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In this book, Miller combines two papers that have been published in English translation (Miller, 1979a, 1979b) with an unpublished third chapter entitled “Über Verachtung” (on contempt). The great value of this book rests in its keen clinical understanding and vivid description of certain pathogenic developmental processes which are not only very common in the population at large but particularly typical for persons who seek psychoanalytic therapy and training.
A drastic condensation cannot do justice to Miller's views, least of all to what she has to say about the therapeutic process; still I have no choice but to state some of her major theses briefly as follows (with some of the quotes taken from her own summaries:
If a person has not received a mothering figure's “appropriate emotional response, mirroring and respect”, that is: the “right narcissistic supplies”, he or she will not develop the ability to experience his feelings as belonging to his own self. As a result, he will continue to search for
narcissistic supplies for the rest of his life and find the most suitable objects for this in his own children while they are very young and at his complete disposal. Children who are endowed with great sensitivity for the feeling responses of others will quickly learn to adapt to the narcissistic needs of such a person. They will “give the mother all the mirroring, consideration and admiration which she has missed as a child.” The result will be that “in spite of excellent performance such a child's true self cannot develop”, so that as an adult he will suffer from narcissistic vulnerability and strive to find at last “an available mother in his own child, partner or, if he has become a psychoanalyst, in his patient.”
“Whereas ‘healthy narcissism’ can be characterized as the full access to the true self” the narcissistic disturbance can be seen as “the intrapsychic heir to the narcissistic cathexis of the child by his parent. In order to maintain the object's love