This book is a quite wonderful weaving of the mythological and the clinical perspectives as applied to the interpretation of narcissistic character disorders, the focus of much recent psychoanalytic attention. Rich in case material and specific illustrations, Schwartz-Salant's study shows also how inadequate a merely diagnostic perspective is to an understanding of the phenomenon of narcissism. Clinical data and phenomena, as psychoanalysts like Kernberg and even Kohut fail to understand, are only partial manifestations of an entire mythic structure. Similarly, individual version of myths, like Ovid's of the Narcissus story, are always only selective retellings of larger tales, as is Freud's version of the Oedipus story, onesided though illuminating. As we study the variants of a particular myth, we realize that nothing short of full attention to each detail can give an accurate picture of the psychological dimensions of the myth.

What Schwartz-Salant does in his analysis is show how