Elizabeth, Protagonist of „Die Narzisstin“, is an intelligent, well-educated and sensitive woman who ends up in a closed ward of a Psychiatric Clinic after trying to make a living on her own, experiencing set-backs in her career and after losing interest in life. She is allowed a diary to write of her experiences simultaneously with psychological help and support. Society, prejudice, faith, ethics, gender inequality, discrimination, illusions of life are themes of her preoccupation in the clinic, in particular, the cross-cultural marriage to a violent husband, a G.I. of the Air Force, born in the hills of Kentucky who was more attracted to his own sex than to her. He, however, becomes a savior of Elizabeth of a nightmarish childhood and adolescence with an ailing, neurotic mother having grand mal seizures of epilepsy, an over-protective father wanting to compensate for the lack of motherly love, during a chaotic time of pre-and past-war Germany. Elizabeths husband even motivates her – as the altruist he could be – to receive a college education lasting nine years giving her an opportunity to finishher studies with a Ph.D. from one of the best universities in the US – and perhaps even contributing to her miraculous recovery from a series of traumas.

In the clinic, after psychotherapeutic sessions, left alone in her room, dream and reality, former and present times, Literature and Psychology, traumas of abuse in her marriage become fused in a subconscious remembrance, surfacing as fractions, kaleidoscopically showing perspectives, changes of identity, observations from inside and outside of two cultures. The narration is reminiscent of post-modernism, surpassing and juggling reality, holding riddles leading to insights and epiphanies about the causation: a womans psyche laid bare. Stylistically eloquent at times, anti-Aristotelean especially in English, a language Elizabeth felt free to become aware of causes and effect of the reason for her desperation, a shocking mirror of a life that, after all, shows a dogged determinism after finding herself again at the end of her sty in the clinic.

The story shows – occasionally and mainly in English – a symbiosis of author and protagonist and the schizoid function of her mind ignoring coherence, time, place, distances when illogically and anti-chronologically taken a stance of past excruciations as a panorama of life. Still at the end findingidentity, there is proof of a spirit of resilience, the rehabilitation as a woman findingherself – a woman who fought prejudice, past set-backs, delusions of marriage, fake promises toward the end of her life. A fascinating story of the testimony of a survivor who did not succumb to the inevitabilities in fate. A must-read.

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