ECENT R ADVANCES in the psychoanalytic understanding of narcissism have created a great interest in the discussion of the theoretical and clinical issues related to the narcissistic line of development. The following is offered, more or less briefly, as a survey of the essence of Heinz Kohut’s5-s recent contributions to an evolving psychology of the self. In addition, some references will be made to extraclinical applications, especially in the area of historical studies. In a young and rapidly growing science as psychoanalysis, it is always difficult to discuss the state of theoretical knowledge at any one time, to take a crosssectional point of view. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, the focus of scientific interest is unevenly distributed and shifts during successive developmental phases to different aspects of the theoretical structure. In psychoanalysis, for example, initial investigations were drawn to the newly discovered unconscious forces and one can speak of a period of id analysis. With the growing appreciation of defensive and adaptive mechanisms, the primary concern of psychoanalytic investigators became what is known as ego psychology. One could mention other foci of interest to illustrate the uneven, stop-and-go development of different strands in the theoretical web that makes a unified integration difficult at a particular point in time. The second difficulty in the way of conceptualizing a neat and nicely harmonious theory is another characteristic common to all young and growing sciences, namely the lack of precise definitions of basic concepts. Here I am referring to the need to keep the definitions of working concepts sufficiently imprecise so that the resulting theoretical structure remains flexible and open to further speculative elaboration, testing by experiment and elaborating development. Psychoanalytic educators have long recognized, therefore, the difficulty of teaching psychoanalytic theory in a cross-sectional view. Instead, the student of psychoanalysis has !o acquire his theoretical understanding by tracing the various strands of theory through their development, that is in a longitudinal view. The initial epoch-making discoveries of Sigmund Freud during the decade before the turn of the century were the unique achievements of a self-analysis by a genius who was able to integrate insights into himself with the observations he had made on hysterical patients. Freud’s choice of hysteria as the neurosis par excellence was influenced by teachers like Charcot and Breuer, by the fin-de-siicle