Slings and Arrows: Narcissistic Injury and Its Treatment Hardcover - 1995

Slings and Arrows deals with narcissistic injury - the deep wounds to our core selves that lacerate, diminish, fragment, and impoverish us, lowering our self-esteem and inducing rage, shame, and humiliation. In this volume Dr. Jerome Levin presents the dynamic psychotherapeutic approach to the treatment of narcissistically wounded patients. Narcissistic injury is the ineluctable concomitant of each life stage. Slings and Arrows gives insight into the nature of these injuries during our journey from birth to death, demonstrating how the therapist can uncover wounds hidden from consciousness and heal these injuries. People are narcissistically injured not only by blows to themselves, but also by the humiliations of those they love, and Slings and Arrows suggests ways for the therapists to work with these "injuries through identification" as well. We are injured not only by life, but by therapy itself. Both patient and therapist are subject to narcissistic wounds during the therapeutic process. Slings and Arrows explores that pain, suggests ways to minimize it, and offers approaches for dealing with patients who have been traumatized by bad or failed therapy in the past. Beginning with an illuminating account of the self, our understanding of it, narcissism, and narcissistic injury, Levin goes on to illustrate these insights with detailed case narrations in which patients and therapists come alive in their mutual struggle to grow and heal through soothing, hurt, insight, and catharsis. In the process, patient and therapist confront abandonment, traumatic childhood abuse, unrequited love, loss, and mortality.