Clinical assimilation of the various methods of family therapy, while maintaining an analytic, self-psychology perspective gave rise to Complementary Narcissism's novel system's perspective of the individual in context. While Complementary Narcissism Theory is applicable to all families, its interventions are most effective with those families who evidence a moderate to high ability to delay gratification in service of a larger reward later. Individual health requires being relatively low in omnipotence or in grandiosity, and in being able to move, when desired, quickly and smoothly between healthy presentations, i.e. low levels of omnipotence and grandiosity. In this self complementarity, the individual is able to have holistic intrapsychic experience and to enter into relationships based upon this strength. Without this capacity, the individual will relate to others who are attracted to dysfunctional presentations of grandiosity and omnipotence, and out of dysfunctional complementarity, rather than out of the strength of intrapsychic wholeness. Consistent with analytic family psychologies this approach goes beyond the family's presenting complaint, the precipitant, and specific behaviors, to understand the etiology of the individuals and of the family itself. At the same time that the origin of a family system is describing the way individuals and their histories influence the system, data is being gathered concerning the influence of the present family of creation, once formed, on the individuals. (ABL)