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Patient O dreams of being in a night-club where some youngsters are robbing the patrons of their sunglasses; the analyst, after hearing the patient's associations, interprets the dream as O's wish to 'flee the painful experience of analysis by robbing the analyst of what has the power to arouse his envy: the analytical system, the capacity to understand and its related creativity … The stolen glasses allow him to look inside himself and to keep the external object under control' (p. 68).1
The above is Mauro Mancia's construction of his patient's internal world. For Freud, who considered the work of the analyst as analogous to that of the archaeologist, constructions were in fact interpretive reconstructions of historical events. It is the Kleinian emphasis on internal objects, maintains Mancia, that allows a redefinition of the function of memory and of the significance of the transference as presentification of relationships between internal objects. Following Schafer's and Spence's innovative work, we can trace remarkable similarities between historical and psychoanalytical methods of inquiry; analysis becomes that which allows 'a rewriting on the part of the patient, and with the help of the analyst, of his new autobiographical history' (p. 195). From archaeologists of the mind we have become historians of affects and emotions.
O's dream, as all dreams, could of course have been interpreted along alternative lines, had we started from different theoretical assumptions and had we followed different technical principles. Mancia, an Italian neurophysiologist and prominent psychoanalyst, though influenced by the work of Klein and Bion has kept his intellectual autonomy firmly grounded in his mastery of psychoanalytical literature and in his clinical experience. In this latest book, evocatively entitled Nello sguardo di Narciso [In the Gaze of Narcissus], he has chosen the fashionable, but not for this less attractive, perspective of narcissistic mental constell