ABSTRACT
The explanatory power of the new psychology of the self is nowhere as evident as with regard to four types of psychological disturbance: the narcissistic personality disorders, the perversions, the delinquencies, and the addictions. The narcissistically disturbed individual yearns for praise and approval or for a merger with an idealized supportive other because he cannot sufficiently supply himself with self-approval or with a sense of strength through his own inner resources. The pervert is driven toward sexual enactments with figures or symbols that give him the feeling of being wanted, real, alive, or powerful. By ingesting the drug, he symbolically compels the mirroring selfobject to soothe him, to accept him. Or he symbolically compels the idealized selfobject to submit to his merging into it and thus to his partaking in its magical power. In either case, the ingestion of the drug provides him with the self-esteem he does not possess.
