Introduction

The seven books reviewed in this issue focus on four topics: destructive impulses, narcissistic disorders, feminism, and therapeutic technique.

Two new books with a psychoanalytic orientation discuss the death wish in unfamiliar contexts.

The review of Nathan Schwartz-Salant's book on narcissism by Jonathan J. Goldberg discusses parallels between the Narcissus myth, clinical phenomena and the prevalence of narcissistic character disorders as illustrative of Jung's idea of evolution within the archetypes. On the subject of narcissistic disorders, June Bernstein reports the positions staked out by leading classical psychoanalysts in the collection of essays edited by Harold P. Blum. She finds them theoretically astute, but lacking new approaches to treatment. Marie C. Nelson defends Jule Eisenbud's hypothesis that paranormal foreknowledge is a form of thought transference. The patient aims his death wish at others by means of psychokinetic influences. Whether the outcome is the foretold disaster depends, as in the case of conscious goals, on what opposing factors arise. Equally unusual are Velikovsky's extensions of Freud's idea of the compulsion to repeat unconscious racially inherited memories. As reported by Deborah Margolis, Velikovsky fears that our present destructive technology makes possible the repetition of traumas the human race suffered when we survived pre-historic natural catastrophes.

Jane Goldberg, in her review of essays on women and psychotherapy