Dears Sirs,

I would like to congratulate Dr Bergstein (2003) for his psychoanalytical insights into the protagonists. I think it is always possible in analyzing a plot to add other considerations that would complement those already made—in this case those of Bergstein about the opera.

As Bergstein puts it, the jester probably had a poor mother figure that could not tolerate the physical defect in her baby, giving rise to negative feelings about the infant, which caused him to repudiate himself. As a child and adult without a good internal object he essentially stayed (or regressed) to a schizo-paranoid position with a strong dependence on an external object to take care of him. Gilda, because her mother died, supplied this maternal dependence in his regressed emotions and feelings. The ‘love’ for his daughter as Bion put it was ‘centriped’, not a real love as a preoccupation for the other in evolution