The Telescoping of Generations: Listening to the Narcissistic Links Between Generations. By Hayde Faimberg. New Library of Psychoanalysis Series. New York:  Brunner-Routledge, 2005,  156 pp., hardcover £87.50, paperback £33.95.

This book is a collection of previously published papers that reflect Hayde Faimberg's changing views about psychoanalytic theory and its application to clinical work over twenty-five years. It is worth noting that her interests are again current, as an increasing number of investigators and clinicians are attempting to put the explication of earliest psychic functioning into the forefront of our understanding of the therapeutic effect in psychoanalysis.

Faimberg is convinced of the correctness of Freud's hypothesis in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” that in the beginning we function as purified “pleasure egos” (1915, p. 136). What is pleasurable (tension-reducing) is the I, and what is unpleasurable (tension-increasing) is the outer world. He consequently concluded that “at the very beginning, it seems the external world, objects, and what is hated are identical” (p. 136). Faimberg's contribution is to add that primitive object relations are established at that same period and the combination remains as an unchanged position until analyzed. In her theory of narcissistic functioning in early life, she posits a lived contradiction, since there is both a sense of self-sufficiency and yet the need to confirm that self-sufficiency in the child via the other.

In each generation, psychic functioning of the child activates the same narcissistic functioning in the parent, and the two interact psychically. The child as the other is to the parent, as the other is to the hypothetical child, the hated other. For the child to attempt to differentiate himself from the mother results in her hatred of the child as the other. Pathological psychic functioning results when the child identifies with the other of the parent. Since the content of the parents' ideas and feelings are about their own parents, there is a “telescoping of generations.”

What one finds lacking in Faimberg's explanations is a place for human motivation, particularly as a participant in psychic conflict. In so