The Narcissistic Condition: A Fact of our Lives and Times. Ed. by Marie Coleman Nelson. Foreword by Benjamin Nelson. New York:  Human Sciences Press, 1977.  300 pp.

Few concepts have been as forcefully thrust to the fore of psychoanalytic theory and practice in recent years as that of narcissism. Marie Nelson's timely volume addresses a crucial challenge to both clinical practice and the comprehension of contemporary society. Benjamin Nelson's foreword makes this reciprocal relationship between the clinical and the social incisively clear.

Ann B. Johnson provides insight into the narcissism of alienated students, and Joel Emanuel investigates the enormous demands upon the teacher of such pupils. Samuel Rubin raises critical theoretical questions regarding the relationship of narcissism to masochism and aggression.

In a lively and imaginative chapter, Hyman Spotnitz presents a fantasied course of modern analysis with the original Narcissus of antiquity, and he supplies the actual dialogue that might ensue were that tragic youth to find his way to the analytic couch. It is surprising how much contemporary reality Spotnitz is able to inject into this dialogue across a gulf of two thousand years. The therapeutic yield of this psychoanalytic interaction is a program of