Narcissistic States and the Therapeutic Process

by Sheldon Bach

Overview

This ebook is now available from Bloomsbury Academic. Bloomsbury Academic publish acclaimed resources for undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as the general reader, across a broad range of subjects including Archaeology, Art&Visual Culture, Biblical Studies, Business&Management, Drama&Performance Studies, Economics, Education, Film&Media, History, Linguistics, Literary Studies, Music&Sound Studies, Philosophy, Politics&International Relations, Psychology, Religious Studies, Social Work&Social Welfare, Sociology, Study Skills, Theology, and Wellbeing, Health&Lifestyle. Visit bloomsbury.com for more information.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781461629696
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	09/01/1993
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	253
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Sheldon Bach is clinical professor of psychology at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis, a training and supervising analyst at the New York Freudian Society, a fellos of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Editorial Reviews

Sheldon Bach's beautifully written Narcissistic States and the Therapeutic Process presents new understanding and challenges to our hard-won perceptions of the clinical dilemmas entailed in the nearly three decades of Kohut-Kernberg controversies on narcissism. By focusing his primary attention (and ours) on the suffering of narcissistic patients and their special qualities of self-assertion, autonomy, and love, and speaking only secondarily of their more obvious qualities of envy, exploitiveness, rage, and cold indifference, Dr. Bach has found a way to compose these two diverse clinical experiences into a coherent portrait of the narcissistic patient. Thus, Bach is neither Kohutian nor Kernbergian, but something quite his own—an original explorer into the possibilities of psychoanalytic work with narcissistic patients.

Louise Kaplan

Narcissistic States and the Therapeutic Process is a rare book. It is lively and interesting, lucid, and yet profound. It succeeds where many other recent attempts to provide new insight about narcissistically vulnerable patients have failed. It offers a framework for understanding the sicker patient without resorting to cumbersome theoretical constructs of simplistic formulas or contrived developmental narratives. The patients' words and the analyst's responses remain always in focus.

Arlene Kramer Richards

This is a richly colored tapestry woven by a gifted clinician who offers us his unique contribution to description, understanding, and technical approaches to problems in the narcissistic domain. By steadfastly not getting caught up in ideological battles, instead building on the harmonies underlying them, Dr. Bach shows us in rich clinical detail the 'other worlds' that can be discerned as we truly listen to our patients in open-ended ways.

Fred Pine