Traversing Narcissistic Pathways: From Freud to Present Times

This article begins with Freud’s struggles in dealing with the concept of transference. His struggles were particularly acute with certain types of narcissistic patients. The view presented is that Freud, in some ways, was prototypic of the type of struggles that contemporary analysts have in allowing transference manifestations to effloresce. Kohut is seen as advancing the struggle and setting a new boundary for analyzability that allowed analysts to begin to move into the patient’s world. Bach, Winnicott, Bion, and Klein are then pictured as moving the boundary in a manner that allowed for a greater range of patients to survive in the analytic situation. The difficulties in allowing the transference, and particularly narcissistic and fragmentary transferences, to unfold are discussed in the light of several clinical examples.