Review of Timeless Grandiosity and Eroticized Contempt: Technical Challenges Posed by Cases of Narcissism and Perversion

Reviews the book, Timeless Grandiosity and Eroticized Contempt: Technical Challenges Posed by Cases of Narcissism and Perversion by Michael Shoshani and Batya Shoshani (2021). As two established psychoanalysts practicing in Israel, Michael and Batya Shoshani bring a wealth of experience and case material to their discussion of perversion, making every effort to demonstrate that beneath the high-minded debates about moralistic theory are suffering patients who need the nosological specificity that the concept of perversion provides. Intent on “formulat[ing] a clinical concept of perversion,” the authors define the term “as an intensification of destructive narcissism, where the death instinct predominates over the life instinct." The authors cover extensive ground, drawing on a wide variety of sources to illuminate the internal world and clinical experience of perverse patients. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)