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I have noticed time and again that patients associate to fragments of their parents’ history in response to my interpretations related to their narcissistic functioning in the transference. Thus we come into contact with aspects of the patient's history that are intimately linked to the parents’history as (re)constructed. In other words, the patient's intrapsychic struggle is reconstructed in the transference in a fragmentary way and related to partial aspects of their parents’ history. Should we regard the interweaving of both histories (the parents’ and the child's) as just anecdotal or subsidiary? In different writings, I have been exploring answers to this question and I have arrived at the hypothesis that the narcissistic modality discovered in the transference had also been partially transmitted by the parents.
What is transmitted is not always a content but essentially a narcissistic way of solving the conflicts. This means that parents transmit to their child the narcissistic functioning they used to solve their intrapsychic conflicts, including the oedipal ones. A conflict of an oedipal nature can be ‘solved’ in a narcissistic modality.
The aim of this essay is to present the following hypothesis. In the working through of the oedipal conflict in each and every analysis we reach a moment of struggle against narcissistic figures. In this situation the subject feels that he totally possesses the object or he is totally excluded by the object: The patient functions with the logic of ‘either-or’; let us call the product of this kind of logic a ‘narcissistic dilemma’.