attempt this difficult task unless we could somehow be convinced that so much is at stake. So Berke deserves much credit for bringing this topic to our attention, offering helpful insight, and challenging us to think more about it.
He undertakes this important task with an engaging and literate style, harvesting material from a lifetime of original exploration and widespread curiosity. He is at his best when he enables us to understand and imagine quite empathically what it is like inside the psyche of a person experiencing the grip of these malevolent forces. He anchors the discussion in a useful theoretical frame, relying primarily on Freud, Klein and their followers. Remaining within this frame for the most part, he offers original and creative thoughts from his own work. However, despite these strengths, the book does prove to be disappointing.
Chief among its flaws is the tendency to get bogged down in theoretical discussions that veer off in obtuse and confusing directions. A second and related criticism is that Berke's heavy use of thinly developed examples gives the book more of an anecdotal than a cohesive analytic feel. One example is the quick mention Berke makes of Bernard Madoff, including the observation that ‘he seemed to harbor an unbearable grudge as a small penis person who could never be big enough. Consequently, he masterminded the greatest investment