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This volume contains eleven articles, mostly revised and originally published between 1977 and 2001, which witness the construction of a psychoanalytic style that is original and, at the same time, familiar and full of resonance with the authors who gave shape to contemporary psychoanalytic thinking, such as Winnicott, Bion, Ronald Fairbairn, Jose Bleger and Esther Bick.
Faimberg's main thesis is that the “telescoping of generations” is a universal phenomenon that can be found in all analyses as long as we take into account its clinical conditions, that is, the revelation of unconscious alienating identifications, in which the history of three generations is condensed. The “history” that is at stake here does not have much to do with what is usually understood by this notion; it cannot be referred to the frame of time, nor can it be related to a narrative, but it consists of a sort of “negative” history of certain elements that operates by obstructing the psychic space of the individual. These elements, which are reenacted in the transference-countertransference transaction, belong to the “narcissistic regulation of the object” and to the individual's attempt to resist its function of appropriation-intrusion. The condensed history summarised by the wording “telescoping of generations” is indeed “the history of the transference of a narcissistic parent that does not allow the child to have his own psychic space” (p. 59).
Haydée Faimberg's psychoanalytic education took place in Argentina, where she followed the seminars directed by Guillermo Maci and was in many ways influenced by Enrique Pichon-Rivière, José Bleger, David Liberman and Jorge Mom. She also worked over years with Willy Baranger, from whom she derived the notion of the “living-dead.” Later on, her use of this notion was seen by many to be very close to the notion of “fantome” worked out by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, to the point that her study could appear as the continuation of the latter's work, in