Hamilton sets about demonstrating that Freud's theory of pri-
mary narcissism as a normal developmental stage is largely
wrong, so we must think about discarding it. From this it begins
to become plain that Freud's notion of psychic energy with its
hydraulic qualities is antiquated. Perhaps psychoanalysis needs
to think about itself in the light of the systems and structuralist
theories now extensively used in both the biological and social
sciences. The urgent practical point here is that old mistaken
theories, especially when classically honoured, can distort good
therapy. Primary narcissism has, of course, been questioned for
decades but never so gracefully and cogently as by Hamilton.
It should be required reading, at least for teachers of psycho-
analysis.

Dr Hamilton is a child and adult psychoanalytic practitioner
and teacher of long experience. Her literary facility makes the
Greek myths seem easy. However, she is also philosophically
and logically trained, and this gives her the conceptual precision
needed to set about reforming old psychoanalytic habits.

Freud envisaged the infant mind as being like an egg hatching:
at first, it has virtually no interest in or energy for emotional
interaction with other objects or people. This is primary narcis-
sism. Only slowly, and born of painful frustrations from external
objects, do self-absorbed desires give way to relating with objects
and the reality sense.

This model of early development was, of course, derived from
the clinical observation of older patients; it was extrapolation
backwards. Hamilton, like John Bowlby before her, uses the
evidence of a host of infant researchers to see how a bit of psycho-
analytic developmental theory stands up to findings from direct
observation. Early on she gives due warning of where she is go-
ing by convincingly showing that the mythical Narcissus himself
grew in an object-relational way. Unnoticed by Freud, Narcissus'
mother fell madly in love with him at his birth and continued
that way. But this is a side-show -- the main arena is the psycho-
analytic model of development. Hamilton sees Freud's primary
narcissism, of psychic egg-hatching, as at one extreme of a con-
tinuum of ideas about infantile interactiveness with the
environment. She shows that Anna Freud actually made many
observations of active interchanges between mothers and infants,
but still followed her father theoretically. So did Spitz, Mahler

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