ABSTRACT
This chapter explores countertransference proclivities experienced at various phases in the analytic work with patients considered narcissistic personality disorders. However, because narcissistic investments are ubiquitous, narcissistic resistances occur in a broad spectrum of patients from healthier to sicker ones. Countertransference vulnerabilities in response to tasks of the introductory phase will depend, in part, upon the presentation of a subject’s narcissistic investments and their defensive elaborations. Some patients will present as basically inhibited, others as more prone to enactment. These patients are prone to manifest enactments of their ego-syntonic, entitled pursuit of narcissistically invested gratifications. These more provocative analysands may evoke countertransference envy from their more socially well adapted and, in that sense, inhibited analysts. H. Loewald, while remarking on the value of H. Kohut’s first book, cautioned against regarding it as the final word and suggested that Kohut’s work might be limited by countertransference identification with his analysand’s narcissism.
