ABSTRACT
Wilhelm Reich first read this paper to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in October 1926. It appeared as a portion of a chapter in his magnum opus, Charakteranalyse, in 1933. Although the seeds of his own paranoid and narcissistic decompensation are evident in this brief work, Reich made a major contribution to our diagnostic understanding of psychopathy by specifying the clinical behavior of aggressive narcissism. His etiological formulations, however, should be taken with a large grain of salt. They are suffused with his own prejudice toward homosexuals and women and have been superseded by more thoughtfully composed developmental object relations theory and our selfobject understanding of the narcissistic transference positions. Many of the current DSM-IV criteria for narcissistic personality disorder are also evident in Reich’s clinical descriptors.
