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Borderline and narcissistic conditions have been hot topics in psychoanalytic discourse for at least 20 years. When a new work on such a popular topic appears, one is led to wonder what it can contribute to the extant literature. In his new book, Rinsley summarizes his thoughts regarding the nature,
development, and treatment of these personality disorders. Rinsley is in the tradition of Kernberg in drawing on both drive and object relations theory in his psychological theorizing. He also draws on such other popular luminaries as Masterson, Klein, Mahler, Adler, and Kohut. Rinsley appears to be a theoretical integrationist by nature, seeking similarities in the work of these and other authors rather than heightening the differences. The reader gets no hint, for instance, of the acrimony that accompanied the Kernberg-Kohut debate for so many years.
As with Masterson, the concept of abandonment depression is central to Rinsley's thinking. According to this view, borderlines suffer abandonment depression whenever faced with steps toward growth, whereas narcissists experience it either when threatened with the possibility of meaningful relationships or when sufficient approbative mirroring is not provided. Both difficulties are presumed to be caused by early developmental experiences with the mother and maintained, at least through adolescence, by later experiences. Borderlines were subjected to rewards for passivity and rejection when they took steps toward growth. While narcissists, in contrast, were simultaneously denied satisfaction of their dependency needs and pushed to become active too quickly. Identification with a persecutory maternal introject leads to a lifelong tendency toward characterological depression always seen, Rinsley claims, in narcissistic personalities.
Rinsley is in the tradition of those analysts who believe that they understand the truth about patients and have the job of getting the patients to acknowledge this truth and to develop the psychi