Notes

1 Cause means here a condition of possibility and not a term-to-term relationship.

2 I use the concept of ego in the sense Freud gives in ‘Instincts and their vicissitudes’ (Freud 1915), without taking into account other concepts of the Ego in Freud (structural theory) or the concept of self.

3 The feeling of estrangement may be linked to the feeling of futility described by Bleger (1967), Fairbairn (1940, 1943) and Winnicott (1960a).

4 Studied by Bion (1962a, 1962b, 1965), Heimann (1943) and Klein (1946, 1952).

5 In French, ‘Le temps narcissique de l’Oedipe’ lends itself easily to express a ‘logical’ time. I prefer to leave aside the word ‘time’ to avoid confusion with chronological time. The word ‘dimension’ in English seems closer to the original sense (the nar cissistic dimension of the Oedipal configuration). (See Chapters 5 and 6.)

6 From different perspectives, this has been studied by Bion (1962a) and Lacan (1966b [1956]).

7 The essays that constitute Chapters 1 and 2 are complementary, not only because they were conceived and written during the same period of time, but also because they are exploring the same clinical problems: How to listen to the patient's narcissistic mode of functioning and how to reconstruct the history of the modality thus revealed. ‘The telescoping of generations’ written in 1979–80 and ‘Narcissistic resistances to the recognition of otherness’ written in 1981 were articulated and presented in a summarized way as one lecture on November 1981 at the Paris Psychoanalytical Society under the title ‘Narcissistic resistances to accepting differ ence between generations and otherness’. For editorial reasons, only one part was published in 1981 in French and the part concerning ‘the telescoping of generations’ was only published for the first time in 1985 in Spanish, after being presented in July 1985 at the International Psychoanalytical Congress in Hamburg.

Chapter 1 includes paragraphs drawn from the French and English translations tha