The Manipulator: A Psychoanalytic View. Ben Bursten. New Haven, Conn.:  Yale University Press, 1973.  ix + 277 pp.

This is, for the most part, a good book—solid, sensible, and closely reasoned. It is a pleasure to read in the way a well-designed parkway is a pleasure to drive on. It is smooth, it flows easily, and the viewpoints, though not arresting, are interesting.

It is refreshing to read a new book by a psychoanalyst, not a psychoanalysis apologist and not a psychoanalysis attacker more motivated to take on the “big man” than to criticize or explore, but simply an analyst allowing his mind to play across a problem. Bursten has no desire to make reality squeal in the grip of a theoretical system, no itch to scratch his way toward a preconception. The author has no axe to grind; he sees both the flaws and the necessities in other points of view.

As for the subject matter, the characters are as varied and motley a cast as were ever dealt up by a mystery writer: the manipulator, the impostor, the special-privileged patient, the V.I.P. patient, and the Baron Mundhausen character. From the appearance of Machiavelli in literature to the emergence on the clinical scene of studies of malingerers, impostors, and other persons leading fraudulent lives, the enigma of the personality of the manipulator has exerted a certain fascination. Even Hollywood was intrigued and gave us Tony Curtis as The Impostor. The more subtle manipulator is often uncommonly successful, rising at times to positions of prominence in business, industry, and politics, even to the presidency of countries, our own included.

The manipulative patient vexes us, drains us, provokes us, and challenges us more than any other. Manipulative behavior cuts across diagnostic boundaries. While prominent in the personality makeup both of narcissistic and of antisocial personalities, it is also observed in psychotics, neurotics, and people never classified as patients, as well as other therapists (never ourselves).

First, Bursten delineates four characteristics of manipulative behavior: (1) it must involve a conflict of goals betwe