Excerpt on narcissism from Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration.  Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts 1988. Copyright Stephen A. Mitchell 1988

Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration. Excerpt Pp. 179 - 234. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts 1988.

Copyright Stephen A. Mitchell 1988.

In this world only play, play as artists and children engage in it, exhibits coming-to-be and passing away, structuring and destroying ... And as children and artists play, so plays the everliving fire. It constructs and destroys, all in innocence ... Transforming itself into water and earth, it builds towers of sand like a child at the seashore, piles them up and tramples them down ... The ever self-renewing impulse to play calls new worlds into being. The child throws its toys away from time to time-and starts again, in innocent caprice. But when it does build, it combines and joins and forms its structures regularly, conforming to inner laws. -NIETZSCHE

In unveiling narcissism as a powerful undercurrent of human experience, Freud pointed to the similarities among the megalomania of the schizophrenic, the magical thinking of "primitive" (non-Western) peoples, the blind infatuation of the lover, and the "childish," doting adulation of parents toward their offspring. The common element in these states, Freud argued, is "overvaluation"-whatever is being considered, whether in oneself or in another, is inflated in importance, its powers exaggerated, its unique perfections extolled. The narcissistic overvaluations of the schizophrenic, the primitive, the lover, the parent, are all secondary derivatives of a more fundamental narcissistic condition, Freud argued, which constitutes the earliest stage of psychic development. Freud portrays the state of primary narcissism as one of total omnipotence, perfection, completeness. The infant imagines himself as constituting the entire universe, or certainly all that is good and pleasurable in it.

Although the state of primary narcissism cannot be maintained for long in a world of inevitable frustrations and increasing parental expectations, the original narcissistic experience, in Freud's view, is not wholly renounced. Much of narcissistic libido is transformed into object libido, self-gratification replaced by drive gratifications facilitated by others as libidinal objects. Some of the original narcissism remains intact, however, and self-regard derives from three different forms in which narcissistic libido is preserved.

Some primary narcissism simply, remains from its original state and serves, like the protoplasmic body of the amoeba, as a never-whollyemptied pool of libidinal resources from which pseudopodlike object libidinal cathexes are drawn. Sometimes narcissistic libido is transferred to the sexual object; here the object is not loved in an anaclitic way, modeled after those who provided drive gratification, but in an idealized, narcissistic fashion, modeled after the inflated self-love of primary narcissism. Some narcissistic libido is set up within the ego ideal. Self-rapture in relation to the child's true attributes is no longer possible; but if the parents' values and expectations can be fulfilled, wholeness and perfection are once again attainable.

The common feature in these three vicissitudes of narcissistic libido is "overvaluation," which Freud identifies as the "narcissistic stigma" (1914b, p. 91). Whether the focus is actually oneself, one's wished-for self, or the beloved, the object is granted positive qualities beyond what is supportable by reality. Thus, narcissism, in Freud's system, entails the attribution of illusory value. His metaphor of the amoeba and its oscillatory protoplasm, now extending outward into the world, now retreating backward into the central body, highlights the reciprocal relationship he saw between engagement with reality (and other people) and narcissistic illusions. For Freud, narcissistic illusions (even when they are transferred through idealization onto love objects), ultimately draw one away from real involvements with others and the gratifications they provide.

Although an explorer of the darkest, most irrational dimensions of human experience, Freud was a supreme rationalist in his sense of social, moral, and scientific values. Rationality, fueled by sublimation, represents the highest and most felicitous development of the human mind. The discontents we suffer in civilization are the necessary price of its uplifting advantages. Unless impeded by neurosis, developmental progress is characterized by a movement from primary process to secondary process, from the pleasure principle to the reality principle. Psychoanalysis as a treatment facilitates this process whereby the irrational and fantastic is brought under the sway of the rational and the real-"where id was, there ego shall be" (1933, p. 80).

Kaplan (1985) has described Freud's dedication to rationality in striking terms.

In this larger context, Freud regarded narcissistic illusions as the inevitable residue of the most primitive and infantile state of mind, and therefore as both unavoidable and dangerous. Precisely because narcissism, by definition, entails illusory overvaluation, it runs counter to reality and beckons as an ever-tempting defensive retreat. Withdrawal from reality is always perilous, the ultimate threat being the total loss of connection with the real world (the schizophrenic state) and the less devastating threat posed by the vulnerable loss of self suffered by the urd requited lover, whose narcissism is transferred to the beloved and never returned.

Freud's stress on the defensive function of illusions has been largely maintained in what one might consider the mainstream of contemporary Freudian thought, although exactly what is being defended against varies in different accounts, depending on the larger set of theoretical premises which shape that account. Let us consider, as examples of the traditional approach to illusion as defense, two of the most significant recent contributions to the literature on narcissism from within Freudian ego psychology, those of Kernberg and Rothstein.

ALTHOUGH KERNBERG stresses his loyalties to Mahler, Jacobson, and the ego-psychological tradition, his contributions draw extensively on Melanie Klein's model of mental life, and his approach to narcissistic illusion is greatly informed by her theories. Klein portrays the infant as beset with terrifying anxieties involving the containment of aggression, and sees early development as a movement from paranoid and depressive anxieties toward a more integrated and secure sense of reality. Within Klein's vision, narcissistic illusions operate as defenses and regressive retreats from these frightening early anxieties: idealization is a refuge from persecutory anxiety and murderous rage toward bad objects; grandiosity is a "manic" defense against the depressive anxiety inherent in feeling small, helpless, and abjectly dependent upon another. Kernberg borrows heavily from these conceptualizations.

He distinguishes normal from pathological narcissism, defining the former (following Freud, as amended by Hartmann, 1950, p. 127) as the libidinal investment of the self. What Kernberg means by normal narcissism, then, is the resultant of all the processes which bear on self-representation and self-regard. He sees pathological narcissism as a particular dynamic mechanism which generates both entitled grandiosity and primitive idealization. Following Klein, Kernberg characterizes these as primitive defense mechanisms, often operating in conjunction with other primitive defense mechanisms such as splitting, denial, and projective identification. Narcissistic illusions are a defense erected within the child's struggle with a "pathologically augmented development of oral aggression" (1975, p. 234), generating paranoid and depressive anxieties; the illusions are constructed from a pathological fusion of ideal self, ideal object, and actual self-image.

How do narcissistic illusions work? In Kernberg's account, the infant is overloaded with primitive aggressive impulses, due to a "constitutionally determined strong aggressive drive, or constitutionally determined lack of anxiety tolerance in regard to aggressive impulses, or severe frustration in their first year of life" (1975, p. 234). He experiences himself and, projectively, other people as well, as essentially sadistic, and this aggressive outlook dominates his early experience. Sticking close to Klein's account of "envy" (1957), Kernberg portrays the narcissistically prone infant as so frustrated and hateful as to be unable to tolerate hope, the possibility of anyone's offering him anything pleasurable or sustaining. So little is forthcoming, the child concludes, and with such ill will toward him, that it is better to expect nothing, to want nothing, to spoil and devalue everything that might be offered. Normal fantasies of self and other as ideal are fused with the child's own realistic self-perceptions, resulting in a "grandiose self' which is experienced as complete, perfect, and self-sustaining. "I am/ have everything. You are/offer nothing." This position serves as both an expression of and a defense against explosive oral aggression, and the only secure solution in a world experienced as treacherous and sinister. Maintenance and protection of the grandiose self becomes the central psychodynamic motive, resulting in a contemptuous character style and disdainful manner of relating to others.

Primitive idealization of others is also characteristic of personalities organized around a grandiose self, according to Kernberg, but the idealization has little to do with any real valuing of others. Rather, Kernberg's narcissistic patient projects his own grandiose self-image onto others when it becomes impossible to sustain within himself, and also uses idealization as a secondary defense, along with splitting, to ward off and conceal the hateful and contemptuous devaluation of others.

Thus, narcissistic illusions protect the patient from the dreadful state in which he spent much of the first several years of life, depending on others for protection and care, yet perpetually dissatisfied, victimized, and enraged. The establishment of the grandiose self removes the patient from the multifaceted psychic pain of this situation, and, once established, the grandiose self perpetuates the devaluing assumptions about others which made its establishment necessary in the first place. It creates a "vicious circle of self-admiration, depreciation of others, and elimination of all actual dependency. The greatest fear of these patients is to be dependent on anybody else, because to depend means to hate, envy, and expose themselves to the danger of being exploited, mistreated, and frustrated" (Kernberg, 1975, p. 235).

Narcissistic illusions have a perniciously sabotaging effect on psychoanalytic treatment. Based on the illusions of self-sufficiency and perfection of the grandiose self, they undercut the very basis on which the psychoanalytic process rests, the presumption that the analysand might gain something meaningful from someone else (in this case the analyst). Despite what might be considerable psychological suffering and a genuine interest in treatment, the analysand whose character is organized around a grandiose self cannot allow the analyst to become important enough to him to really help him. The analyst and his interpretations must be continually devalued, spoiled, to avoid catapulting the patient into a condition of overpowering longing, abject dependency, and intolerable hatred and envy.

Kernberg's technical recommendations are wholly consistent with this psychodynamic portrait-a methodical and persistent interpretation of the defensive function of grandiosity and idealization as they emerge in the transference (1984, p. 197). Anything else is a waste of time, since the narcissistic illusions systematically destroy the very ground upon which the treatment proceeds. Unless the workings of the grandiose self are continually brought to light and confronted, the impact of the treatment is often subtly but systematically vitiated. "The analyst must continuously focus on the particular quality of the transference in these cases and consistently counteract the patient's efforts toward omnipotent control and devaluation" (1975, p. 246). This traditional emphasis on aggressive interpretation of narcissistic phenomena derives from and is wholly consistent with Freud's early view of "narcissistic neurosis" as unanalyzable and narcissistic defenses as generating the most recalcitrant resistances to the analytic process. (See, for example, Abraham, 1919.)

Rothstein (1984) has presented a rich amalgam of dynamic formulations which he portrays as an "evolutionary" extension of Freud's structural model (from which he has deleted virtually all energic considerations). The result is a psychodynamic account which stresses conflict among various relational motives and puts particular stress on the importance of the actual relationship to significant others. The most pervasive influence on Rothstein's perspective, particularly with regard to more severe disorders, is Mahler's depiction of the process of separation-individuation from an original symbiotic matrix. Rothstein's approach to narcissism is a blend of Freud's original formulations and Mahler's more contemporary view of the child's struggle for relational autonomy.

Rothstein distinguishes Freud's phenomenological portrayal of narcissism as a "felt quality of perfection" from his metapsychological treatment of narcissism (as the libidinal cathexis of the ego). He adds symbiosis to Freud's account of primary narcissism and sees narcissistic illusions as based developmentally on preindividuated experiences of a perfect self fused with a perfect object. The loss of this original state of perfection is a severe narcissistic blow, an inevitable developmental insult which is traversed only by reinstating the lost narcissistic perfection in the ego ideal. By identifying with the narcissistically tinged images of the ego ideal, the child softens the otherwise unbearable pain of separation. "Narcissistically invested identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects and is a fundamental concomitant of primary separation-individuation. The pursuit of narcissistic perfection in one form or another is a defensive distortion that is a ubiquitous characteristic of the ego" (Rothstein, 1983, p. 99).

Thus, like Freud, Rothstein sees some residues of primary narcissism as inevitable, reestablished in the ego ideal. For Rothstein, with his Mahlerian perspective, the loss of infantile narcissism has an additional poignancy, since it represents not just the loss of grandeur and perfection, but the loss of the original symbiotic state. Accordingly, narcissistic illusions operate as defensive retreats not only from disappointments in reality in general, but also from anxiety and dread connected with separation. He holds that "narcissistic perfection is a defensive distortion of reality" (p. 98). Like many defenses within the ego-psychological model, narcissism itself is neither healthy nor pathological; some defenses are necessary and serve adaptive functions within the psychic economy. Although a total relinquishment of narcissistic illusions is impossible, it is the goal of analysis, in Rothstein's view, to identify and work through the salient narcissistic investments.

ALTHOUGH PROCEEDING from a very different set of basic assumptions concerning the motivational and structural underpinnings of emotional life, the major theorists within the interpersonal tradition have taken an approach to the clinical phenomenon of illusions, the implications of which are quite similar to the mainstream Freudian approach from Freud to Kernberg to Rothstein. Sullivan sees idealization as a dangerous, self-depleting security operation and stresses the "cost" to the patient of "thinking the doctor is wonderful" (White, 1952, p.1 34). He recommends challenging the patient's assumptions that the analyst is so different from other people, often a product of inexperience in taking risks with others, and sees extended periods of idealization as reflecting a kind of acting out of countertransference. "The effective restriction of idealization is dependent on the physician's own freedom from personality warp. In so far as he is capable of real intimacy in the situation with the patient, to that extent he can inhibit idealization ... The measure of this capacity [is] intuited or empathized by any patient" (Sullivan, 1972, p. 343).

Similarly, Sullivan regards grandiosity as a dynamic for covering over feelings of insecurity through "invidious comparison" between oneself and others,

Although Sullivan does not develop an explicit technical procedure for the handling of illusions, one gets the clear impression throughout his writings that the analyst is in no way helpful by failing to address the patient's overvaluation of either himself or the analyst. Both kinds of illusions are seen as self-sabotaging devices propping up a shaky sense of self-esteem, operating as an obstacle to the development of the analysand's own resources and self-respect.

Fromm takes an even dimmer view of the place of illusion in emotional life. He sees psychodynamics in the general context of certain inescapable realities of the human condition, among which are finitude and separateness. To this condition two kinds of responses are possible: progressive, productive responses which accept the existential realities and create meaningful ties to others; and regressive, destructive responses, based on a self-deluding denial of the realities of the human condition. The overvaluing of illusions concerning the self or others from whom one derives some compensatory reassurance are regressive self-deceptions from Fromm's perspective and must be dealt with as such. In fact, at several points Fromm accuses Sullivan, in his emphasis on protecting the analysand's need for security, of being in effect soft on illusions. Anything short of a continual interpretive challenge to the analysand's overvaluing illusions concerning both himself and the analyst would be an expression of countertransferential contempt on the analyst's part, a disrespectful collusion in the analysand's flight from reality and meaning.

THUS, ALTHOUGH deriving from very different psychodynamic traditions and assumptions, the major lines of theorizing within orthodox theory, Freudian ego psychology, and interpersonal theory all converge in an essentially similar technical approach to the clinical phenomenon of narcissistic illusions. The latter are viewed as regressive defenses against frustration, separation, aggression, dependence, and despair.

Transferential illusions concerning either the self or the analyst must be interpreted, their unreality pointed out, and their defensive purpose defined.

In recent years there has emerged an alternative view of infantile mental states and the narcissistic illusions which are thought to derive from them. This approach is closely connected with the developmental-arrest model of psychopathology and the therapeutic action of psychoanalytic treatment. The most important contributors to this very different perspective have been Winnicott and Kohut, each of whom in his own distinct fashion regards infantile narcissism and subsequent narcissistic illusions in later life as the core of the self and the deepest source of creativity. Here the prototypical "narcissist" is not the child, madman, or savage, but the creative artist, drawing for inspiration on overvaluing illusions.

Although Winnicott did not often write about narcissism per se, his entire opus revolves around the issue which we have seen is central to that domain: the relationship between illusion and reality, between the self and the outside world. For Winnicott, the key process in early development is the establishment of a sense of the self experienced as real. For this to happen, the child requires a very particular sort of relationship with his or her providers, the most distinguishing feature of which is, ironically, that the child must not know of the existence of the relationship, must not know that it is being provided at all.

The essential feature of the necessary "facilitating" environment provided by the mother is her effort to shape the environment around the child's spontaneously arising wishes, to read the child's needs and provide for them. The mother's actualization of the infant's desires makes it possible for the latter to assume that his wishes actually create the objects of his desire-that the breast, in effect his entire world, is the product of his creation. In fact, Winnicott characterizes the child's experience, made possible by the mother's perfect accommodation to his wishes, as the "moment of illusion." The virtual invisibility of Winnicott's "goodenough mother" allows the infant a developmentally crucial immersion in an illusory, megalomaniacal, solipsistic state of "subjective omnipotence."

Eventually the child learns to live in objective reality (introduced largely through the mother's incremental failure to accommodate herself to the child's wishes) as it becomes clear that objects and people have their own independent existence and are only minimally under the child's control. The distinguishing characteristic of the terrain between the original subjective omnipotence and the eventual objective reality, transitional experiencing, is an ambiguity about the status of the other. Is the transitional object (the traditional teddy bear, for example) a creation of the child, in some special relation to the child, under his or her control, or is it simply an object within the world of mundane objects, subject to being lost, damaged, discarded, washed? The good-enough parent of the transitional stage allows the child this ambiguity, participating in the child's illusions like the mother whose accommodation makes possible the earlier experience of subjective omnipotence, thereby enabling the child to solidify a sense of self as a consistent source of spontaneous wishes, longings, and resources.

Freud measured mental health in terms of the capacity to love and work; Winnicott envisions health as the capacity for play, as freedom to move back and forth between the harsh light of objective reality and the soothing ambiguities of lofty self-absorption and grandeur in subjective omnipotence. In fact, Winnicott regards the reimmersion into subjective omnipotence as the ground of creativity, in which one totally disregards external reality and develops one's illusions to the fullest. He originally presented his view of patients with fragmented, aborted (false) selves as a distinct diagnostic group reflecting more severe psychopathology and, employing the developmental tilt, he placed them developmentally as antedating oedipal neuroses. As is often the case with theoretical innovations introduced through the establishment of a new diagnostic category, the category spreads and the formulations take on more and more general relevance. Thus, many varieties of psychopathology came to be viewed by Winnicott as reflecting deficiencies in the establishment of a healthy self, as a consequence of insufficient experience of the illusions of subjective omnipotence and the transitional phase.

This view of the development of the self led Winnicott to redefine both the analytic situation and the analytic process. Whereas Freud saw the analytic situation in terms of abstinence (instinctual wishes emerge and find no gratification), Winnicott sees the analytic situation in terms of satisfaction, not of instinctual impulses per se, but of crucial developmental experiences, missed parental functions. The couch, the constancy of the sessions, the demeanor of the analyst --these become the "holding environment" which was not provided in infancy. Freud saw the analytic process in terms of renunciation; by bringing to light and renouncing infantile wishes and illusions, healthier and more mature forms of libidinal organization become possible. Winnicott sees the analytic process in terms of a kind of revitalization; the frozen, aborted self is able to reawaken and begin to develop as crucial ego needs are met.

Although Winnicott does not apply this model of treatment to the problem of narcissistic illusions per se, its implications are clear. The patient's self has been fractured and crushed by maternal impingement, creating the necessity for a premature adaptation to external reality and a disconnection from one's own subjective reality, the core of the self and the source of all potential creativity. The analyst's task is to fan the embers, to rekindle the spark. He must create an atmosphere as receptive as possible to the patient's subjectivity; he must avoid challenging the patient in any way which could be experienced as an impingement, an insistence once again on compliance with respect to external reality. Narcissistic illusions, in Winnicott's model, are neither defenses nor obstructions. The patient's illusions concerning both himself and the analyst represent the growing edge of the patient's aborted self; as good-enough mothering entails an accommodation of the world to sustain the infant's illusions, good-enough analysis entails an accommodation of the analytic situation to the patient's subjective reality, a "going to meet and match the moment of hope" (1945, p. 309).

The more explicit technical implications of this new understanding of the meaning of narcissistic illusions were developed by Kohut, who, like Winnicott, introduced his innovations in connection with a diagnostic category of greater severity (narcissistic personality disorders), but who expanded those innovations into a broad and novel theory of development, psychic structure, and motivation. In his original 1971 presentation Kohut described two forms of transference, the mirroring transference and the idealizing transference, which, he argued, are very different from ordinary neurotic transferences. Here the patient is not simply transferring infantile impulses and conflicts onto the person of the analyst as a differentiated object. In the mirroring and idealizing transferences, the analyst and his responses function in lieu of missing psychic structures within the patient's own personality. In mirroring transference the patient experiences himself in terms of overvaluing grandiosity and requires the analyst's mirroring responses to avoid a disintegration of self. In idealizing transference the patient experiences the analyst in terms of overvaluing admiration and requires the analyst's allowance of the idealization to avoid a disintegration of self.

In Kohut's account, the appearance of narcissistic illusions within the analytic situation-primitive grandiosity or idealization-represents the patient's attempt to establish crucial developmental opportunities, a self-object relationship unavailable in childhood. These phenomena represent not a defensive retreat from reality (a la Freud, Sullivan, Rothstein, and Kernberg), but the growing edge of an aborted developmental process which was stalled because of parental failure to allow the child sustained experiences of illusions of grandeur and idealization. Thus, the appearance of narcissistic illusions within the analytic relationship constitutes a fragile opportunity for the revitalization of the self. The illusions must be cultivated, warmly received, and certainly not challenged, allowing a reanimation of the normal developmental process through which the illusions will eventually be transformed, by virtue of simple exposure to reality in an emotionally sustaining environment, into more realistic images of self and other.

Kohut stresses throughout that he is recommending an "empathic comprehension" of narcissistic needs and not "play acting" or "wishfulfillment." But empathic comprehension certainly entails a receptivity to the narcissistic illusions and an avoidance at all costs of anything which would challenge them or suggest that they are unrealistic. "While it is analytically deleterious to bring about an idealization of the analyst by artificial devices, a spontaneously occurring therapeutic mobilization of the idealized parent imago or of the grandiose self is indeed to be welcomed and must not be interfered with" (1971, p. 164). Kohut sees the dangers of interference, analogous to Winnicott's notion of impingement, as very great indeed and warns against even "slight overobjectivity of the analyst's attitude or a coolness in the analyst's voice; or ... the tendency to be jocular with the admiring patient or to disparage the narcissistic idealization in a humorous and kindly way" (p. 263). Anything short of warm acceptance of narcissistic illusions concerning both the self and the analyst-which illusions are assumed to simply express themselves, independent of the interactional field in which the analyst participates-runs the risk of closing off the delicate, pristine narcissistic longings and thereby eliminating the possibility of the reemergence of healthy self-development.

THERE is a striking symmetry between these two different traditions of understanding narcissistic illusions; for each, the approach of the other borders on the lunatic. From Kohut's point of view, the kind of methodical interpretive approach to narcissistic transferences recommended by Kernberg is extremely counterproductive, implying a countertransferential acting out. For Kohut, Kernberg's stance suggests great difficulty in tolerating the position in which the narcissistic transferences place the analyst, arousing anxiety concerning his own grandiosity (in the idealizing transference) or envy of the patient's grandiosity (in the mirroring transference). Thus, Atwood and Stolorow argue that the oral rage Kernberg sees in borderline patients is actually an iatrogenic consequence of his technical approach. Methodical interpretation of the transference is experienced by the narcissistically vulnerable patient as an assault and generates intense narcissistic rage, which Kernberg then regards as basic and long-standing, requiring the very procedures which created it in the first place. From the vantage point of self psychology, Kernberg is continually creating the monster he is perpetually slaying.

Similarly, from the more traditional point of view, the Winnicott-Kohut approach is an exercise in futility. An unquestioning acceptance of the patient's illusions with the assumption that they will eventually diminish of their own accord represents a collusion with the patient's defenses; the analytic process is thereby subverted, and the analyst never emerges as a figure who can meaningfully help the patient. From the traditional vantage point, the Winnicott-Kohut approach suggests what Loewald (1973) has termed a countertransferential "overidentification with the patient's narcissistic needs" (p. 346). Loewald further suggests that Kohut's avoidance of any focus on "an affirmation of the positive and enriching aspects of limitations" of self and others constitutes a "subtle kind of seduction of the patient" (p. 349). As Kernberg notes, unresolved narcissistic conflicts in the analyst "may foster excessive acceptance as well as rejection of the patient's idealization ... To accept the admiration seems to be an abandonment of a neutral position" (1975, p. 298).*

ILLUSION As defense, illusion as the growing edge of the self-these two approaches derive most broadly from larger divergent perspectives on the relation between the individual and society that have a long history in Western culture. From one perspective (developed to its fullest by the Enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century), culture and civilization humanize the individual creature, whose personal subjectivity is beneficially renounced in favor of the higher objectivity and rationality of society. From the other perspective (developed to its fullest in the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century), subjective experience is a higher form of reality; society threatens what is most precious in the individual, and conventional "rationality" is portrayed as an oppressive-repressive force.

These two approaches to illusion have generated an exciting controversy in the analytic literature, particularly because they are dramatically contrasting and mutually exclusive (which is often the case with competing psychoanalytic theories in their polarized swings of the pendulum). This controversy demonstrates dramatically the extent to which concepts like neutrality, countertransference, and empathy are theory bound.

It is a mistake to regard one of these approaches as more empathic than the other. They simply proceed (empathically) from different assumptions about the patient's experience. Kernberg's narcissist lives in an embattled world, in which he and all others are experienced as sadistic, self-serving, and exploitative. The only possible security lies in a devaluation of others, disarming them of their power to hurt him. From this perspective, an empathic response entails an appreciation of his endangered status (see Schafer, 1983) and a delineation of his narcissistic defenses, along with an effort to make some meaningful contact possible. To simply accept the grandiosity would be to empathize only with the most superficial level of the patient's defenses and not with what is presumed to be his underlying experience.

Kohut's narcissist, on the other hand, is a brittle creature who lives in a harsh and continually bruising world. The only possible security lies in a splitting off of important segments of the self (either vertically or horizontally) in an effort to protect the deep and tender feelings connected to them, often covered over by bravado or narcissistic rage. From this perspective, an empathic response entails an appreciation of the continual threat of self-dissolution and disintegration, and an encouragement of growth-enhancing illusions. To challenge the patient's illusions would be to perpetuate the repeated traumas of childhood. With narcissistic illusions, as with most analytic phenomena, empathy and countertransference are in the eye of the beholder.I STRONGLY suspect that the majority of analysts work in neither of these two sharply contrasting ways, that most of us struggle to find some midpoint, undoubtedly reflective of our own personality and style, between challenging and accepting narcissistic illusions. Because subtlety and tone are crucial, it is difficult to formulate such a clinical posture in simple, schematic terms. The following description is offered as a framework for locating such an approach conceptually and in terms of technique, within an integrated relational perspective.

The more traditional approach to narcissism highlights the important ways in which narcissistic illusions are used defensively, but misses their role in health and creativity and in consolidating certain kinds of developmentally crucial relationships with others. The developmental arrest approach has generated a perspective on narcissism which stresses the growth-enhancing function of narcissistic illusions, but overlooks the extent to which they often constrict and interfere in real engagements between the analysand and other people, including the analyst.

It is possible to draw upon the clinical wisdom in both these contributions by viewing narcissistic illusions in the context of their interactive role in perpetuating the analysand's relational matrix. In viewing narcissism as either only defensive or as fundamentally growth enhancing, both traditions overemphasize what is taken to be the inherent nature of narcissistic illusions. What has been neglected is the key function of narcissism throughout the life cycle in perpetuating stereotyped patterns of integrating interpersonal relationships and fantasied ties to significant objects.

All varieties of narcissistic illusions are generated throughout the life cycle, from the exuberance of the toddler to the nostalgic musings of old age: grand estimations of one's own capacities and perfection, infatuation with the larger-than-life qualities of others whom one loves or envies, and fantasies of an exquisite, perfect merger with desirable or dreaded others. The determination of emotional health as opposed to psychopathology, when it comes to narcissistic illusions, has less to do with the actual content of the illusions than with the attitude of the individual about that content. All of us probably experience at various times feelings and thoughts as self-ennobling as the most grandiose narcissist, as devoted as the most star-struck idealizer, as fused as the most boundaryless symbiosis seeker. The problem of narcissism concerns issues of character structure, not mental content; it is not so much what you do and think as your attitude toward what you do and think, how seriously you take yourself. How can this subtle issue of attitude be conceptualized?

Consider Nietzsche's theory of tragedy (1872/1956). Life is lived in two fundamental dimensions, Nietzsche suggests. On the one hand, we live in a world of illusions, continually generating transient forms and meanings with which we play and then quickly discard. This facet of living Nietzsche terms Apollonian, Apollo being the god of the dream, art, and illusion. On the other hand, we are embedded in a larger unity, a universal pool of energy from which we emerge temporarily, articulate ourselves, and into which we once again disappear. This facet of living Nietzsche terms Dionysian, Dionysus representing reimmersion in this undifferentiated oneness and, in Nietzsche's system, the inevitable undoing of all illusions, all individual existence.*

Nietzsche establishes "the tragic" as the fullest, richest model of living, and the truly tragic represents a balance between the Apollonian and Dionysian dimensions. The tragic man (this phrase must be disentangled from all pejorative connotations) is one who is able to fully pursue his Apollonian illusions and also is able to relinquish them in the face of the inevitable realities of the human condition. The tragic man regards his life as a work of art, to be conceived, shaped, polished, and inevitably dissolved. The prototypical tragic activity is play, in which new forms are continually created and demolished, in which the individuality of the player is continually articulated, developed, and relinquished. In the passage used as the epigraph for this chapter, Nietzsche uses the building of sandcastles as a metaphor for the dialectic he envisions as the underlying structure of life and the essence of the tragic.

Picture the beach at low tide. Three different approaches are possible. The Apollonian man builds elaborate sandcastles, throwing himself into his activity as if his creations would last forever, totally oblivious to the incoming tide which will demolish his productions. Here is someone who ignores reality and is therefore continually surprised, battered, and bruised by it. The Dionysian man sees the inevitability of the leveling tide and therefore builds no castles. His constant preoccupation with the ephemeral nature of his life and his creations allows him no psychic space in which to live and play. He will only build if his productions are assured of immortality, but unlike the Apollonian man, he suffers no delusions in this regard. Here is someone tyrannized and depleted by reality.

The third option is Nietzsche's tragic man, aware of the tide and the transitory nature of his productions, yet building his sandcastles nevertheless. The inevitable limitations of reality do not dim the passion with which he builds his castles; in fact, the inexorable realities add a poignancy and sweetness to his passion. The tragicomic play in which our third man builds, Nietzsche suggests, is the richest form of life, generating the deepest meaning from the dialectical interplay of illusion and reality.

The very word "illusion," Loewald (1974, p. 354) reminds us, derives from the Latin ludere, to play. Healthy narcissism reflects Nietzsche's subtle dialectical balance between illusions and reality; illusions concerning oneself and others are generated, playfully enjoyed, and relinquished in the face of disappointments. New illusions are continually created and dissolved. Winnicott (1971) has described the important connections between healthy illusion, play, creativity, and cultural phenomena in general.

In pathological narcissism, on the other hand, illusions are taken too seriously, insisted upon. In some narcissistic disturbances, illusions are actively and consciously maintained; reality is sacrificed in order to perpetuate an addictive devotion to self-ennobling, idealizing, or symbiotic fictions. This is the approach of the first man on the beach, blindly building and building. In some narcissistic disturbances, illusions are harbored secretly or repressed; preoccupation with the limitations and risks of reality lead to an absence of joyfulness or liveliness-even a paralysis. Any activity is threatening because it inevitably encounters limitations, and these are felt to be unacceptable. This is the approach of the second man on the beach, holding out for immortality and waiting in despair for the tide.

What is the etiology of such disturbances? What determines whether one will be able to negotiate the delicate balance between illusions and reality in healthy narcissism, or whether one will suffer an addictive devotion to illusions resulting in either a removal from reality or a despair in the face of it? The key factor resides in the interplay of illusions and reality in the character-forming relationships with significant others. What is crucial, therefore, is the interactive function of illusions within the analysand's relational matrix.

The growth of the balance necessary for healthy narcissism requires a particular sort of relationship with a parent, in which the parent is able to comfortably experience both the child and herself in both modes, in playful illusions of grandiosity, idealization, and fusion, and in deflating disappointments and realistic limitations. The child naturally and playfully generates lofty self-overvaluations, glowing overvaluations of the parent, and boundaryless experiences of sameness and fusion. The ideal parental response to these experiences consists in a participation coupled with the capacity to disengage, a capacity to enjoy and play with the child's illusions, to add illusions of his or her own, and to let the illusions go, experiencing the child and herself in more realistic terms. Thus, the parent participates with the child in requisite experiences characterized by shifting idealization and aggrandizements-now the child is elevated, now the parent, now both together. The ideal parental response is neither a total immersion in illusion nor a cynical rationalism, but a capacity to play with illusions while never losing sight of the fact that this is a form of play.

Consider the position of the child in relation to a parent who, in one way or another, takes these kinds of illusions extremely seriously, whose own sense of security in fact is contingent upon them. Such a parent insists on specific overvaluations* of the child or herself or both. These illusions have become addictive for the parent, and they become a dominant feature in the possibilities for relatedness which such a parent offers the child. The more addictive the illusions for the parent, the more unavoidable they become for the child, who feels that the only way to connect with the parent, to be engaged with him, is to participate in his illusions. Such a child must regard himself as perfect and extraordinary and be seen by the parent that way, to be seen at all; or he must worship the parent as perfect and extraordinary to become real and important to the parent. Further, children tend to pick up how crucial such illusions are for the parent's shaky sense of self-esteem. Deutsch (1937) long ago noted the role of parental "induction" in cases of "folie a deux," where adoption by the child of the parent's delusion represents "an important part of an attempt to rescue the object through identification with it, or its delusional system" (p. 247). Abandonment of parental illusions thus becomes an emotional equivalent of abandonment of the parents themselves, the avoidance of which, as M. Friedman (1985) has argued, is an underlying feature in many forms of psychopathology.

In such circumstances, sustaining parental illusions becomes the basis for stability and for maintaining connections with others, the vehicle for what Fairbairn repeatedly terms the "tie to bad objects," or what Robbins (1982) more recently has described as pathological efforts at symbiotic bonding. Here illusions are no longer the spontaneously generated, transitory, playful creation of an active mind. Illusions are insisted upon with utmost seriousness by significant others, and they become the necessary price for contact and relation. Ogden (1982) speaks of

This is true not just of infancy, but throughout childhood and later into adulthood. Every analyst is familiar with the dread adult patients frequently feel in connection with major characterological change; they anticipate a profound sense of isolation from parents (alive or dead) who related to them, seemed to need so much to relate to them, only through their now-loosened and about-to-be-transcended character pathology (see Searles, 1958).

Thus, addictive parental illusions generate learned modes of contact in the child who will come to develop narcissistic difficulties, modes of contact which are felt to be the only alternative to the impossible option of no contact at all. The more addictive the illusion for the parent, the more unable is the parent to experience the child in any other way; the child necessarily cuts himself off from sources of spontaneously generated fantasies and illusions, and the child's personality becomes brittle, precariously anchored around rigid parental illusions. If the parent is not able to play at illusion building and relinquishment, to offer a full and variegated emotional presence to the child, the latter participates in what is provided, and these forms of participation become the learned basis for all future interpersonal relations.

The parent who is mindful only of the incoming tide, who cannot tolerate any play with the child's spontaneously generated fantasies and illusions out of fear or morbid addiction to despair, poses a closely related set of difficulties for the child. Illusions are seen as dangerous, hopefulness and joy as pernicious betrayal of the parent whose sense of security (and, perhaps, specialness) resides in a wooden clinging to a pale and joyless "reality." Here any sense of joy and playfulness in illusion making is deeply repressed and its emergence in the analysis is often accompanied by intense anxiety, shame, or fear of total interpersonal isolation.

THE MYTHOLOGICAL figure of Icarus vividly captures the powerful relationship between the child and the parent's illusions. Daedalus, the builder of the Labyrinth, constructs wings of feathers and wax, so that he and his son Icarus can escape their island prison. The use of such wings requires a true sense of Nietzsche's dialectical balance: flying too high risks a melting of the wings by the sun; flying too low risks a weighing down of the wings from the dampness of the ocean. Icarus does not heed the warning he receives. He flies too close to the sun; his wings melt, and he plunges into the ocean, disappearing beneath a clump of floating feathers.

We have all been born of imperfect parents, with favorite illusions about themselves and their progeny buoying their self-esteem, cherished along a continuum ending with addiction to illusion. We have all come to know ourselves through participation in parental illusions, which have become our own. Like Icarus, therefore, we have all donned Daedalus' wings. It is the subtleties of parental involvement with these illusions which greatly influence the nature of the flight provided by those wings-whether one can fly high enough to enjoy them and truly soar, or whether the sense of ponderous necessity concerning the illusions leads one to fly too high or to never leave the ground.

The myth of Icarus points to another significant feature of generational interaction in the subtleties of narcissistic illusion. In most accounts Daedalus is portrayed as a caring father, at least in his warnings to Icarus to fly neither too high nor too low, and Daedalus himself is able to negotiate a successful flight to safety. Children of illustrious parents are particularly prone to narcissistic difficulties. With parents of distinction of one sort or another, it takes particular sensitivity to be able to help a child sort through and digest parental identifications to generate illusions and ambitions of his or her own.

In both prior approaches to narcissism, pathological grandiosity and pathological idealization are understood largely as forces operating within the internal psychic economy of the individual. They are viewed as internally generated phenomena, either as defensive solutions to anxiety, frustration, and envy, or as spontaneously arising, pristine, early developmental needs. The developmental-arrest approach suffers from this constraint just as much as the more traditional approach. Illusion is treated not as a normal product of mental activity throughout the life cycle, but is located within the earliest developmental phases. And illusions within the psychoanalytic situation are treated as reflective of the early developmental needs, in pure form, rather than as learned modes of connection with others, as the not-at-all-playful, stereotyped, compulsive patterns of integration they have become.

Ever since Freud's abandonment of the theory of infantile seduction, the legacy of drive theory for the subsequent history of psychoanalytic ideas has included an underemphasis of the role of actual relationships in the evolution of mental structures and content, and of the residues of actual interactions in fantasied object ties. With respect to narcissism, both traditions isolate the figure within the relational tapestry. In so doing, they overlook the extent to which grandiosity and idealization

function as interactional modes, arising as learned patterns of integrating relationships, and maintained as the vehicle for intimate connections (real and imagined) with others. They focus on one dimension of the relational matrix, the self, but not on the self with others; to regard these phenomena solely in terms of self-organization is like working with only half the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

The major theorists we have been considering do not completely fail to notice these interactional facets of narcissistic phenomena. They are too astute as clinicians to do so. The problem is that the specifics of parental character and fantasied object ties do not fit into theoretical models emphasizing what are taken to be spontaneously arising, developmental phenomena, so they are noticed clinically and then passed over when major etiological dynamics are assigned or technical approaches developed. The subtleties of the parents' personalities, the ways in which they required the child to maintain narcissistic illusions, are lost; the parents are viewed in a binary fashion, either as gratifying or not gratifying infantile needs (drives or relational).

Freud's paper "On Narcissism," for example, contains a wry and incisive description of parents' narcissistic investment in their children:

Freud calls our attention to the striking similarity between the parents' attitude toward the child and the child's attitude toward himself. The parent overvalues the child; the child overvalues himself. Freud does not, however, derive the child's narcissism from the parents' attitude! He points to the parents' often-compulsive need to use the child as a magic solution for their own limitations and disappointments. Yet he does not consider how such a set of parental expectations and needs might contribute to the child's sense of who he is and who he needs to be for others. Although parental values, internalized in the ego ideal, become important later on in recapturing the primary narcissistic experience, Freud derives infantile narcissism from the inherent properties of self-directed libido. Infantile grandiosity is an instinctual vicissitude; self-love generates narcissism, apart from the relational matrix. In effect, Freud derives the parents' narcissism from the child's, their own unresolved infantile narcissistic longings and the opportunity provided by their child's infantile narcissism to evoke their own. In viewing narcissism as a quality inherent in self-directed libido, Freud underplays the extent to which parental fantasies influence the child's sense of who he is and has to be for the parents. Infantile experience shapes adult character, and adult character through parenting shapes infantile experience, in a continually evolving generational cycle within the relational matrix.

Kernberg similarly provides a vivid portrait of parental narcissism at work in the dynamic interactions within families producing children with later narcissistic difficulties.

How could a child growing up in such circumstances become anything but narcissistic? become visible to his parents in any form other than as an extraordinary, larger-than-life creature? Why the need to evoke a hypothetical excess of aggression (either constitutional or basedon great deprivation in the earliest years) to account for what is more simply and clearly derivable from the relational matrix? Like Freud, Kernberg sees the clinical relevance of parental values and expectations, the constricted forms of relationships they offer to the child; yet this factor is assigned only a peripheral etiological role in shaping later defenses against early conflicts. Kernberg's model of mind, still drawing strongly on the monadic framework of drive theory, regards pathological narcissism as an internally generated mechanism, established in the first years of life in the face of extreme oral rage. The mother is important, not in the subtleties of her character and the particularities of the relational patterns she offers the child, but in her gross role as frustration of the child's oral needs and as an object for the child's oral rage.

Kohut's clinical reports reflect a similar striking discordance between rich observations of parent-child interactions and a theoretical model of narcissism which assigns the particular content of these interactions to a secondary role. Kohut describes patients who exhibit various forms of grandiosity, some noisily proclaimed, others secretly and shamefully harbored. Kohut considers these to be manifestations of "archaic" grandiosity, which was not allowed to establish itself and undergo normal transmuting internalization because of the parents' failures as self-objects. Thus, his model derives narcissism from the expression of inherent sources. Yet, Kohut often informs us (usually parenthetically) that the parents failed the child in quite specific ways, using that child as a narcissistic extension of themselves in precisely the manner in which the child then constructs his grandiosity.

Within both traditions there has been movement toward granting greater etiological importance to parental character and the specifics of child-parent interactions. From the drive-theory side, Rothstein (1984) has placed increasing emphasis on the role of the actual relationship in the generation and maintenance of narcissistic illusion, and Robbins (1982) has written of the ways in which narcissistic phenomena operate as shared illusions, drawing on grandiose fantasies of idealized objects. From the relational-model side, there has been discussion of the parents, not simply in terms of their failure to provide self-object functions for the child, but also in terms of their use of the child as their own self-object (Atwood and Stolorow, 1984).

I have suggested that in ideal parenting the parent participates with the child in a variable fashion that contains both joyful play with illusions and an affirming embrace of reality. Loewald has depicted the delicate interpenetrability between illusion and consensual reality that can develop from such interactions in a redefinition of the traditional concept of reality testing:

How does the analyst help the analysand arrive at such a balance between illusion and reality, at the capacity to live in and fuse both realms? Loewald suggests that the analyst's interpretations and demeanor convey a subtle double quality which makes this possible. On the one hand, the analyst's descriptions and interpretations enable the patient to advance his access to his own subjectivity and inner resources. On the other hand,

In the next chapter we turn to this subtle dialectic between articulating and embracing the analysand's illusions, on the one hand, and the provision of a larger context in which they can be experienced, on the other.

Models attempting to illuminate the meaning and function of narcissistic phenomena necessarily imply a clinical posture by the analyst which best facilitates their resolution; therefore, theories of narcissism tend to appear complete with a recommended technical approach. Narcissism viewed as defense suggests an active, interpretive stance; narcissism viewed as an aborted form of infantile mental life suggests a warmly receptive stance. I have argued that narcissistic illusions are usefully understood neither solely as a defensive solution to an internal psychic threat, nor solely as a pure efflorescence of infantile mental life, but most fundamentally as a form of interaction, of participation with others. From this perspective, grandiosity and idealization sometimes serve defensive purposes and sometimes represent unfulfilled developmental needs; but when they recur in stereotyped form in the analytic situation, their central function is to serve as a gambit, an invitation to a particular form of interaction. What is most important clinically is, as Schwartz (1978, p. 8) has put it, "the `petition' in the repetition."

Viewing narcissistic illusions as invitations casts the analyst's response in a different sort of perspective. The analysand requires some participation from the analyst to complete the old object tie, to connect with the analyst in a consciously or unconsciously desired fashion. If grandiosity is involved, some expression of admiration or appreciation may be requested, or at least attentive noninterference; if idealization is involved, some expression of pleasure at being adored may be requested, or at least acknowledgment of the analysand's devotion. Often participation in a mutually admiring relationship is requested-both the analyst and the analysand are to be considered truly distinguished, and alike in some unusual fashion. Responding to such an invitation in a way that is analytically constructive is tricky, and difficult to capture in a simple formula. What is most crucial frequently is not the words, but the tone in which they are spoken. The most useful response entails a subtle dialectic between joining the analysand in the narcissistic integration and simultaneously questioning the nature and purpose of that integration, both a playful participation in the analysand's illusions and a puzzled curiosity about how and why they came to be so serious, the sine qua non of the analysand's sense of security and involvement with others.

It is easiest to define the sort of analytic posture I have in mind by locating it between the kinds of recommended positions which have accompanied the major theoretical traditions.

In the classical tradition, narcissistic illusions are ferreted out and exposed to "objective" scrutiny. Such an aggressively interpretive approach (a la Kernberg) misses the need of the analysand to establish the narcissistic integration and runs the risk of discouraging the gambit and driving the transference underground. Grandiosity and idealization are efforts to reach the object through familiar, preferred modes of connection and intimacy. In Kernberg's discussion of these issues, for example, narcissistic configurations are understood as defenses against anxieties generated by oral aggression in early object relations, rather than as expressions of these object relations as entrenched familial patterns throughout childhood.

Kernberg speaks of the manner in which the "pathological grandiose self is utilized in the transference precisely to avoid the emergence of the dissociated, repressed or projected aspects of self and object representations of primitive object relations" (1984, p. 197). He does not consider the possibility that the emergence of the grandiose self within the transference is an effort to re-create actual familial object relations, to re-create early object ties. To interpret grandiosity and idealization simply as defenses risks encouraging resistances to the expression and establishment of these often conflictual and anxiety-filled, yet crucial transferential configurations. It promotes a compliance with what is likely to be experienced as the analyst's insistence on less narcissistic, more "real" perceptions and relations.

In the developmental-arrest tradition, drawing on the metaphor of the analysand as baby, narcissistic illusions in the adult patient are equated with the spontaneous exuberance of childhood, and necessarily encouraged. Such a receptive, unquestioning approach (like that of Winnicott and Kohut) misses the role of the narcissistic integrations in perpetuating old object ties, and runs the risk of consolidating them. Atwood and Stolorow, drawing on the self-psychology tradition, regard these narcissistic illusions as the product of the patient's effort "to establish in the analytic transference the requisite facilitating intersubjective context that had been absent or insufficient during the formative years and that now permitted the arrested developmental process to resume" (1984, p. 83). Here narcissistic illusions are reflected, encouraged (as a device for remobilizing a stalled developmental process), and presumed to dissolve of their own accord in the face of reality and the analyst's empathic understanding of the patient's naturally arising disappointments. Yet the analyst's failure to appreciate illusions as vehicles for preserving entrenched familial patterns is likely to be experienced by the analysand as the analyst's own investment in and encouragement of compulsive narcissistic illusions.

Because they regard narcissistic transferences solely as self-regulation, either in terms of defenses or in terms of the re-creation of infantile states, both prior traditions minimize the interactive complexity of the analyst's response. Both regard the transference as not fundamentally involved in interaction with the person of the analyst, so that the analyst can respond to its features from a somewhat detached position, either by challenging or by universally accepting. No attention is paid to the implications of the analyst's response for the analysand's sense of who the analyst is, what the analyst likes, needs, values, and what sort of relatedness is possible between them. A more purely interactive view regards the narcissistic transferences as strategies of engagement, efforts to connect with the person of the analyst according to paradigms of relatedness derived from the past. Such an approach places great importance on the implications of the analyst's response to the analysand's sense of who the analyst is and what can happen between them.

Why can the analyst not simply remain "neutral," neither demanding change nor encouraging perpetuation, but merely silent or descriptively interpretive? If one is invited to a dance, one either attends in some fashion or does not attend in some fashion. Remaining silent and refusing to respond constitute powerful responses and are experienced by the analysand as responses. It is striking in this regard that both Kohut and Kernberg consider their own approach to be neutral, and that of the other to be a departure from neutrality. In my view, each is right about the other, but misses the extent to which his own posture is a form of participation and is inevitably experienced in that way by the analysand. (See Black, 1987, for a discussion of the transferential implications of all technical stances.) As the popular saying goes, "You pay your money and you take your choice."

The most constructive form of analytic participation derives from the discovery of a path between the contrasting dangers of complicity and challenge, a path that reflects a willingness to play, an acceptance of the importance of the narcissistic integration as a special and favored mode of relation, yet also a questioning of why this must be the only way. This posture is similar to the kind of ideal parental response to the child's illusions described in the previous chapter. The parent is receptive to the child's illusions about himself and the parent, but maintains a light touch, conveying a sense of pleasure without the pressure of necessity. The analyst's response to the analysand's transferential gambits should reflect that same openness to playful participation. An ability to play together, including a participation in each other's illusions, is a crucial dimension not only of adult-child relations, but of adult-adult relations as well.

It is not possible to adopt such an analytic posture with any patient at the start and hold it all the way through the analysis. The analyst becomes embroiled in the illusions of each patient, as they manifest themselves in the transferential pushes and pulls. They inevitably arouse conflictual feelings in the analyst about his own narcissistic illusions, and he finds himself sometimes getting too much pleasure out of the patient's attributions, sometimes feeling the need to stop them, sometimes alternatively indulging them and subtly attacking them. The analytic stance I am describing is not a self-conscious posturing, but the result of continually working through narcissistic conflicts in the countertransference to allow for a true spirit of curiosity in the analyst's inquiry into the meaning of the analysand's illusions. Where did the analysand learn this particular pattern of relatedness? What was riding on these illusory notions within the analysand's early significant relations with others? What were its pleasures? Its costs? The latter question is particularly important.

Analysands who integrate relations with others around grandiose claims tend to believe passionately that this is the best sort of relationship to have. They seek out admirers and discard as uninteresting those who are not admirers. (Analysands who harbor secret grandiose claims believe just as passionately that being the object of devoted admiration is the acme of interpersonal satisfaction, but fear they will never be successful in attaining this goal.) The analytic inquiry into these phenomena opens up important questions. How did this asymmetrical form of relatedness become so highly treasured? One frequently discovers that it was the vehicle for the closest bonds within the family, or for shared familial fantasies about how closer bonds might be achieved. Does the analysand assume that the passion of parental investment in overvaluing him is the most intense sort of connection he can hope for with others? The analysand is generally unaware of what is lost in such asymmetry, that relationships structured around others' admiration of and devotion to him preclude his excitement about and enjoyment of them, his opportunity to take pleasure in them not simply as reflectors of his own glory, but as different, interesting, and admirable in their own right.

It is vital that the analytic inquiry into grandiose illusions and relationships, and what the analysand believes, notices, and does not notice about them, avoid a moralistic tone. Relationships structured around grandiosity are problematic because they truncate the analysand's experience, not because they are unfair or unseemly. The focus should be on what is gained and what is missing in these relationships, and the analysand's limited awareness of both. The analyst's capacity to explore these issues constructively with the analysand is contingent upon an appreciation of this central point. The danger is that the analyst secretly or unconsciously believes that entitlement and grandiose claims are in fact a precious and preferred way of life. This leads either to a more or less subtly conveyed insistence that the patient renounce his claims, motivated by the analyst's envy ("if I can't have this, you certainly can't"), or to a vicarious enjoyment in allowing the analysand an envied and forbidden pleasure denied to himself ("I'm too `mature' to indulge myself in this precious entitlement, but I can grant it to you").

The analyst's overidentification with the analysand's grandiose claims represents a failure to appreciate how much these claims undermine and sour the analysand's involvements with other people and isolate him in a confusing and often paranoid fashion. The analysand may come to feel more and more that only his analyst is really "sensitive" to him. An additional danger in working with this sort of transference is that the analyst's own conflictual longings to idealize may come to play a role in his admiration of the analysand. This can lead to the analyst's own investment in the analysand's grandiosity and difficulty in allowing him to move past this integration, or to anxiety in the face of the analysand's grandiosity and interference with the unfolding of this narcissistic integration.

ANALYSANDS WHO integrate relations around idealizing others also tend to believe passionately that this is the best sort of relationship to have. Life is seen as extremely complicated and perilous. The easiest and safest strategy for living is to find someone who seems to be secure and successful, who has all the answers, and to apprentice oneself to that person. For the price of considerable devotion, the idealized object will take the disciple under his wing, protecting him, leading him, guiding him along the path they have already cut through the obstacles of life. Analysands who integrate relationships on this basis are convinced that such an idealized bond is a very precious, very special tic. Sullivan would ask of patients idealizing the analyst, "Can they afford it?" It is precisely the cost of idealization which the analysand does not notice.

Feuerbach, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, argued that religion is, by its nature, a form of human self-alienation, that the characteristics and powers attributed to "God" in any religion are inevitably a reflection of human resources which the inhabitants of that culture are frightened to own. God becomes a screen on which are projected dissociated aspects of the self.

Although this is a highly oversimplified account of religion, idealization in human relations does often reflect such a masochistic, projective process. Because of disturbed earlier relationships, there is a terror of individuation and self-development. The analysand fears that finding his own path means isolation, a fear often originating in the context of relationships with parents who demand adoration and deference as the price of involvement. For such an analysand, the only way to ensure human contact is to find someone to go first, to remain always in someone's shadow. The presumption is that all others are as brittle and demanding of deference as the parents, as frightened of the analysand's self-development. They fear that to emerge from the shadow of the parent or the analyst is to lose the parent or analyst. Such an analysand generally fails to appreciate how much mental effort he expends in propping up others, convincing himself that the other is always more advanced along whatever line he himself is pursuing. Despite recurring inevitable disappointments, the analysand does not grasp that life is too idiosyncratic for anyone else's solutions to be a helpful shortcut to reaching his own.

Idealization frequently functions as part of a self-perpetuating cycle, generating the anxiety it then serves to assuage. The idealizing analysand often makes the analyst's interpretations into aphorisms, highly prized possessions which are granted a significance far beyond their actual substance or utility. Rather than working at or digesting the interpretation, the analysand keeps it at a distance, a gift from the idealized analyst, and evokes it at points of anxiety. Preserving the link between the ideas and the analyst protects their magic function in times of doubt or confusion. It also prevents the analysand from transforming the ideas and making them his own. So the lack of self-esteem and confidence in one's own thinking is perpetually undermined by the idealization, which then creates a setting in which the magic from the idealized analyst serves as balm.

As with the analysis of grandiose illusions, the inquiry into idealizing illusions also must avoid a moralistic tone. The problem with idealization is not that it is "childish" (as Freud noted) but that, as an exclusive mode of relation, it strongly limits possibilities. Analysands who compulsively integrate relationships on an idealizing basis remain perpetual disciples and can never fully allow themselves to experience their own strengths and resources. Further, they often secretly harbor the suspicion that the object of their idealization is flawed and brittle, that a close look at the analyst's full humanity would ruin them both. A hazard in the analytic exploration of these issues is that the analyst may overidentify with the analysand's idealizing longings, secretly or unconsciously believing that being under the wing of (or sexually surrendering to) a bigger, more powerful figure is a preferred way of life. This may lead either to a subtly conveyed insistence that the analysand renounce his claims, because of the analyst's envy, or to a vicarious enjoyment in allowing the analysand a forbidden pleasure denied to himself. An additional danger is the analyst's possible overenjoyment of being the object of idealization, so that he has trouble releasing the analysand from the narcissistic integration (or his fear that he will enjoy being the object of idealization so much that he cannot allow the analysand this experience).

Analysands manifesting narcissistic transferences generally need to be joined in their self-admiration or idealization in order to feel involved, to feel that something important is happening. The analyst cannot feign this participation. It makes a huge difference to the analysand whether the analyst is genuinely admiring or is patronizing him, whether he is enjoying or is merely tolerating the analysand's admiration. Analysands suffering from rigid narcissistic patterns of integration tend to be extremely sensitive to the genuineness of the analyst's attitude toward them and toward himself. What is called for is not a forced assumption of some prescribed "analytic" demeanor, either "neutral" or "empathic," but a willingness to meet and engage the analysand on his own terms. The analyst has to be able to gradually broaden the repertoire of connections between himself and the analysand, to treat the narcissistic integration as an elective form of play to be enjoyed, rather than as a somber necessity.

The problem with transferential illusions is precisely that they are not playful (in the sense of Loewald and Winnicott). They have to be transformed from a desperate prerequisite for connection and security into an enrichment of other forms of engagement. What is called for is an active shift in relatedness on the part of the analyst. This takes time and pacing. The issue of timing is highly complex and determinable only within the complexities of each individual case. Bromberg (1983) has described a shifting "empathy-anxiety balance" as the context within which treatment takes place, and argues that for narcissistic patients the beginning of treatment must be weighted heavily on the side of empathy.

These analysands are apt to be extremely sensitive to the manner in which the analyst reacts to their illusions and gambits. The analytic posture I am describing conveys a willingness to participate as well as a curiosity about the constrictive limits which this form of participation allows. To return to the metaphor of the dance invitation, I do not propose going to the dance and complaining about the music, but enjoying the dance as offered, together with questioning the singularity of the style. How did it come about that the analysand learned no other steps? Why does the analysand believe that this is the only desirable dance there is? Most analysands need to feel that their own dance style is appreciated in order to be open to expanding their repertoire.

One of the great, generally unacknowledged truths about analytic technique is that it is developed on a trial-and-error basis, personally designed in the interaction with each individual analysand. With some analysands, one can question illusions right from the start; with others, this is not possible. There is no way to know beforehand. One tests out different approaches: puzzlement, teasing, probing, intellectual challenge, raised eyebrow (literally and figuratively), until one finds which among the analyst's many voices and positions enables that particular analysand to feel both joined and nudged toward deeper understanding.

Because clinical work with narcissistic illusions is so tailored and subtle, I shall in the remainder of this chapter discuss extended fragments from analyses illustrating the three major kinds of narcissistic illusions: grandiosity, mutual admiration (what Kohut terms "twinship"), and idealization. The purpose is to illustrate the manner in which self-organizations centering on narcissistic illusions concerning self or others have crucial functions in maintaining the analysand's relational matrix, by preserving characteristic patterns of interpersonal integrations and fantasied object ties. The fragments are in no way meant to represent comprehensive case histories. Many dimensions of the work are omitted, to highlight the various aspects I wish to examine. The clinical challenge in each case is how to engage the analysand in immersion in and emergence from narcissistic integrations.

John, a man in his early fifties, sought treatment as part of a broader campaign of self-perfection. He was a filmmaker who had turned his passion for adventure and his considerable talent into a successful film company, the management of which had come to dominate his life. The company was nearly always in a state of chaos, which was both a reflection and a direct consequence of his own approach to living. John's willingness to take risks, combined with a considerable business acumen, had enabled him to create the basis for a highly successful operation. Yet his ambitions at any particular time constantly exceeded his resources. His new ventures and overextensions kept the organization on the brink of disaster, and it was often only through his persuasive charm that he was able to keep the company going. Further, none of the individuals lie employed in the ever-expanding business were competent to do their job. He invariably hired young, inexperienced people who tended to be creative, idealistic, and devoted to him as a wise benefactor. The threat of calamitous employee mistakes required his continual supervision over all aspects of the company. Despite a series of dazzling successes, he lived in a state of perpetual apprehension and recurrent panic, because a new disaster inevitably seemed to appear just as he had sidestepped the last one. John entered treatment because of extended bouts of depression and anxiety; in part he was looking for help in perfecting his organizational and managerial skills so he would be able to oversee his business operations with greater composure.

The company was his entire life. Still, as we gradually came to understand, the company was really his vehicle for a greater vision and ambition. His view of the business world and of life in general embodied a recurrent dichotomy between stability, organization, and conformity on the one hand and artistic expressiveness, fluidity, and adventure on the other. As John began to give voice to his larger ambitions, he revealed a deep faith in his own ability to achieve a perfect balance between these two poles; the creation of such a balance in his company would result in a radically novel approach to business in general, in which expressiveness and organization would complement each other. This would encourage a larger revolution in business practices, and a more general cultural advance. As we explored these hopes, John would place himself among the great political and cultural figures of contemporary and past societies. He saw himself as a heroic, beleaguered Atlas in a world of incompetents. During business crises, he recalled, he often had repetitive fantasies of himself as Henry Kissinger, negotiating dramatic truces among warring parties, as well as dreams of being in plunging airplanes, grabbing the controls and executing heroic escapes.

John had considerable difficulty in his personal relations, maintaining them only with men and women who regarded him as a guru of one sort or another. He was enormously generous with money and advice, and took great pleasure in helping others along. Although he was available in the moment, his friends all "understood" that his availability could not be anticipated. He was extremely busy, constantly coming and going, and would turn up in their lives in dramatic and compelling fashion, only to disappear again shortly thereafter. He dated rarely, and seemed unbothered by the absence of sexuality in his life. Sex was too complicated and entangling, and his schedule was too unpredictable to plan ahead. His most prolonged relationship had been with a much younger woman whom he regarded as beautiful, full of potential, and fundamentally mishandled by her parents. He took her on as a project, luring her from the control of her overprotective parents and fashioning her, Pygmalion-like, according to his own vision. The relationship collapsed when she turned out to be quite troubled, as well as a recalcitrant student; her increasingly insistent and desperate demands on his time began interfering with his sense of freedom and adventure.

The transference was organized along similar lines. John would talk on and on about his business problems, the enervating lack of dependability of his employees, and the brilliance of his efforts to keep things afloat. He would gather advice from various sources, including self-help books, and regarded the analyst as the ultimate self-help resource and reference. He conveyed a sense of fascination with the contents of his own mind, which he would put on display, arranging and rearranging them for the analyst's appreciation.

Occasional feelings of loneliness would be expressed and quickly avoided by a return to his business worries and dramatic rescues. John and I came to understand that he feared he was unable to sustain any sort of personal relationship, particularly intimate involvement with a woman. He felt he was wonderful on first meeting, but in the long run would have trouble maintaining a level of charm and excitement sufficient to keep a woman interested. He was drawn to women who seemed accomplished and desirable, yet with whom he felt somehow flawed and inadequate. He felt safer in the company of younger, adoring women of high potential, yet he was afraid of their need for him. It became clear that although he felt tormented and enervated by the pressures and worries of his life, he feared that any slackening of the pace would result in emptiness and boredom. Life outside the fast lane would become unbearably tedious and humdrum, and he would lose all his appeal to others. John felt deeply flawed as a person, hovering always on the brink of depression; yet he thought his company was infinitely perfectible and operated as a kind of surrogate self, which he would continue to expand and perfect. "The company doesn't get depressed or scared. I can always keep changing its public face, and keep changing the parts. When some people fall down, I can just replace them." We uncovered his belief that once his company was flawless and stable, he would be able to emerge as a person in his own right.

John's grandiosity served important defensive functions, the most central of which was its counterdepressive effect. Underneath the glitter, John's sense of living in the world of other people was extremely grim. He saw others as leading desolate lives, as slaves to conventionality, as desperately longing for someone to provide life and excitement for them. He saw himself as able to have a vitalizing, reparative impact on others-but only for a short time. Unable to sustain his counterdepressive efforts, his own depression would emerge and he would be revealed as empty, having nothing to offer, bitterly disappointing to others. The grandiose illusions operated as a powerful defense against this sense of bleakness and personal deficiency.

They also served important functions in the expression and control of aggression. John saw other people as generally worthless and unable to provide him with anything useful or interesting. He felt enraged at their mistakes, almost personally betrayed, as if they were simply demonstrating over and over how little he could count on them. Attributing elevated status to himself expressed his deep contempt for others; it also removed him from the threat of being in a position where he expected anything from anyone. Being uniquely competent and self-sufficient, he did not need to expose himself to vulnerability and rage, or to what he experienced as constant disappointment and betrayal.

Although the grandiose illusions had come to serve secondary defensive functions, their content derived from the structure of relationships within his family, particularly the manner in which he had come to embody his mother's hopes and ambitions. The maternal grandparents had been extremely industrious working-class people, immigrants of Mediterranean extraction, with great aspirations for social advancement. They had worked their way from rather humble conditions into a position which was, for a while, fairly affluent-although eventually a combination of bad business decisions and bad luck once again kept them from attaining the social standing they longed for. John's mother was the younger of two children. Her brother had become a highly successful and renowned lawyer, who occupied an almost mythical status within the family. Although financially well off (which pleased his parents greatly), the brother had chosen to devote himself largely to social causes and public-service projects. He was very much an individualist, had extensive and interesting hobbies, and traveled frequently to exotic places. His wife was a flamboyant and seemingly fascinating person, and their marriage was regarded by most family members as ideal.

John's mother adored her elder brother. Although she too was quite intelligent, much less had been expected of her by their parents, who were mostly concerned that she be taken care of materially. She had attended college briefly, then left to marry John's father, a steady but seemingly dull accountant whom her parents regarded as a "great catch." She worried a great deal about financial stability, at least partially in reaction to her parents' shifting fortunes and the diminished opportunities offered women at that time; her choice of a husband seems to have been dominated by that consideration. John, the firstborn, was followed by three sisters. The mother became very involved with John and one of his sisters, the brightest and most artistic of the children. The other two girls, quieter and more obviously troubled, receded into the background, where dwelt the father.

John's mother placed strong emphasis on nonconventionality and excitement. She saw her husband as hopelessly dull and compared him unfavorably to her brother, who was her model for the good life. She saw John as the heir apparent, not to his father's throne, but to his uncle's. John became his mother's companion in adventure, accompanied his aunt and uncle on their vacations, and developed a wide range of hobbies and exotic tastes, which drew him further into the orbit of his mother and her brother. John's mother gave him lessons in social skills and manners, worked with him to polish his diction and elocution, and even pressured him into cosmetic surgery to "improve" his appearance.

John's father came from an impoverished, Irish-immigrant background. His father had made a meager living. An elder brother led a religious, marginal existence, never managing to leave home or establish any sort of independent existence. A younger sister became a political radical and bohemian. The father was the steadiest of the family and supported the others both financially and emotionally. Having worked at menial jobs to put himself through school, he treasured his hardearned status as a professional.

In the face of his wife's appropriation of their son, John's father silently and somewhat bitterly retreated. He developed an alliance with the two daughters who were abandoned in disappointment by the mother. The marriage was quite stormy at intervals, and the children were encouraged to take sides. John felt he was often forced to play the judge of his parents' competing claims. Because of their difficulties in reconciling their own differences, the two of them seemed to grant a precocious, Solomon-like wisdom to their son. The marriage eventually broke apart in an atmosphere of mutual hostility and distrust.

Throughout his childhood John felt different from his peers, whom he regarded as conventional and conformistic, yet not good enough to be accepted by the most desirable and popular, in comparison to whom he felt dull and humdrum. His sense of himself had consolidated around his mother's image of him, modeled on her own glittering vision of her brother. He took on positive significance for her only as a reflection of his uncle's brilliance, and his model in all relationships was the one between his uncle and mother, between an all-knowing, infinitely exciting guru and a worshipful disciple. On the other hand, his childhood had been suffused with the continual sense that he had failed his mother, that he never would live up to her ambitions for him, and that her preoccupation with refinement of his behavior and appearance reflected deep disappointment in him. In her sense of herself as compromised and damaged, she seemed to look to him as a vehicle of redemption and justification-which he, of course, could never manage. Success necessitated an escalation of demands, to keep alive the dynamic tension and her hope for a cure of her own depression (through him). The sense of failure also was connected to a secret identification with his father as mediocre and discarded.

The central technical problem in the analysis was the analyst's position vis-a-vis John's grandiosity. On the one hand, systematic interpretation of the defensive functions of the grandiosity, by itself, would probably have driven him out of treatment. His need to display himself and his talents was intense, and the transference was organized around these exhibitionistic needs. In John's view, the analyst was like the mother, needing and enjoying his display, and, in his humble efforts to analyze him, helping him to perfect himself. The analyst's genuine admiration of John's talents and pleasure in him was probably a prerequisite for the analysis to proceed. Merely to interpret the defensive aspects of his grandiosity would have been to miss the importance to him of integrating relationships on that basis, the only basis on which he believed he could connect with others. Failure to engage with him in this way would either have made the treatment uninteresting to him or necessitated a submissive, defeated withdrawal (modeled after the father).

On the other hand, allowing John's grandiose claims to stand at face value would not have provided any traction for analytic change. John had a deep conviction that others, including the analyst, led dull and empty lives and that they needed to feed on his vitality. One had the sense that his self-displays could have lasted for years, perhaps decades, that they were not so much opening up something new in him, but perpetuating something old. The analyst's unchallenging participation in this integration could only be experienced as a corroboration of John's belief that this is all that can happen between people: one displays and teaches; the other admires and absorbs.

What seemed most useful was a playful participation in and appreciation of John's grandiose claims, combined with an inquiry into their origins and functions. The analyst's gradually developing ability to enjoy him without needing to take so seriously the demands he placed upon himself, seemed to make it possible for John to begin to laugh at himself, an enormously important positive prognostic sign. Sympathizing with his despair at a business failure, while noting that what was at stake apparently was not just the business venture itself but his role in the evolutionary development of the species, proved useful, as did comparisons between his relation to his company and Louis XIV's relation to the state. We explored his expectations of instant and total rapture in the response of others to him, both within and outside the transference; the selectivity of what he attended to in other people and their response to him; and the alacrity with which he assumed the other to be disinterested and disappointed in him. Particularly startling to him was the analyst's pointing to how little satisfaction he actually expected and obtained in his relations with others. He had a deep conviction that winning appreciation of himself as guru was the ultimate in human affairs. He gradually came to see how much he was missing, and how embittered and angry he was about that lack.

The broader context of the work was an inquiry into the origins and functions of his grandiose claims and ambitions: how they came to be so crucial, how they functioned to preserve his tie to his mother, and his deep fear that to abandon these illusions as compulsive necessities would be to lose forever any possibility of his being important and exciting to anyone. The increasingly collaborative inquiry and jointly constructed interpretations, combined with a lighter, nonaddictive participation inhis narcissistic illusions, transformed the analytic relationship into a different sort of integration, making it possible for John to operate increasingly outside his formerly characteristic narcissistic patterns. He learned to enjoy rather than be tormented by his prodigious talents, and to use his ambitions as goals and guidelines rather than as prerequisites to feeling good about himself.

Lucy was a painter in her late twenties who had been in treatment on and off with different therapists for more than ten years. Although she felt vaguely "supported" by these prior therapies in her struggle against depression, she was uninvolved in a deep way in any of them. She had a sense of herself as being very different from other people, and had been unable to connect with her previous therapists. She had been in treatment with her current (female) analyst for eight months, and this time things were quite different. She felt very involved and had an intense sense of importance about what was taking place. The analyst also felt involved in the treatment; in fact, she felt considerable anxiety about what she experienced as overly intense countertransference feelings, which led her to seek consultation on the case.

Lucy was the eldest of five children. Her mother was a strikingly uneven woman, very strong and talented in some respects, yet enormously self-absorbed. The mother had been an adored only child and had a very close relationship with her own mother, who had come to live with the family when Lucy was quite young. The presence of the grandmother had created a breach between the parents, who became increasingly estranged. This apparently was not especially disturbing to Lucy's mother, whose most intense bond seemed to be with her mother. All three generations of women in the family were quite artistic in one way or another, and each was also odd and quirky in her own particular fashion; this was not only tolerated by all, but almost cultivated. The father increasingly removed himself from the family, eventually becoming an alcoholic. He had seemed most fond of Lucy and there was a real bond between them, although it was hard for Lucy to understand the basis for his favoring of her. Their interactions often had an ambiguously sexual quality, even though ritualized and formal.

After her husband's death and the departure of her children, Lucy's mother moved with her own mother into a small cabin in the woods. It was as if extraneous elements had been discarded and a perfect union once again established. Mother and grandmother would sometimes lie in different directions on the same sofa, like two kittens in the sun. The mother would languish about, dabbling in painting and poetry, surrounded by photographs of herself as a young girl, and lost in reverie.

Lucy had been a shy, dreamy, talented, and fearful child who spent a lot of time at home. She ended up marrying her high school boyfriend, a very outgoing young man who was totally devoted to her. They regarded each other as perfect complements: he dealt with the outside world in ways that she could not and arranged the material basis for their existence; she provided the emotional softness and richness he lacked and adorned their life with her rich imagination. She would paint at home, barely leaving the apartment for weeks on end, like a princess in a tower; he would return every evening to fill her in on life in the outside world and to share her exotic realms of fantasy. Her paintings were beautifully executed, but unfashionably representational studies of subjects with highly personal meanings. They seemed to be from another time, and analytic inquiry revealed associations between Lucy's paintings and her mother's dreamy reveries of her own younger days. To the analyst it seemed as if Lucy had become a character in her mother's fantasy life.

Lucy decided almost immediately on meeting her current analyst that the two of them were very much alike, and that conviction had come to dominate much of their work together. Having a very astute eye for detail, Lucy noticed myriad similarities in their tastes, values, and sensibilities. She became convinced that there was a strong, almost spiritual commonality between them. The analyst's interpretive statements frequently evoked a gasp of recognition in her, followed by an amazed "How did you know that?" She felt she had become a very special patient for the analyst because of their kindred spirits, and she searched diligently for clues indicating that this was in fact the case. Lucy became intensely curious about the details of the analyst's personal life. During her hours of solitude she would weave into fantasies of marvelous companionship those facets that she was able to glean. It became imperative to Lucy that the analyst experience their relationship in similar terms. She had decided, for example, that a particular color was the analyst's favorite; it became hers as well and took on significance as a symbol of their special bond. When. the analyst wore that color, Lucy would be enormously pleased and comfortable; when the analyst wore a different color, Lucy would feel anxious and betrayed, as if the analyst were deliberately interfering in her well-being, disappointing her in an almost cruel way.

The analyst did regard Lucy as a special patient. She too sensed considerable similarity between them, regarding Lucy as, in some ways, a "preanalyzed" version of herself. On the one hand, this was gratifying. She admired Lucy, was flattered by the latter's appreciation of her, and felt a maternal pleasure in helping someone with whom she identified so strongly. On the other hand, she felt increasingly oppressed and trapped by the intensity of the transference and countertransference. She knew that some of the sense of similarity was contrived by Lucy, and that she was not quite as remarkably intuitive as Lucy wanted to think of her as being. Further, it was difficult to know how to respond to Lucy's curiosity, detective work, and confabulations. She knew supplying more details was not called for; yet the pressure Lucy felt to have her confirm their special bond seemed intense. She feared disappointing her, to the point of becoming self-conscious about deciding the color of her clothes on the morning of a session with Lucy. Would she wear the special color and confirm their pact, or wear something different and betray it? She felt increasingly that her hands were tied. The sense of special connection in the transference seemed "precious" for Lucy, both extremely important and especially brittle and delicate.

Early in the analysis Lucy reported dreams in which the analyst appeared-technicolor dreams, with a bright, panoramic quality about them.

This dream reflects something of the quality of perfect attunement that Lucy, and frequently the analyst, experienced in the transference-countertransference integration at the start of the treatment.

Lucy's experience of herself in relation to other people and to the analyst centered around an illusion of sameness. The only meaningful contact between herself and someone else was contingent upon the symbiotic fantasy that they were identical in some fundamental way, that their psychic content was almost interchangeable. Lucy's life was organized around a search for such relatedness; once she found something akin to it, she clung desperately.

As the analyst's first vacation approached, a second transferential configuration emerged, both in dreams and in fantasies. Lucy began portraying the analyst as "spare," someone who lives a lonely existence, empty of pleasure or joy. The month-long break in the treatment over the vacation proved very difficult for Lucy; she became anxious and regressed, feeling abandoned and somehow helpless. Upon the analyst's return, she reported the following dream.

It is clear from the material about the analyst's vacation and the dream following it that illusions of sameness served as a defense, warding off feelings of depression, emptiness, damage, and rejection. Lucy feared the alternative to the special bond of sameness to be a desolate lack of contact, in which she and the other would be face to face with their own pain and inability to reach each other. In that sense, the illusion of sameness was a narcissistic, counterdepressive defense to be interpreted.

We might also regard the illusion of sameness as an expression of a longing for symbiotic union which the mother, in her adhesive tie to her own mother, probably was unable to provide. The mother's eagerness to return to her own fusion with her mother made separating seem a precarious business, creating conflicts around the rapprochement crisis and leaving Lucy with a dread of differences and a longing for "oneness" (Silverman, Lachmann, and Milich, 1982). In that sense, the illusion of sameness appeared in the treatment through what Kohut (1971) terms a "twinship" transference, representing a missing developmental experience re-created in the treatment situation, an experience to be encouraged and slowly outgrown.

Both these dimensions of the narcissistic transference are important; as with John's grandiose claims, however, Lucy's illusion of sameness is fully grasped only in the context of the interactive fabric of her early relations with others. This was a family in which there seemed to be very little real involvement with others. Each of the family members was a strong and developed presence, and it was as if each granted to the others the right of self-absorption. Within this armada of ships passing in the night, Lucy seems to have been hungry for contact. The person most involved with her was her father-although the contact was episodic, puzzling, ambiguous, expressed more through rituals than intimacy. The most intense involvement within the family was that between mother and grandmother, and it was a fusion from which Lucy and everyone else was excluded. This relationship became the model for the ultimate form of human contact. Mutual absorption, an identity of values and attributes, the exclusion of others-these became the hallmarks of true intimacy. It was this form of relatedness which Lucy sought in the analytic relationship. When it was not possible to infer its presence, she remained uninvolved; when it was possible, she became intensely absorbed.

What can we say of the analyst's handling of this material? Should the defensive dimensions of this transference have been interpreted aggressively from the beginning? Did gratification in the countertransference lead to the creation of a countertherapeutic folie a deux? Or was the patient's experience of gratification with respect to the illusion of sameness an indication of potential for progress, a developmental growing edge, not to be interfered with in any way?

Lucy's illusion of sameness, consolidated in this transference-countertransference integration, was both essential for treatment to be joined and a retardant to growth that needed to be challenged in some fashion. Based on Lucy's earlier treatment history, it seems reasonable to conclude that the analyst's matching countertransference responses and her willingness to participate in and enjoy the patient's illusions were fortuitous. They made possible a deeper therapeutic engagement than would otherwise have been possible, one that would have been precluded also by early interpretation of the defensive functions of this configuration. Yet, since the illusion of sameness represented not simply potential new growth but also a re-creation of old object ties, allowing this narcissistic configuration to remain unchallenged threatened to become counterproductive.

The analyst began exploring the patient's early relationships as prototypes for the pursuit of identity with others. Simultaneously, she began raising questions about why the patient regarded this form of connection, which (after the patient had introduced the phrase) they referred to as being "joined at the hip," as the ultimate in human relations. She pointed out to Lucy how hard she worked to force an identity when differences might be interesting in their own right. At first, this line of inquiry was strongly resisted; Lucy felt as if the analyst were taking away from her something very precious, and her dreams of exhilarating activities in pure, rarefied mountain air would suddenly change to scenes of muddy, dried-up river basins. This shift was understood as reflecting the patient's fear that the only alternative to shared identity was the desolation she had experienced as a child, a loneliness that she feared was being re-created in the analyst's withdrawal.

Patient and analyst began to work collaboratively on appreciating how contrived many of the illusions of sameness were, based on what they came to call talismanic contact, expressed through rituals and magical signs. One by-product of this work was Lucy's reporting for the first time that she had secret areas of her experience withheld from both her analyst and her husband, the natural counterpart to the forced identity which had seemed to be the price of meaningful connection. Another by-product of this phase of the treatment was an increase in Lucy's freedom to pursue some of her own independent ambitions and activities.

Thus, the analyst's participation in, yet inquiry into, the narcissistic illusions of sameness generated in Lucy a growing awareness of her conflicts over relating through forced identity, and began to transform the analytic relationship into a form of connection more complex in structure and richer in possibilities.

In her discussion of various experiences and fantasies grouped under the developmental organization she terms the paranoid-schizoid position, Melanie Klein speaks variously of "good" objects, "ideal" objects, and "pseudoideal" objects. Although these concepts are not defined and distinguished from one another with much precision, they are all products of splitting, which Klein sees as the central defense mechanism of the earliest months of life, and can be arranged on a continuum of severity. Through splitting the infant keeps separate his good (pleasurable, loving) experiences with others from his bad (painful, hateful) experiences, in order to protect his libidinal relationships from the destructive impact of his aggression. Thus, the good object is a composite of all good experiences with others. The ideal object is the good object elaborated through fantasy, goodness granted magical powers to protect the child and ward off dangers.

But what if the child's experiences with others are nearly all painful and unpleasant-if, in the distribution of experiences, there is no material from which to construct a good or ideal object? Voltaire suggested that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Similarly, Klein argues that the child cannot survive without some sense of connection to a loved and loving other, and that if the child does not experience the basis for such a relationship, he will imagine it. Thus, the pseudoideal object is not elaborated out of the child's experience, but is created whole cloth.

The distinctions among good, ideal, and pseudoideal objects provide a useful framework for thinking about different kinds of idealization within the transference. Some idealization is based on actual experience with the analyst-interpretations that have been helpful, for example. The illusory element in this sort of idealization is not in the creation of the good qualities or experiences, but in the care taken to prevent recognition and integration of other not-so-good qualities or experiences, such as interpretations that do not help much, or interpretations that feel hurtful. The patient experiences only the dimensions of the relationship with the analyst which he deems acceptable.

Other idealizing transferences are based on actual experiences with the analyst, but are elaborated in more or less fantastic ways. Here some good experience, some actual help, serves as the core around which are woven imaginative attributions of the range and depth of the analyst's powers, the idyllic richness of his personal life, the constancy and purity of his motives, and so on.

A third kind of pseudoidealizing transference is created whole cloth. Here what the analyst says or does seems to matter very little. The analyst's goodness and power are assumed and insisted upon, with scraps of evidence strung together to create the impression of a plausible image. On the pseudoidealizing end of the idealizing continuum, the analyst is likely to have the sometimes uncanny countertransferential experience of not recognizing himself at all in the analysand's experience of him.

* * *

DIANE, a young lawyer and politician, illustrates the workings of an idealizing transference.

The significant benchmarks in Diane's emotional development as an adult consisted in a series of intense, idealizing relationships with mentors of various sorts. Choosing men and women who seemed talented and successful at whatever endeavor Diane herself was interested in at the time, she would apprentice herself to them. A talented person in general, she was especially skilled and seductive in the art of discipleship. She was extremely successful at positioning herself beside, behind, and/or underneath (in different contexts, different prepositions apply) the other, whom she would admire, protect, and devote herself to. Analytic inquiry revealed the implicit contract she felt pertained in such relationships. She would place loyalty to her mentor above all else, admiring, defending, and publicly representing him or her as a talented and special disciple, in a way she felt would enhance the mentor's reputation and status. She would speak of the mentor as someone who had attained a lofty, invulnerable pinnacle of existence, with all questions answered, all rough edges smoothed, and no frailties, foibles, or other evidence to the contrary. The mentor in turn was expected to regard her as his special charge, be loyal to her above all others, protect her from the hardships of life, and guide her deftly in a direct, linear fashion to the accomplished, privileged, and invulnerable status he himself had (presumably) attained in life.

The relationships lasted for quite a while and were often mutually satisfying to the two participants, both within and outside the fantasied idealizing pact. Not surprisingly, Diane invariably suffered periods of painful disillusionment and betrayal. Either the adored object exposed clay feet, or he proved less steadfast than Diane. Following periods of intense, smoldering rage and despair, new models would be established. Although very attractive, Diane seemed more girlish than womanly; she had few intense romantic involvements.

Sources for the structure of this idealizing mode were found in Diane's relationships with both her parents, who saw themselves as special, admirable people; they were intensely competitive with each other for recognition in general and for Diane's loyalty in particular. The mother was an extremely tough, overburdened woman, who presented herself as a saintly victim of her husband's failings. She saw Diane as a secret ally who (unlike the father) was sensitive to her plight, yet who, as the father's favorite, could influence him in ways beneficial to herself.

As an older sibling, Diane felt deprived of the affection and nurturance the mother provided for her younger brother and sisters. Demeaning Diane's needs seemed to be in part the mother's way of assuaging her own guilt and despair at not being able to provide fully for everyone. The mother's most intense relationships were with her babies and with damaged relatives of various sorts whom she took care of. Diane could gain access to her only through sympathizing with her, admiring her devotion to others and to herself as a small child, and forgiving her guilt at not constantly providing for Diane as well. Their relationship seemed to center around a deep yearning in both for a perfect mother-infant synchrony.

Diane's father was an extremely volatile, paranoid man who kept his explosive rage and terror in check through an elaborately constructed obsessional devotion to fastidiousness and detail. As a young man, he had been a rather dashing figure, adventurous and successful in sports; but a series of injuries and career disasters left him shaken, somewhat bewildered, and extremely bitter. He had been very involved with Diane, his eldest daughter, especially when she was small. Diane adored her father and loved hearing stories of his bravery and exploits. She became an accomplished student of her father's perfectionism and certainty, a good soldier in her father's army. She believed she had earned his "chosen" status over her siblings, and felt protected and safe under her father's harsh but sure control. It was only as Diane grew older that she realized how fearful and temperamental her father was. There were many disappointments involving her father's refusal to join Diane in activities in the outside world, and frightening outbreaks of sadistic violence. He had enormous difficulty tolerating her accomplishments and would either demean them, claim credit for them, or both. Diane's disillusionment with her father was very gradual; she resisted it strongly. She was frightened at how crazy she feared her father was, but deeply loved the bond she felt as the favorite child of a noble and fearless man.

She developed a strong, conflictual counteridentification with the mother. On the one hand, she felt intense longings to join in what Diane viewed as her mother's masochistic, degraded status; on the other hand, her father was her model for operating effectively in the world. There were intense oedipal yearnings and a sense of herself as an oedipal victor. Surely she would be a better, more submissive, more appreciative wife to her father than her mother was. Furthermore, she felt herself to be like her father in many respects, explosive and rageful.

Although Diane chose a very different life course from either parent and had left the family in many fundamental respects, the structure of her relationship with her father was preserved into adulthood. When she visited, her father would bait her with his political and social prejudices in an effort to reclaim his place as the object of unquestioned loyalty. If Diane (predictably) differed with her father, he would up the ante, his taunts getting more and more bitter. Diane found herself agreeing with her father to "keep him under control." In many respects, she played a central role in the family, operating as a kind of double agent. Her father needed to see Diane as loyal to him, as the repository of his bruised hopes for respect and renewal. Her mother regarded Diane as her champion and as leverage with her husband, placating him and thereby enhancing his stability and keeping the family intact. Diane's divided loyalties, as she strove to be each parent's "daughter," made her later career in politics seem uncomplicated; life within the family was a tension-filled juggling act. We came to see that she had taken the common elements in both these relationships, connection through exclusive devotion and through submission, as the basis for her manner of integrating relationships with significant others in general.

The predominant features of the transference were organized around just these lines. The analyst was viewed as someone with ready answers to all of life's important questions, with a perfectly organized and disciplined personal existence. He was seen as demanding total devotion, in terms of solemn dedication to the analytic work and repeatedly expressed loyalty to him as a person. Diane did in fact work very hard, seemed to get a great deal out of the treatment, and tried to be a rewarding patient for the analyst. An early dream, several months into the analysis, provided the first evidence of the doubts Diane unconsciously harbored, an image of the analyst as omnipresent and omniscient.

Associations to the bears uncovered fears concerning her father's explosive rages and terror of her own rages as well. Her hopes in analysis were for a better idealized father, one who would guide her along a course which would protect her from what she felt was her own bestiality (partially an identification with her experience of her father). It was extremely important to her to see the analyst as perfect and all knowing, as providing a safe route through the dense thicket of her own conflicts, diverse identifications, and divided loyalties. As the dream suggests, she harbored secret fears about the analyst's powers and dependability; the possibility that the analyst was not what he seemed to be provoked extreme anxiety and was difficult for her to sustain in conscious thought.

One of the central dimensions of the analysis entailed an articulation and gradual working through of this erotic-idealizing pattern of integration, both within and outside the transference. The analyst often was pleased and amused by, as well as curious about, the wondrous attributes with which Diane endowed him. It was these countertransferential feelings, combined and expressed in the analyst's participation, which helped to make it possible for Diane to consolidate a relationship with the analyst along necessarily idealizing lines as well as to gradually begin to question and transform that pattern of relating.

Racker (1968) makes the point that a crucial feature of exploration of the transference is inquiry into the patient's fantasies about the countertransference. This was very much the case with Diane. Devotion to the analyst seemed absolutely essential to her, not only because of the security and certainty it seemed to provide, but also because she secretly felt that it was the only sort of relationship the analyst was able to sustain. She was convinced that he, like all people, felt closest to another only when he saw the other as very much like himself, agreeing with all his opinions and prejudices. Differences would surely make the analyst anxious and self-doubting and would be experienced as hostile. Kindness would consist in unquestioning devotion.

Challenging and inquiring into these assumptions began to free Diane of them. She began to see that treating someone else as if they were God might not particularly enhance their self-esteem, and that she regarded other people as shallow, vulnerable, and brittle. She assumed that the analyst would feel he had nothing to offer her as a woman rather than as a baby or small girl. As these beliefs were explored and challenged, the relationship began to open up and become more complex.

If she was not being submissive, Diane feared, competitive feelings might emerge and the relationship would become "messy." There was considerable evidence in her dreams of a longing to dethrone the analyst and other pedestaled icons whom, during her waking life, she was so carefully protecting from herself and others. As she slowly became more competitive, she became aware of fears of retaliation: if you're strong, people "give it to you"; if you appear frightened and confused, kindness and consideration result. She realized how secretly powerful she had come to feel in her passivity, and how little she attended to her considerable prowess and resources as a woman. She both longed for and feared being overwhelmed-as she so often had been, as a child, by her father. Alternatively, she was terrified of how brittle her heroes seemed to be and how easily crushed they might be by her hidden strengths.

The analytic process itself was experienced in the context of this transferential configuration. There was an extraordinary desire to surrender to the analyst sexually and, in a more global way, to be made over according to the image of perfection attributed to the analyst. On the other hand, she deeply resented the submission she felt was demanded of her and struggled resistively against it. A dream midway through the analysis highlighted these issues:

The shots in the dream became a central metaphor in Diane's increasing awareness of how much she both desired and resented the (sexual) submission and incorporation she experienced in the analytic relationship. She was supposed to take in the analyst's ideas, look the other way, surrender totally. On the one hand, she felt this act would save her; on the other hand, she felt humiliated and enraged by it.

As these conflictual features of the transference were articulated and questioned, a deep fear of being abandoned and utterly alone emerged. Only gradually was Diane able to sustain a belief in the possibility of the analyst's liking and helping her as her own person rather than as a replica of the image she had fashioned out of the analyst's attributes and her idealizing elaborations of them. She began to realize how much effort was going into convincing herself that the analyst was already far down whatever road she herself was pursuing. She started thinking of admired others not as providing blueprints for living, but as resources to be used, digested, and selectively absorbed.

HENRY was born into the kind of familial circumstances which make pseudoidealization an emotional necessity for survival. He was the second of three children born to an extremely poor Jewish family on the lower east side of New York. The father was a remote, highly intellectual man who was only peripherally involved with the family. The mother was a hard-working, long-suffering woman whose experience seemed laced with psychotic terrors and compulsions. She was paralyzed by the outside world, which she experienced as treacherous and forbidding, and felt it necessary to control her children in bizarre and intrusive ways, including forced feedings and rigorous regimes of order and cleanliness. Her first son had been born severely damaged and had died in infancy. Henry's younger sister had become a compliant, seemingly perfect child, surrendering herself to the mother's ministrations. As an adult, this sister suffered from crippling inhibitions and a severely restricted life in close proximity to the mother.

Henry's life centered around an essentially fantastic relationship with his father. He neatly segregated his experience of his parents through splitting: his mother was wholly malevolent and dangerous; his father was benevolent and caring. Everything seemed to depend on being able to preserve this image of the father, which gave Henry at least some hope in an otherwise frightening existence. He portrayed the father to himself as someone extraordinarily wise and in tune with him. The father knew what his son was feeling and secretly joined him in hatred of the mother's oppressive regime. Yet the father knew that it was best for him to remain silent and not interfere. He was with Henry every step of the way, but their secret alliance would have to be denied, for Henry's own good, if he ever attempted to bring it out in the open.

Henry's fantasied bond with his father was mediated largely through the image of the dead elder brother. This loss had been extremely painful for the father and had probably contributed substantially to his withdrawal. He had pictured his eldest son as a renowned rabbi; the birth of the younger children did not begin to compensate for his loss. Henr^y-became very interested in intellectual and religious pursuits; by becoming the father's image of the dead brother, he hoped to consolidate his own tie to his father. It was, ironically, the father's almost-total remoteness which made this fantasy possible. Henry filled in the space vacated by his father's emotional absence with what he needed to protect himself from his fear of and identification with the mother.

Henry was able to draw on his considerable talents and vitality to create a rich and diversified life for himself. Nevertheless, he suffered pervasive anxieties and inhibitions, which had brought him into treatment. He was married to an active, successful woman, in many respects the opposite of both his parents. He felt warm admiration for and dependency upon her, using her as a kind of executive function for an^y of his own wishes and ambitions in life. Relations with friends and colleagues were integrated along similar deferential lines. The transference was joined on this basis, characterized from the start by extreme idealization divorced from any actual experiences or benefits.

Two dreams, the first about a colleague, the second about his boss. both with clear allusions to the transference, illustrate both the benign and the masochistic dimensions of this type of idealization. The first dream occurred about six months into the treatment.

This dream captures the hopefulness that is invariably a crucial feature of object ties characterized by idealization and pseudoidealization. By attaching to (and sexually submitting to) a perfect other, a new start is possible; the damaged self (expressed here through the castration imagery) is remediable.

The second dream, reported about a year later, reveals another facet of this sort of integration.

Once again, the father-boss-analyst is a larger-than-life figure; everything depends on utilizing his powers, on following his lead out of danger. Yet the dread of being let down, the total surrender necessary to be taken care of, the abject dependency required by the other (encased like the dead brother)-these are suffocating.

Both the benign and the masochistic facets of the idealization were prominent in this transference. The analyst and the analytic process were granted wonderful magical powers to heal and to show the way. The relative reticence of the analytic stance made it possible to attribute incredible wisdom to the analyst. His words were coyly sought, captured and savored with great enthusiasm, and transformed into formulas for living, like embroidered homilies hung on the wall. This search for something new and healing had much of the quality that Balint terms "the new beginning," and that Winnicott and Kohut stress in the handling of narcissistic illusions. Henry sought something different within the only framework he knew, through a re-creation of the object tie to the father. Self-abnegation, glorification of and deference to the other, were assumed to be the price of contact, the best way to use the help of another, to capture that person's attention, to sustain his or her interest.

In addition to its reparative features, Henry's idealization served important defensive purposes against his intense rage at the other for what he felt was the deference demanded; his doubts about the other's constancy, resources, and caring; his anxiety about his own capacities and autonomy. Whereas the idealization of his father was a powerful adaptive device during his childhood, saving him from terror and despair, idealization of his wife and the analyst in his adulthood kept him encased in a self-perpetuating cycle of constricted and truncated relations with others. The more he elevated the other as magic savior, the more damaged he felt; the more damaged he felt, the more apprenticeship to the magic savior seemed the only way out.

The most constructive response to Henry's idealizing transference encompassed both acknowledgment and joining of the "new beginning" aspect and questioning and interpretation of the defense aspect. To challenge his idealization vigorously and to interpret it prematurely only as a defense against rage or separation would have been to preclude a deep transferential engagement. Henry's search for a new start was mediated through the old object tie. To refuse to meet him there would have been to drive him out of treatment or into a compliant, superficial adaptation to the analyst's demands. Nonetheless, to avoid interpreting the masochistic and defensive aspects of his idealization would have been to condemn Henry to this and only this mode of integrating relationships with others. One could envision a prolonged, intense devotion to the analyst, helpful in many respects, but without the impetus for Henry to engage others, beginning with the analyst, in a more complex and mutual fashion.

VIEWING NARCISSISTIC illusions as defensive highlights their role in perpetuating internal equilibrium and constrictions in living. Viewing narcissistic illusions as growth enhancing highlights their potential role in enriching self experience. The defensive and constructive features of narcissistic illusions are integrable; they both are considerably enriched when viewed in the context of a relational matrix, as interactive vehicles for attachments to significant others and as characteristic patterns of interpersonal integration.

In actuality, the analytic relationship is two highly conflictual, simultaneous relationships which continually interpenetrate each other-a neurotic, constricted form of integration (Loewald's "old" object; Fairbairn's "bad" object) that dissolves over time, and a healthier form of integration (Loewald's "new" object; Fairbairn's "good" object) that is slowly opened up and consolidated. The analyst's participation in the analysand's illusions is essential to establishment of the narcissistic integration; the analyst's questioning of illusions is essential to the dissolution of this integration and the establishment of a richer form of relation.

The analyst's descriptions, interpretations, and questions all provide the analysand with a form of participation which operates outside the narcissistic integration. What is provided in this sort of interaction is not an opportunity for the analysand to renounce illusions, but to experience them in a broader context-not as constrictive limits on his relations with others, but as possible forms of enriching interactions. The analyst's own ease in engaging and disengaging in illusions about himself and others is crucial to this process. One might think of it in terms of the analysand's learning or internalizing a kind of "love of life," sustainable without illusions yet continually enriched by them.

Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration

Excerpt Pp. 179 - 234.

Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts 1988..

Copyright Stephen A. Mitchell 1988.

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