You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
“It is said that God created man in his image, but man created God in the image of himself as a fetus, and does not want to stop identifying with it.” In this way, Bela Grunberger enunciates his main thesis regarding man's narcissistic striving for total, unconditional, unconnected, effortless, and pure gratification in reliving the existence of a fetus in the womb in postnatal life.
He explains his return to a subject that is familiar to those who know his work by stressing the pedagogic benefit derived from repetition, and he points out correctly that “I never repeat myself without introducing some new element which modifies the perspective I have adopted” (p. x). He demonstrates the many ramifications of his basic assumption, widens the scope of its applicability, and sensitizes the reader to a phenomenon he discovers in many unexpected contexts: the universe of narcissism in its ongoing conflict with the claims and limitations inherent in man's biological existence. He detects and describes the repercussions of the basic antagonism between the narcissistic and the oedipal attitudes on the practice of psychoanalysis and its training program. He suggests its relevance to the concept of the superego, and he applies his understanding to perversion and social phenomena such as antisemitism.
These “new essays” are therefore new only in the sense that most of them have not been published in English before and that Grunberger enters into territories not traversed in his first collection published here in 1979. The focus of his interest remains constant; it has been his lifetime study and he has become a master at ferreting out the narcissistic universe in its many guises and disguises. Repeatedly, and in many different contexts, Grunberger analyzes the conflict between, on one side, narcissism, with its tendency to withdrawal, absolutes, and fantasizing, and, on the other, anality, with its striving for mastery, incorporating aggression against real objects, the tolerance