ABSTRACT
Ben Bursten, an American psychoanalyst, wrote this diagnostic paper, which appeared in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1973. His important but little-known book, The Manipulator, was published by Yale University Press the same year. Bursten sets forth his four types of narcissistic personality: the craving, the paranoid, the manipulative, and the phallic narcissistic. He discusses their common aim, reunion with the omnipotent object, and the different means by which they pursue it. Most germane to psychopathy is the manipulative type, chiefly defined by repetitive attempts to “put something over” on the object. Domination is achieved, contemptuous delight is felt, and once again the grandiose self is preserved through the behavioral devaluation of the other.
