Lies and narcissism

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The life of the Vienna-born writer Stefan Zweig, whose centenary will be on November 28th, 1981, is portrayed in the light of some external data. His works - mainly novellas - in which the theme of suicide plays a central role, are briefly presented, and his preference for describing psychological borderline and extreme states is stressed. One of his first poems and his last one - more than forty years lie between them - are discussed with reference to his depression and suicidal tendencies. Zweig, who at least since the First World war had been periodically suffering from depressions, was looked after and in a sense also treated by his first wife Friderike von Winternitz, until he had to leave his home in Salzburg in 1935...

Shame is a central human affect, reflecting feelings of defect, inferiority, and failure of the self. It is, therefore, a proper focus for psychoanalytic treatment. Beginning with Freud's seminal attention to narcissism and the ego ideal, the possibility for studying shame and its relation to the ego ideal (i.e. the loving function of the superego) was inherent in psychoanalytic theory, but Freud's pursuit of intrapsychic conflict and the punitive superego postponed further elaboration of shame. Interest in the relation of the ego ideal to the superego (Hartmann, 1950; Reich, 1954), and in the ideal self (Sandler et al...

A segment of the psychotherapy with a schizophrenic woman and her psychological testing are presented in this paper. The authors focus on the role of the idealizing transference, and illustrate how its operation, along with the mechanisms of fusion, basic trust, and narcissistic alliance, facilitates the process of therapeutically transforming this patient's object representations. Changes in her hallucinations and delusions reflected this process. The idealizing transference may be more generally applicable in the treatment of individuals with schizophrenic psychosis than was previously thought...

Through a review of Freud's views of transference and a presentation of case material, various aspects of transference are examined and discussed. Freud used the concept of transference not only clinically as related to the person of the analyst, but also in his theory of psychology. Both are linked by the theory that the origins of the transference lie in the intrapsychic processes and the unconscious conflicts of patients, and account for his repeated emphasis regarding the central aspect of transference resistance...

Central to the dynamics that underlie women's conflicts about their own autonomous achievements are the reappraised psychoanalytic concepts of penis envy and masochism. These ideas need not be abandoned because of the phallocentric bias that is responsible for their initial formulation. When they are conceptualized as serving defensive ego-maintaining functions for the woman, their richness in expressing aspects of women's psychological experiences becomes evident. Both culturally ascribed meanings to physiological differences and the physical differences themselves have an impact on an individual's developing psychological sense of self, and of self in relation to others...

The significance of 'Beyond the pleasure principle' (BPP) cannot be understood by focusing solely on its manifest content. BPP is the product of theoretical displacements and compromise formations the motivation for which lies in the innovations introduced in 'On narcissism'. These innovations threatened assumptions about conflict and rationality inherent in Freud's libido theory. In BPP Freud attempts to resolve these questions by recasting primary narcissism as an 'inorganic unity'. The coherence of BPP can be restored if we un do these displacements and read its latent content...

Family research studies confirm that abusive parents tend to be undifferentiated partners who compete with each other and with their children for attention and nurturance. More or less healthy parents make demands on children to counteract their own injured narcissism, but they do so largely without devaluation and the sadistic use of projective identification. Under sufficient stress abusive parents attack the child who fails to gratify their needs, thereby giving vent to longstanding frustrations and feelings of being threatened by the child's individuation and competency...

Object-relations theories share a number of core assumptions that require reconsideration in the light of empirical data. These include the assumptions that (1) a continuum of development is isomorphic with a continuum of pathology, (2) the origin of severe character pathology lies in the pre-oedipal period, (3) certain features of borderline object relations (such as splitting and narcissism) are transcended normatively by the oedipal period, (4) 'object relations' is a unitary phenomenon or developmental line, (5) object-relational stages are culturally invariant, and (6) clinical data from pathological adults are necessary and largely sufficient for constructing and evaluating theories of object relations...

As a means for presenting Sartre's insights into the narcissistic problems of the self, we have used his phenomenological system as articulated in Being and Nothingness (1943) to illuminate these issues in the personality of Roquentin, the hero of his novel Nausea (1938). Roquentin attempts to stabilize his fragmenting self and to avoid "nausea" by using three mechanisms which Sartre argues maintain the self from drowning in the objects of the self. These are "reflection," "temporality" (continuity through time), and "being-for-others" (how we experience another's view of ourselves)...