(Routledge Relational Perspectives Series, October 2013)
Editors: Lew Aron and Adrienne Harris
In this volume, Daniel Shaw presents a way of understanding the traumatic impact of narcissism as it is engendered developmentally, and as it is enacted relationally. Focusing on the dynamics of narcissism in interpersonal relations, Shaw describes the relational system of what he terms the ‘traumatizing narcissist’ as a system of subjugation the objectification of one person in a relationship as the means of enforcing the dominance of the subjectivity of the other.
Daniel Shaw illustrates the workings of this relational system of subjugation in a variety of contexts: theorizing traumatic narcissism as an intergenerationally transmitted relational/developmental trauma, providing clinical vignettes illustrating the analyst’s experience of working with the adult children of traumatizing narcissists. He explores the relationship of cult leaders and their followers, and examines how traumatic narcissism has lingered vestigially in some aspects of the psychoanalytic profession.
Bringing together theories of trauma and attachment, intersubjectivity and complementarity, and the rich clinical sensibility of the Relational Psychoanalysis tradition, Shaw demonstrates how narcissism can best be understood not merely as character, but as the result of the specific trauma of subjugation, in which one person is required to become the object for a significant other who demands hegemonic subjectivity. This book presents therapeutic clinical opportunities not only for psychoanalysts of different schools, but for all mental health professionals working with a wide variety of modalities.
Daniel Shaw, LCSW is a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist in private practice in New York City, and in Nyack, New York. He is a training analyst, teacher and supervisor of analytic candidates at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York City.
Daniel Shaw LCSW
211 W. 56th St., Apt. 5K
New York, NY 10019
845-548-2561
danielshawlcsw@gmail.com
