Manzano J., Palacio Espasa F., Zilkha N. (1999). Les Scenarios Narcissiques De La Parentalite. Paris: Presses Universitaires De France.

Manzano J., Palacio Espasa F., Zilkha N. (1999). Les Scenarios Narcissiques  De La Parentalite. Paris: Presses Universitaires De France.

“Charlie weeps his mother’s sadness”. Charlie is a five-year-old boy who is lately showing symptoms of maniacal hyperactivity, disturbed relationships, and problems in separating from his mother. His mother believes his difficulties have begun when she lost her grandmother, who had offered her unbounded love and comprehension since childhood, thus compensating the lack of attention she felt was receiving from her parents. A three-session consultation with the presence of parents and their child brings to light the mother’s identification with the lost and idealized object, and her subsequent submission to her son, without ever imposing him any limit. Charlie experiences all the attentions he is given as the realization of his phantasies of incest and parricide, which also emerge through the transference, whereby the therapist becomes the rival that he must attack and destroy.

Daniel’s case is about a very oppositive nine-year-old boy with an aggressive behaviour, which can already be described as antisocial. Family counselling reveals how his mother projects on him her very authoritative father, whereas his father experiences him both as his own violent father and the unfairly treated boy that he always felt to be. Therefore, while the parents are thus able to recover their libidinal link with their own father images, the boy identifies himself with the aggressive and omnipotent aspects of these collusive parental projections: he then organizes, as by proxy, an antisocial personality.

These are only two of the several clinical cases analyzed in this book illustrating how often parents, in order to ward off their phantoms, don’t just repress their memories, but are led to use projection or projective identification. In the first example, the mother identifies herself with the ideal parents she had wished to have; in the second case, the parents identify themselves with the child who fears to lose his parents’ affection. These phantasmatic scenarios are in most instances preconscious, and can therefore be often transformed into a satisfying condition for family members by means of a careful interpretative working-through of transference and countertransference, focused on anaclitical and edipical issues. This is the case for the first clinical illustration, but not always, unfortunately, these techniques are successful. In the second clinical picture, both the parents and the son had a substantially positive pre-transference; nonetheless, the sole work on the projected paternal persecutory imago of the parents on the child proved to be insufficient. An individual psychotherapy is therefore advisable for the boy.

After their previous extensive writings on the subject, Manzano, Palacio Espasa and Zilkha propose in this book further clinical work and theoretic elaboration on therapeutic interventions designed for parents and children, with a specific focus on the area of relationships.

Following Fraiberg’s pioneering therapeutic experiments, based on the conceptualization of the ghosts in the nursery, Palacio Espasa himself and Cramer developed the technique of short psychotherapy with young children and their mothers. Their elaboration started from the notions of phantasmatic interaction and symptomatic interactive sequence, a composed structure at the junction between intra-psychic and interacted dynamics. Palacio Espasa and Manzano further extended this approach, even applying it to adolescents.

The subject of parent-child counselling for a large range of ages is developed and theorized throughout this book, on the assumption that there are a few core elements, which can hamper evolution processes at different stages of development. The specific significance of this book is in designing and illustrating a counselling model, which is soundly rooted in a psychoanalytic methodology and conceptualization. Just as in Freud’s formulation of psychoanalysis, here we find an “investigation method”, a “treatment method” and a very clear and articulated theoretical framework; all this is supported and detailed through exhaustive and convincing clinical examples, which together offer a complete picture of the range of clinical situations addressed by the proposed theorization.

Narcissism is the key concept in this book, stemming from Freud’s definition in 1914, when he stated that parent’s love for their children is nothing but their own revived narcissism. Moreover, setting the narcissistic against the anaclytic libidinal object choice, Freud described the different constellations where the individual loves in the other “either what he is, or what he was, what he would like to be, the person that was a part of himself.”

Using in their counselling work a shifting perspective from parents’ and children’s psychic world to the relational field, Manzano, Palacio Espasa, and Zilkha point out that relational configurations similar to those which Freud caught in adults’ narcissistic love relationships can be found in different proportions and forms in all parents-children relationships. Specifically, they are speaking of secondary narcissism, viewed as the presence of an object representation of the other who becomes one’s own self through the phantoms of introjective and projective identification, which can partially or totally dissolve the boundaries between oneself and the object.

Moving from this assumptions, the Authors define the “narcissistic scenarios in parenthood”, which can be identified through a series of elements that are constantly present and detectable. The core mechanism is surely the projection or, more exactly, the projective identification of parents towards their child: what is projected is a selfrepresentation, therefore invested by narcissistic libido, both directly and indirectly – through the image of an inner object with whom an identification was established. The parents’ projection towards their child corresponds to their complementary identification or counteridentification with another inner representation: the result is a picture always involving a relationship between “self” and “self”. Creating this scene is always aimed to realize a fulfilment of a narcissistic nature; other goals can be achieved at the same time, mostly defensive or useful to realize object libidinal satisfactions.    These projections and identifications result in the acted interaction which, by means of its realistic quality, transforms the scenario in something that goes beyond a pure imaginative essence, and converts it to a symptom allowing masked substitute satisfactions.

Two different dynamic courses can be detected in these interactions. In one case, a scene is “fixed”, with the aim of convincing oneself that it will be unalterable: a father, for example, recognizes his son as the ideal and omnipotent child that he would have liked to be, identifying himself in the ideal father he had always longed for. In the other case, what has been experienced as an unacceptable past is “repeated” in a mended form, which corresponds to one’s own unsatisfied wishes; it occurs, for example, when a parent projects onto his/her child the image of the sad and deserted child he felt he was, and, identifying himself in a parent that does not abandon, retroactively restores his own story and becomes the son that never underwent separation.

Phantoms and unconscious imaginary roles are therefore determinant for parents’ representations of themselves as well as for their behaviour with their children. This process encourages children to develop particular forms of expression, which become part of the specific communication system between them and their parents. Children will respond to the phantasmatic pressures expressed by their parents’ communicative behaviour according both to their drives and defences and to their needs of attachment and holding. Either if a child identifies himself, totally or partially, with the representations projected onto him, or if he projects back or rejects the role his parents gave him, his developmental processes might be disturbed and symptoms might occur.

It should be emphasized that a narcissistic relationships between parents and children always accompanies, in variable proportions, an object relationship where the child is recognized and loved as an individualized subject. When problems arise during early development, the narcissistic relationship becomes overriding and hinders the move to the prevalence of an object relationship. A balance between the different forces can be maintained as long as the child adapts to the projective pressures exerted by his parents and plays the role he has been assigned. Counselling is usually required when the child does not adapt anymore to these projections and manifests his individual needs, which do not match with his parents’ projections, thus upsetting the family balance; however, also the child’s compliance with these projections might drive him to developmental problems as well as to troubled relationships with the external world.

In clinical practice of counselling, different sources are available to outline the narcissistic scenarios and the relational dynamics that are to be used in interpretative interventions. Among these, specifically important are parents’ and, if possible, children’s verbal communications, parents’ pre-transference towards the therapist, the therapist’s counter-reactions, and evidences from the observation of interactive parents-child behaviour.

Clinical illustrations, which take up a very large part of this book, develop on the basis of a conceptual framework that is composed of these key elements:

• parents’ predominant projection;
• parents’ counteridentification;
• aim of the projection;
• child’s reaction to the projection;
• signification/understanding of the symptoms (based on the diagnostic evaluation of child and parents);
• factors that originated the decompensation which led to the consultation;
• parents’ pre-transference;
• child’s pre-transference;
• therapist’s counter-reactions;
• therapist’s interventions;
• evolution of the situation.

As far as technique is concerned, Cramer and Palacio Espasa had already stressed (Cramer, 1974; Cramer, Palacio Espasa, 1993) the peculiar sensitivity to therapeutic interventions and the natural availability to change characterizing post-partum period. In this book they demonstrate how a short psychotherapy approach can be applied to counselling for parents and children of all ages, including adolescents. When adolescents are involved, as well as children beyond infancy, the interpretations will be simultaneously addressed to the parents and to the child or adolescent, and they shall consider that the Oedipus conflict will be added the narcissistic scenario. Moreover, fathers are more often included, whereas in the past literature they were rather marginal characters, due to the fact that the focus was mainly on the mother-child relationship. This counselling methodology is dated back to Winnicott, who introduced a technique of child psychotherapeutic intervention consisting in sporadic sessions instead of regular and methodical ones as in the traditional setting.

The interpretation addressed to the parents in a family setting allows the child to become aware of the suffered conflictual overload resulting from his parents’ projections. On the other hand, the direct interpretation to the child in the presence of his parents permits both parts to grasp the conflict they mutually arouse in each other, in a self-feeding vicious circle. A pivotal concept for this model of understanding is the so called “phantasmatic interaction”, which Cramer introduced in 1982: it attaches parents’ phantoms a fundamental role in the creation of the child’s psychic world and in the parents’ reaction towards the child’s phantoms.

In all cases, the background for the appearance of troubles in parentschild relationship is made of the whole of psychological processes that usually take place in parents at their children’ birth.  First of all, there is the developmental mourning that is the reactivation of the experience of loss of original objects: insofar as it hasn’t undergone enough working through, it can show up in the parent-child relationship as a narcissistic scenario. An other widespread process is the forced re-identification with the image of one’s own parents’, which revives conflicts with the sexual images of one’s parents, by then repressed since latency and adolescence.

Projective identification or, in other words, the projection of aspects of the parent’s self onto the child, is nearly always the projection of an inner object that contains these self-aspects which were projected onto it: this is a normal phantom that performs fundamental functions for development and communication, but it can become pathological for defensive reasons, especially related to separation and object loss anxieties. In such cases, the intensity of projection is discriminating, and can be assessed through the degree of aggression, violence and splitting of the parental phantom, the quality of the resulting omnipotent control and fusion, the quantity of Ego lost by the parent due to projection, and the obstacles to communication and awareness: all this is in contrast with the normal projective identification, that is at the service of empathy.

The missing of the status of child that is involved in the shift to the adult condition intensifies as the parents make a request of help, thus fostering a pre-transference towards the analyst; if it is positive, a short therapy is indicated, whereas if it is negative, a short course is not recommended.  The importance of pre-transference and of the related countertransference as therapeutic instruments results from the fact that the projections towards the therapist are the same or closely related to those that the parents address towards their children.

One of the key elements in the therapeutic approach presented in this book is the fundamental use of the interpretative tool, as long as the pre-transference is predominantly positive. Interpretation is not addressed to the transference from the parent to the therapist, but to the transference from the parent towards the child, thus giving priority to anaclytical projections, and not to the edipic ones (the first one taking over and including edipic images and then generating less resistance).  By means of this work, a parent can take back his own projections towards his child and start an intrapsychic working-through of the conflict.  The authors suggest to avoid, when possible, to interpret negative transference, which would need a much longer long psychotherapeutic process.

Interpretation is essential in order to establish new preconscious links and to transform both the projections onto the child and the parent’s identifications, thus avoiding that repetition mechanism resettle in after ephemeral “transference recoveries”.  Provided that the therapist has the function of a container of the parents’, and possibly the child’s, projective identifications, which he modifies through his own insight and related psychic activity, interpretation is still necessary in order to project back the modified projections to patients. This helps them reintroject their own inner objects and transformed parts, as well as the therapeutic function that generates understanding and becomes therefore a new inner resource.

The clinical configurations of the most typical and frequent narcissistic scenarios can be classified according to the dominant type of projective identification of parents towards their child. Between the two main pictures to be considered, the first one shows a prevalent projection onto the child of the parents’ childish images of themselves; in the second one, the dominant projection involves the image of a significant inner object in the parents’ past. Projections of infantile self-images and objects of the past that are experienced as persecutory or very harmed are considered unsuitable to short interventions.

Short interventions are fit when parental projections involve selfimages experienced as deprived or abandoned, idealized, or damaged, or when parents’ inner objects are damaged, idealized, or marked by hostile or negative features. In the most favourable situations, when parental images projected onto the child stand out for their mostly negative features, the parent strives for restoring, through projective identification, a bond with the significant missed object of his past; then the analyst can use this libidic potential to free the child from negative projections.    In cases where a short therapeutic approach is not suggested, as when parents project persecutory or very damaged self-images or inner object representations onto the child, we are dealing with projective identifications of a basically expulsive kind: the parent evacuates negative representations either of the child he was or of significant objects experienced as aggressive or damaged by himself. The Authors propose the definition of “dissociated narcissism” when speaking about the mechanism by which parents oppose a strong resistance to acknowledge the basic tie between their actual condition as parents and their past experience as children with their own parents. In that case, parental idealization is massive and entirely unconscious, so that it is very difficult to single out the narcissistic aspects in parents.

In the theoretical conclusions developed at the end of the book, the Authors stress the extension that the “anaclyitic phantasmal representations” have in parental narcissistic scenarios. In contrast with Freud’s formulations, which apparently dropped the notion of a self-preserving drive while introducing the concept of narcissism, the Authors start from Kleinian theory to suggest that libidinal drives, in elaborating the depressive position and the struggle against the death drive, include both aspects of self-preservation and sexual features.

The specific significance of this theoretic elaboration lies therefore in identifying a double phantasmal value, both anaclytical and sexual, in the phantoms that characterize parent-children relationships: therefore, it definitely departs from theories stemming from Bowlby’s formulations, which assign a key role to the notion of attachment. Moreover, it emphasizes how anaclytical phantoms often work as a sound preconscious defense to edipical and incestuous phantoms.

The other distinguishing aspect in this book is the wealth of clinical material that is offered as a support to the proposed theories and to illustrate the suggested technique: it results in a very clear and terse exposition, which sometimes might even seem excessive. This, though, might be a risk worth taking when the aim is to generously conveying so many ideas in a clear manner and describing intervention techniques suitable even to other clinical contexts.