A Pattern of Madness

Born of wide-ranging scholarship, a lifetime's psychoanalytic practice and deep personal commitment and struggle, this book will challenge professional practitioners in the field and all those who take a serious interest in understanding the human psyche.

Author of many respected psychoanalytic works including Narcissism: A New Theory, Emotion and Spirit, Making of a Psychotherapist and Spirit of Sanity, the distinguished psychoanalyst Neville Symington''s latest book expands, refines and deepens what has become an ever more impressive, far-reaching and absorbing inquiry into the nature of madness and sanity. It is Symington''s central contention that the core psychopathology of our times can be identified and designated as narcissism, although self-centredness, egoism or solipsism might serve equally well. Critical of psychiatry''s mere symptomatology, and of much psychotherapeutic practice as superficial and sterile, the present volume probes compellingly into the narcissistic pattern in an effort to delineate its structure in all its complexity and thereby gain a measure of perspective and distance from this most intractable of psychic states.