Normal Narcissism in the Age of Trump: The Americanization of Narcissism by E. Lunbeck (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2014;  367 pp.) The Right to Narcissism: The Case for an Im-possible Self-Love by P. DeArmitt (New York:  Fordham University Press, 2014;  192 pp.). Narcissism and Its Discontents by J. Walsh (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2015;  182 pp.);

Psychoanalysis is at once a theory of human development, a therapeutic modality for the treatment of neurotic illness and character pathology in children and adults, and an interpretative strategy in the cultural analysis and interpretation of group pathology at the societal level (Galatarioutou, 2005). ‘Narcissism’ as a Freudian category offers an effective illustration of the appeal of this multi-level Freudian hermeneutics and the attendant limitations, particularly as narcissism carries normative overtones that invariably become political at all three levels of analysis.

In our present moment, Donald Trump's obnoxious campaign and his unstable presidency of the United States of America have brought clinical notions of ‘malignant narcissism’ into the public consciousness and produced no shortage of armchair diagnoses, more often than not from people who usually know better than to make such pronouncements without direct observation of the patient. Trump himself would appear to