Chapter 1 The Telescoping of Generations: A Genealogy of Alienated Identifications (1981/1985)*

I was first led to reflect on the topic discussed in this essay by a patient with an apparently empty, dead psyche. During the sessions he was inaccessible, absent. He hardly acknowledged my presence. I failed to find any interpretative means to make myself exist in his psyche, which would thereby allow me to accurately interpret his absence; the patient simply was not there to listen to me! My only function consisted in holding – in my countertransference – the anxiety of not understanding and not existing as an analyst in the patient's psyche (but therefore being unable to modify his emptiness, his psychical death).

Mario was a man of 30 who had the appearance of an adolescent. Although he was a student of science, he had serious difficulties in thinking; he lived in almost complete isolation and had never had a love affair. Sometimes he appeared contemptuous and distant, at other times he seemed overwhelmed by anxiety (which he did not communicate) or else he looked bewildered. At the time I met him, Mario was being treated in an institution. He always remained silent and looked like an inanimate object rather than a person, except for a slightly contemptuous manner. He was considered as extremely helpless and solitary by all the patients in the institution, but he never spoke of this.

At that time Argentina, the country where he was treated in the early 1970s, was going through one of its serious economic crises. People bought dollars as a means of protection against the devaluation of the currency. Mario, however, made no attempt to defend his money. He remained in his timeless routine of

‘doing nothing’, a crystallization of time and of his life, which, in the present situation, assumed a critical quality. However, he showed no signs of concern; he just persisted in his conte