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The papers in this collection, refined and shaped for this edition by Argentine analyst Haydée Faimberg (who has been based in Paris since the 1970s), were written over a period of thirty years. Representing
the evolution of a sophisticated psychoanalytic intelligence, this book gives a clear window into the working mind of an analyst equally comfortable with theory, philosophy, and clinical practice.
There are at least three good reasons that a North American psychoanalytic audience will find value in this consistently strong collection of papers. Analysts interested in intersubjectivity (in any of its guises) will resonate to one of Faimberg's main themes: the telescoping of generations. Intergenerational transmission of trauma is a topic of great interest at the moment, and Faimberg has both a theory and a method of work for observing and interpreting the emergence of secret, encrypted forms of identification that carry the unmetabolized trauma of prior generations.
A second point of interest in these papers is the clarity of clinical method. Faimberg's succinct term listening to listening roots her attunement to the patient in a very particular way. She is trying to discern, both through clinical observation and self-observation, who it is that the analysand speaks to or listens to. Who is the interlocutor whom the analysand is addressing? There are a number of implications in this kind of inquiry. First, Faimberg enters into a form of identification with the analysand, allowing her to be inhabited by his or her enigmatic gaps and silences. Then, clinical choices become guided by a sensitivity to the gaps in her own knowing. She speaks not from the authority of the one who knows, but as one who is curious, aware of the presence both of unconscious forms and of unconscious processes, and entering uncharted and often unrepresentable space.
A third point of interest is Faimberg's comfort with and immersion in matters of metapsychology, theories of mind and of langu