Narcissism, Realism, and Their Paradoxical Relation.

This paper is an exploration of the way in which narcissistic fantasies contribute to the development of a capacity for reality testing by moderating anxiety aroused by development that could otherwise become traumatic. Images of the success and failure of this psychic process are to be found in Raphael's painting "The School of Athens." The facilitation of an improved capacity for realism by narcissistic fantasies is a paradoxical idea because, in and of themselves, narcissistic fantasies substitute for reality.

The interplay of deductive and inductive reasoning in psychoanalytic theorizing.

Deductive and inductive reasoning both played an essential part in Freud's construction of psychoanalysis. In this paper, the author explores the happy marriage of empiricism and rationalism in Freud's use of deductive reasoning in the construction of psychoanalytic theory. To do this, the author considers three major amendments Freud made to his theory: (i) infant and childhood sexuality, (ii) the structural theory, and (iii) the theory of signal anxiety.

Narcissism, hypochondria and the problem of alternative theories.

This paper is an experiment in conceptual integration and clinical theory testing. Its argument is that narcissism and sexual object love develop from a single source and continue to interact during childhood development and adult life (Freud) and that drives in their oedipal and other formations are not merely disintegration products of narcissism (Kohut). Material from two analyses, supplemented by material from two others, indicate that narcissistic injury was a significant factor in the neuroses of these patients but that aggressive and libidinal conflicts were also decisive such that their hypochondriac symptoms were compositions of their interacting causality.