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I feel much honoured to discuss Dr. Haydée Faimberg's The Telescoping of Generations: Tistening to the Narcissistic Tinks between Generations (Faimberg, 2005).
I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Faimberg at our symposium in Vermont last year and was impressed by her writings and the lively discussions they promoted. I would like to focus on some of the main ideas in her book, bearing in mind that I cannot do justice to her original and sophisticated thinking in the short time I have.
Dr. Faimberg moves between literature, philosophy, and technical and clinical material. She invites us to enter a world of meanings and non-meanings, the closed spaces where there is no entrance and no way out.
In Tather Brown: The Essential Tales (Chesterton, 2005, p. 82) we find a wonderful play on words: “I think he has driven me mad, for I have felt him where he could not have been and I have heard his voice when he could not have spoken.” These are the places nobody has seen and things nobody has heard, but where something has happened. Why are we not able to hear, why are we not able to see?
Dr. Faimberg invited us to penetrate a space of invisibles, of unheards, unlistens, that will take shape through analysis. Her concepts are original, fascinating, and stimulating: How can we listen more carefully, open a closed space, make the invisible visible and the absent present? This book explores various “unseen, invisible” objects and “inaudible” discourses and communications. The theoretical object that we construct in psychoanalysis becomes something visible and audible in the psychoanalytic session.
In Dr. Faimbergs work, the evolution of a new concept originates from Freud and is then expanded upon in an original way. Her clinical model is an open system, with the past and present reshaped by the dynamic movement of the analysand's and analyst's emerging understanding. One of the main ideas is the transmission of a history, which at least partially does not belong to the patient's life a