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This is a book on the unconscious process; how it appears in the clinical situation (always in the transference - counter-transference), and how it can be understood. In grasping the enigmatic subject of Haydée Faimberg's work, the reader will be well advised to skip, for the time being, the matter-of-fact everyday reality approach, and instead look for more subtle poetic meanings. Freud brought our attention to the fact that what psychoanalysis can discover has already been written about by poets, to whom we have to turn to learn more. In this perspective, the poem by Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark can be seen as an inspirational source to Haydée Faimberg, when she sets out on her own journey to find out more about the workings of the Unconscious.
What is a Snark? “The Snark was a Boojum': Reading Lewis Carroll” is Haydée Faimberg's first published paper . It is a stimulating, poetic analysis of the poem, a hundred years after its publication. Even if it is published as the last chapter of Haydée Faimberg's book, I recommend the reader, as the author herself suggests, to start with it. After that you will be well prepared for the preceding ten articles, presented and first published between 1981 and 2001.
Haydée Faimberg's attention is, from the beginning, directed towards the unconscious transmission between generations. A crime is committed, or a secret is harboured in the family. But it is not spoken of or represented in the verbal story of the family. The scheme is instead transmitted by way of narcissistic identifications. These identifications constitute a linking between generations, but they are difficult for the analyst to discern, because they are alienated from any psychic representation. In the psychoanalytic situation, they appear in the transference, where they manifest themselves as narcissistic resistances. In 1981, she already launches the hypothesis that these narcissistic identifications, in which at least three generations are telescoped