Back to Christopher Lasch, The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time: Table of Contents
The shifting emphasis in clinical studies from primary to secondary narcissism reflects both the shift in psychoanalytic theory from study of the id to study of the ego and a change in the type of patients seeking psychiatric treatment. Indeed the shift from a psychology of instincts to ego psychology itself grew partly out of a recognition that the patients who began to present themselves for treatment in the 1940s and 1950s “very seldom resembled the classical neuroses Freud described so thoroughly.”