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Caroline Rupprecht has done a remarkable job researching the work of three modernist women writers - Henriette Hardenburg, Djuna Barnes and Unica Zürn - and drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Freud, Lacan, Klein and others, in order to generate a gender politics that purports to break, if one is to believe the reviewer on the back of the book, ‘preconceived notions of identity and subjectivity through [the] reading of the ‘transgressive potential’ of narcissism.’ Indeed, Rupprecht meticulously reassembles discourses of various kinds - psychoanalysis, literary studies, historical documents and so on - and produces a kaleidoscopic picture of these writers, all of whom, at one point, engaged with and related to identity politics either as a thematic or biographical focus. Rupprecht has produced a veritable ‘Fleissarbeit’ (hard work), divided into two main sections: ‘Paradigms of Narcissism’ and ‘Avant-Garde Women.’
In the first part, Rupprecht outlines with extraordinary sagacity the psychoanalytic theory that has influenced Freud's paper ‘On Narcissism,’ and introduces theorists who, in one way or another, have contributed to the concept of narcissism. In providing a theoretical framework within and against which the author attempts to place the work of the above writers, Rupprecht implicitly underscores the importance of narcissism in the development of psychoanalysis. She ends her introduction by surveying object relations theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, although, at various moments in her work (for instance, on p. 27), she fails to do justice to the complexity of these theories. Given the scope and range of this ‘Fleissarbeit’ - in fact, nothing seems to escape Rupprecht's critical eye - it is striking that she does not revisit Torok and Abraham's concept of narcissism. To achieve something new, and to provide a comprehensive study of narcissism as a richly layered psychoanalytic and cultural phenomenon - without risking the pitfalls of oversimplification o