Manzano, J., Espasa, F.P., Zilkha, N. (1999). The Narcissistic Scenarios of Parenthood. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 80:465-476.

(1999). International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 80:465-476

The Narcissistic Scenarios of Parenthood

J. Manzano , F. Palacio Espasa and N. Zilkha

The authors begin by pointing out that Freud always considered parent–child relations in terms of
the child's psychic development and took little account of the parents' experience of the
relationship and its psychic effects on them. They recall Freud's distinction between the anaclitic
and narcissistic modes of relationship and show how these are unconsciously embodied and
enacted in varying proportions in the cases observed in their own clinical practice of therapeutic
consultations with parents and young children. After a review of the relevant psychoanalytic
literature, the authors present their concept of the narcissistic scenarios of parenthood, which
include parental projection on to the child, parental counter-identification, a specific aim and a
relational dynamic that is acted out. Depending on the individual situation, the effects may help to
structure the developing psyche or, if the narcissistic element is excessive, they may be
pathological. The authors consider the literature on the application of psychoanalysis to therapeutic
interventions with parents and children, stressing the technical importance of establishing a
therapeutic focus. These ideas are illustrated by a detailed case history showing the interaction
between a mother and a 4-year-old girl and how it was modified by a short therapy. The
differences between interpretation in this situation and in the classical psychoanalytic setting are
explained, and the paper ends with some comments on the transmission of psychic elements from
generation to generation.

Psychoanalytic knowledge has been consistently applied to other fields of individual and group-
related human activity since Freud first began to make his discoveries, and its dissemination and
influence in society and culture have thereby been facilitated. This paper discusses an aspect of its
application to early parent–child interactions and their disorders as well as to direct therapeutic
intervention in these situations. From this point of view the concept of ‘parental functioning’ is shown
to be a phase in the psychic development of the individual that contributes to maturation.
In his investigation of the parent–child relationship, Freud concentrated throughout his career on
the child, so that his entire theory of psychic development may be regarded as an exploration of how
the child experiences this relationship and what consequences it has for the child. Freud's approach
was thus almost exclusively unidirectional, taking virtually no account of the parental experience of
the relationship or its potential impact on the parents' psychic functioning. According to his theory
(Freud, 1905), the first object of the child's libidinal drives is the mother. The resulting relationship
takes an ‘anaclitic’ form, being attached to the first experiences of satisfaction of his vital needs (for
self-preservation): the child will love the caring mother. The ensuing
—————————————
Translated by Philip Slotkin, MA, MITI.
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process of development is well known: with the succeeding stages of psychosexual maturation and
organisation the libidinal cathexis of the object is widened and extends to the parent of opposite sex,
while the other parent becomes an object of rivalry and fear. This is the Oedipus complex, which,
together with its vicissitudes, will later influence the subject's relations with love partners in adult life.
However, in introducing the concept of narcissism in 1914, Freud also described another possible
form of relationship: a libidinal object choice he rightly called ‘narcissistic’. Here the prototype of
libidinal interest is neither the ‘feeding woman’ nor the ‘protecting man’ but the subject himself, who

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is loved in the mother and in all the succession of substitutes for her with whom this ‘narcissistic
relationship’ is forged.
Freud originally discovered the ‘narcissistic relationship’—paradoxical as the term may seem—in
adult pathology. He described people who chose their love objects not according to the model of their
mother but according to that of their own person, i.e. a representation of themselves. In this way such a
subject loved ‘(a) what he himself is … (b) what he himself was, (c) what he himself would like to be,
[and] (d) someone who was once part of himself’ (1914, p. 90).
Freud considered these two paths to object choice to be open to any human being capable of
entering into a relationship either object-wise (by anaclisis) or in narcissistic form; either might be
preferred and predominate.

Parenthood and Psychoanalysis

Having arrived at this point in his exposition of the ‘narcissistic choice of object’, Freud
exceptionally shifts the focus in the narcissistic relationship from the child to the parents. In his view,
the parents ‘are under a compulsion to ascribe every perfection to the child’—‘His Majesty the
Baby’—and ‘to conceal and forget all his shortcomings’. They are inclined ‘to renew on his behalf the
claims to privileges which were long ago given up by themselves’ (Freud, 1914, pp. 90-91); and they
see themselves in the child in the form in which they once fancied themselves. Freud regards parents'
love for their children as nothing but their own narcissism reborn, i.e. their love for themselves. Later
he was to see this situation in terms of the ego ideal: parents put their own ego ideal (what they would
like to be) on to the child and the child identifies with it, making it his own ideal, which he will in
adulthood project in turn on to his own child. Freud even came to conclude that the ‘cultural’ aspects
of this projected ego ideal lay at the root of the mechanism of generation-to-generation cultural
inheritance.
In the observations on adult psychopathology mentioned above, Freud had also noted some
conspicuous forms of adult love relationship in which the subject accommodated his own infantile
person in the love object (who would be someone younger than himself) while himself playing the part
of the ideal mother of his childhood, whom he thought—or wished—he had had; the subject identified
with this mother who satisfied every need and desire. In this ‘unconscious enactment’—frequently
encountered in clinical practice today—the subject therefore loves himself in his partner and, more
absolutely, in the form of the ideal mother whom he embodies.
Because he lacked direct clinical experience of the parent–child relationship, Freud never
explicitly compared these narcissistic adult loves with what he described as a narcissistic relationship
between parents and their children, but, as we have seen, merely considered the general character of
that relationship. We ourselves have found in our own clinical practice of therapeutic consultations
with parents and babies or parents and young children that ‘enactments’ similar to those described as
characteristic of adult narcissistic relationships are observable in varying proportions and forms in all
parent–child relationships. These unconscious ‘enactments’ assume a variety of guises. One example
is the familiar situation where a mother projects on to her newborn baby the image of her own
unmourned father, herself
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identifying with a daughter living permanently with her father in a seemingly object-based relationship
that is in fact one of ‘fusion’. Another is the father who sees in his son the ideal and omnipotent child
he would have liked to be, while he himself identifies with the also ideal father he would have liked to
have.
Correlations with and antecedents of these findings may be found in the psychoanalytic literature
since Freud. Deutsch (1934) described in particular the effect on youngsters of maternal projections,
resulting in the procurement of unconscious satisfaction by delegation. More recently, following
Freud's assignment of central importance to identificatory mechanisms in the formation of the child's
psyche (1923), many authors (e.g. Lebovici, 1983; Kaës et al., 1993; Golse, 1966) have studied the
processes of transmission from generation to generation and filiation (‘transgenerationality’), i.e. the
child's ‘inheritance’ from his parents. The same issues have been tackled from a different standpoint

2
by the attachment theorists (Bowlby, 1988; Main & Cassidy, 1988; Fonagy et al., 1996; Mazet,
1996). Starting with de Mijolla (1981) and Abraham & Torok (1978), several authors writing in a
more strictly psychoanalytic context (Baranès, 1991; Enriquez, 1998; Guyotat, 1980) have sought on
the basis of retrospective material from adult analyses to specify the metapsychological conditions for
intergenerational transmission. The concept of ‘telescoping of the generations’ (Faimberg, 1988) is
particularly relevant here.
The pioneering psychoanalytic therapies of Selma Fraiberg on ‘ghosts in the nursery’ (Fraiberg et
al., 1975) are more directly linked to our work; these are based on her concept of the repetition of
mothers' negative infantile experiences in the relationship with their own children by unconscious
mechanisms of identification with the aggressor. Fonagy et al. (1996) have recently put forward
similar views. However, the work of Cramer on short psychotherapies (1974), together with
subsequent contributions by that author, has contributed most to the development of our knowledge in
this field. Although adopting a different conceptual approach,Raphael-Leff (1995) not long ago
published an account of her clinical work with parents and babies, in which she arrives at conclusions
similar to ours on ‘narcissistic displacements’ between parents and young children with relational
problems; she shares our view of the importance of ‘narcissistic fantasies’ that may usurp reality and
affect parent–child interaction.

The Narcissistic Scenarios of Parenthood

Our own analysis of the parent–child situations observed in our clinical practice has led us to
formulate the concept of the ‘narcissistic scenarios of parenthood’, whose main aspects we have been
able to distinguish. These scenarios have four main components: (1) parental projection on to the
child; (2) a complementary identification on the part of the parent (counteridentification); (3) a
specific aim; and (4) a relational dynamic that is acted out.
The particular features of each component indicate how the parental narcissism will impact on the
child, with potential repercussions—which may be either structuring or pathogenic—on his psychic
development.
The parental projection on to the child is more precisely a projective identification. What is
projected is a representation of the parent's self, which is therefore cathected with narcissistic libido; it
may be projected either directly as such, as in the example given above of the representation of the
ideal child the father would have liked to be, or via the internal image of an object, as in the other
example, the image of the mother's dead father. In the second case this image—the parent's internal
object—carries a self-representation formerly projected on to it; in other words, an identification with
this object has taken place. Hence, even if the projection on to the child corresponds to an image of the
object, it necessarily includes a self-representation and is therefore narcissistic in nature. To
paraphrase Freud, the shadow of the parents may be said to have fallen on the
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child, either directly or by way of the shadow of the parental internal objects.
It is important to note that in the context of parent–child relations the notion of projective
identification does not necessarily have a pathological connotation. Projective identifications with a
child may be a vehicle for parental empathy with him and thereby contribute to his psychic
development (Bion, 1962; Grinberg, 1976; Grotstein, 1981).
Parental complementary identification (counteridentification in our parlance) uses different
internal representations: in our examples these are the image of the daughter with a father who was
still alive or the ideal father the subject would like to have had. The scenario thus always presents a
relationship between ‘self’ and ‘self’.
The terms ‘complementary identification’ (Racker, 1968) and ‘projective counteridentification’
(Grinberg, 1976) have to do with the vicissitudes of the analyst's countertransference relations. The
former indicates that the analyst in his countertransference may himself identify with certain objects or
with aspects of his patient'sinternal world in complementarity with the patient's identifications. Racker
contrasts this complementary identification with ‘concordant identification’, in which the analyst's
countertransference identification is of the same kind as the patient's. Grinberg's projective

3
counteridentification describes a vicissitude of the countertransference in which the analyst identifies
with certain aspects of his patient's projective identification with him. The present authors use the term
‘complementary parental identification’ or ‘complementary parental counteridentification’ to refer to
the forms in which the parents identify with images of their own parents or representations of their
infantile selves, which precisely parallel the type of projective identifications with their own children
in which they engage.
The aim of this enactment thus always involves the achievement of a narcissistic satisfaction.
Other aims may, however, be present in addition, such as a defensive disavowal of loss or the
satisfaction of object-related libidinal wishes in the form of the disguised satisfaction of repressed
oedipal drives.
The acted out interaction between the players is the result of these projections and identifications.
The fact that the scenario is actually played out in reality is of fundamental importance, because it can
then take on more than a purely imaginary existence and be converted into a symptom with disguised
substitutive satisfactions.
We have distinguished two different dynamic forms of such interaction. In the first a ‘scenario’ is
‘fixed’ and the subject does everything possible to convince himself of its immutability; for instance,
that the child and the father in the situation mentioned above will always remain ideal. The second
form involves the ‘refashioning’ of a past felt to be unacceptable by ‘correcting’ it in the desired way,
as, for example, when the subject projects on to the child the image of the sad, abandoned child he
believes himself to have been and, identifying with non-abandoning parents, retroactively reconstructs
his own personal history by becoming the child who has never experienced separations.
Unconscious imaginary roles and fantasies thus determine not only the self-representation of the
parents but also the general way in which they comport themselves with their children, involving
verbal and infra-verbal attitudes and behaviours, expressions of affect, omissions, and so on. Although
we do not always pick up the detail of these mechanisms in a given situation, our therapeutic
experience shows that a relatively simple form of behaviour accompanying a parent's projections and
identifications and directly impacting on the child can sometimes be observed very easily. For
example, sleep disorders are often found to be connected with a mother who projects on to her child
the image of a damaged or dead person from her past, so that she wakes her baby several times a night
to check that he is still alive. Other disorders, such as vomiting and anorexia, may result from the
child's opposition to a clearly observable intrusive behaviour in the mother. In most cases the mother
selects and reinforces certain
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of the child's forms of expression, so that these tend to be included in the specific mother–child or
parent–child communication system.
Hence the child will react to the fantasy pressures thus expressed in the parents' communicative
behaviour in accordance with his own motivations—in particular, the need for attachment and holding
aroused by his own drives and defences. He will identify wholly or partly with the representation
projected on to him, but may also reject and reproject the parentally assigned role; in the latter case his
development may be affected and symptoms may be generated.
The word ‘narcissism’ has so many meanings that it is essential to specify what it is intended to
denote. We ourselves employ it in Freud's general sense of ‘self-love’, the libidinal cathexis of the
subject's own personality or the representation of the self as distinct from the love of the object, of the
other differentiated from self, the ‘libidinal complement to … egoism’ (1914, pp. 73-4). Eschewing
the controversy as whether or not there is such a thing as a phase of primary narcissism, we use the
concept here in the general sense of secondary narcissism as described by Klein (1946), Rosenfeld
(1964) and Kernberg (1984), which entails the existence of an object-type representation of the other
that has become the subject's own self through fantasies of introjective and projective identification
that may wholly or partially obliterate the boundaries between self and object. This conception offers
an explanation for the coexistence of a narcissistic relationship (love of self in the other) and a genuine
object relationship (love of the other as different from self). In our view, the description of the
narcissistic scenarios of parenthood illustrates this formulation of the parents' narcissistic relationship
with the child (as a representation of themselves) coexisting with an object relationship in which the

4
child is loved as a separate being. As stated earlier, we believe that these two modes are to be found in
varying proportions in all parent–child relationships. However, in the ‘pathological’ cases referred to
us on account of early problems of development the narcissistic mode is usually found to predominate,
whereas in less conflictual situations the narcissistic relationship, although present, is gradually
superseded by an object relationship in which the child is acknowledged and loved predominantly as a
distinct individual.
Hence the narcissistic scenarios of parenthood may either be overcome and integrated into the
harmonious development of the parent–child relationship, or have pathological consequences if they
interfere with this development and conflict with reality—in particular, with the reality of the
existence of a growing child that is inconsistent with the parental projection on to him.
In the latter case, the interactive dynamic that comes into play has a number of possible outcomes.
A balance of forces may be struck, in which the child accepts the projective pressure and plays the part
assigned to him without succumbing to any evident disorders of adaptation; although help in
overcoming relational or developmental problems is of course not sought in these situations, these
children may quite possibly have psychological difficulties later in life. Conversely, the balance may
be disturbed, and these are the clinical cases that come to our attention. The basic pattern is that, in
growing up, the child ceases to play the part assigned to him and demonstrates his need to be
acknowledged as a person rather than the ‘shadow of the parents or of their internal objects’. This may
result in the onset of pathology in the parents, or problems with the child's development and adaptation
to the outside world due to his acceptance of the parental projections, or a combination of the two.
Notwithstanding this diversity of clinical situations, the narcissistic scenarios most frequently met
with in our consultations are found to be assignable to a limited number of types with sufficient
common features to be incorporated in specific dynamic configurations.
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Therapeutic Intervention with Parents and Children

Therapy of the parent–child relationship has been recommended by a number of psychoanalytic
authors. While taking account of the parents' contribution to the child's pathology, Winnicott (1971)
hardly ever intervened directly in their interaction in his therapeutic consultations. Mahler (1967) had
used mother–child psychotherapies in cases of symbiotic psychosis in which the maternal fantasies
were important in maintaining the child's symbiotic illusion. However, the introduction of systematic
short- or long-term psychotherapeutic work with mothers and babies, in the English-speaking world, is
due mainly to Fraiberg (Fraiberg et al., 1975), who drew attention to the intrusion of the maternal
fantasies into the baby's functioning in the form of ‘ghosts in the nursery’. In the French-speaking
countries, Lebovici (1986) was a pioneer of therapeutic consultation involving play by the child in the
presence of the mother, which enabled him to break up some symptomatic vicious circles. Over the
years this author has delved ever deeper and more productively into the notion of the parent–baby
therapeutic consultation (cf.Lebovici, 1991), developing concepts that have since acquired classical
status, such as ‘generational transmission’ and ‘enactment’. The original feature of Lebovici's
approach here is direct intervention with the baby and the resulting therapeutic repercussions on the
family situation as a whole—and in particular on the parents' transgenerational repetitions.
Another pioneering figure is Cramer (1974), with his work on short therapeutic interventions and
his important concept of ‘psychic mutuality’ of parents and children, mediated by the processes of
projection, introjection and identification. His work illustrates the highly positive results of this type of
therapy (Cramer & Stern, 1988) and the nature of the psychotherapeutic process in this approach
(Cramer & Palacio Espasa, 1993), which he particularly recommends in the favourable period
immediately after the baby's birth (Cramer, 1982). He has drawn attention to the technical importance
for the therapist of formulating a ‘therapeutic focus’ and of discovering the ‘symptomatic interactive
sequences’ between baby and mother with a view to elaborating this focus (Cramer & Palacio
Espasa, 1993). We ourselves have used the term ‘therapeutic consultation’ to denote our short
psychotherapeutic work with mothers and very young children (Manzano & Palacio Espasa, 1981,
1994 Palacio Espasa & Manzano, 1982). This wider conception of the therapeutic consultation, in
which therapy is done both with each of the parents and with the child as circumstances permit, is

5
currently used in France and some of the clinicians concerned—in particular Berger (1987),Golse
(1966), Houzel (1995), Sanchez-Cardenas (1994)—have developed it in productive and original
ways.
Narcissistic scenarios have been brought to light from a variety of information sources in our
current clinical practice. The first point to be made is that at least one of the two parties in the
interaction—the mother or the father—although interacting pre-verbally with the baby possesses the
faculty of verbal language, which can express that party's conscious thought and betray unconscious
contents. The same applies to older children and adolescents. Secondly, the mother forms an
emotional relationship not only with the child but also with the therapist. What the mother says—her
associations—may allow inferences as to her unconscious fantasies. These will be mainly ones
concerning and accompanying her real activity with the child, but others will also be present,
underlying the relationship with the therapist in what we have called the pretransference; this
transference may provide information on the nature of the mother–child bond owing to the latter's
parallelism with the relationship with the therapist. Similarly, the entire complex of counter-reactions
(feelings and thoughts) aroused in the therapist by the projection of the mother's internal objects and/or
other parts of herself is one of our main sources of evidence, by virtue of the opportunities
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they afford for insight and self-observation. These information sources are complemented by objective
data accruing from observation of the interactive behaviour between mother and child (Cramer &
Stern, 1988; Lebovici, 1983), as well as by the quick clinical evaluation of the mental status of
mother and child open to the experienced practitioner during the consultation.
When all this information is combined with the therapist's theoretical knowledge and practical
experience of individual and relational psychopathology, he will potentially be able to make a
‘focused’ choice of the relational dynamic on which to base his understanding and interpretive
intervention.

Clinical Illustration: The ‘Double Rations’

Christine was a 4-year-old girl described as very sociable. Adopted when she was a few weeks
old, she had the features of her Indian biological mother. Three months previously the family had
adopted a North American child. The reason for the adoptive mother's consultation was that her
daughter complained all day of being hungry and was constantly demanding food. She weighed 19kg
and was 107cm tall. The demands were more pressing when the mother, who worked part-time, was
present and they provoked great irritation in her. Even when they were outside Christine would come
up to her and ask for something to eat. The mother feared her daughter might become obese,
especially as she herself had been ‘podgy’ in her teens and had suffered a great deal as a result, feeling
abandoned by her parents. It was immediately clear to the therapist that the mother felt guilty at not
devoting all her time to her daughter and was afraid of frustrating her at every level. This was
suggested to the mother in the first interview, to which she came alone. Sobbing, she then associated
with her feeling that her daughter always lacked something and that she was trying to make up this
lack. However, she added that for that reason she had perhaps not done enough to foster her
independence. Furthermore, she said, Christine did not help her, because she would yell whenever her
mother refused to give her what she wanted. The mother gave an account of her own history and why
she and her husband had decided to adopt children. She had simply proved sterile and that was all she
knew about it. Surprisingly, as soon as Christine arrived the couple had applied to adopt a second
child. The mother herself claimed to have had a ‘happy childhood’. When the therapist confronted her
with what she had said about her adolescent body and her feeling of having been set aside, she started
crying again and wondered if her parents had realised how much she had suffered. She experienced
this seeming indifference as an ‘emotional deprivation’, and the fact that her mother had worked hard
had made it worse. Her father had been a ‘man of principle’ with whom she had had hardly any
communication. She was the eldest of three children who were very close together in age.
Christine, explained her mother, had ‘always known’ that she had been adopted. She would often
ask her mother to tell her her story. The mother then associated with her frustration at not having
breast-fed her daughter, which still bothered her greatly. From the age of 2 Christine had wanted to

6
play at being a baby; when she then asked her mother for the breast, she had begun to accede and
indeed still did so. The therapist told her that there was a connection between the child's symptom and
the mother's own need to be able to feed her so as to make up through her daughter for her own
feelings of deprivation as a child. The patient added that her husband also thought Christine's
behaviour had something to do with a frustration: he blamed it on the reduction from five bottle feeds
a day to four.
Two weeks later the mother came along with Christine for the second consultation. She was a
sweet little girl, who, while acting her age, made quite a shy impression. Holding an apple her mother
had just given her, she settled on her mother's knee. She said she knew why she
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was coming to a doctor ‘for her worries’ and spontaneously began to talk about her fears with a
negation: ‘I'm never afraid at night, no one disturbs me maybe I am afraid of lions, but there aren't any
in houses’. She then whispered in her mother's ear that she would like to have a look at the toys. She
put her apple down carefully, adding that she did not want it to fall and break. The mother then
announced that Christine was appreciably less hungry lately. She also noted that her daughter was very
interested in kangaroos. The little girl munched noisily on her apple and said: ‘My skin is browner
than Mummy's’. The mother was horrified. The therapist spoke to the child about the questions she
was asking concerning kangaroos, as well as her questions about her origins and the respects in which
she was like her mother and those in which she differed from her. Christine acquiesced and pretended
to eat a sweet. The mother joined in the game and asked for one as well. The little girl's enthusiasm
mounted and, biting into the apple, she went on with the game. Putting the apple down again, she said
she would leave it for later. The therapist pointed out to the child, and to the mother through the child,
that the time when she had wanted to involve her Mummy was when she had seen that she was
different from her.
Christine now picked up the animals and staged a scene with a family of cows, which, however,
was rather an odd family because the calves were actually foals. The therapist again interpreted the
child's curiosity about her origins and differences. Christine went up to her mother and put her hair-
slides in the mother's hair. The therapist added that she did not know if she had to be just like Mummy
or if she could be a little different. Mother and daughter laughed together for the first time in the
session.
The mother brought both her children along to the consultation a week later and Christine openly
attacked her mother and sister, making fun of the white colour of the latter's skin. When the mother
again expressed her fear that her daughter might have experienced frustrations before her adoption, the
therapist drew her attention to her sense of guilt at the emotional deprivation her daughter might have
suffered; the connection was thus made, this time in Christine's presence, with the breast-feeding game
as an opportunity par excellence for this woman to show her affection for her daughter. The rivalry
with the sister seemed to have accentuated the greed symptoms.
The girl's food symptom then disappeared; in the subsequent consultations the mother gave a more
relaxed impression and began to think more about her own history and her regrets that her own
mother, who had died eight years before, had not given her more attention. She mentioned that she had
been sent to boarding school for a while during her teens but said she did not know why; she had
experienced this episode as an abandonment. The therapist made the connection between this
frustration and her need to supply ‘double rations’ in her relationship with her daughter. Christine
readily took school in her stride and enjoyed making friends with other little girls, the mother being
excluded from these relationships. When she occasionally asked for ‘too much’, her mother ‘rationed’
her. The therapist again interpreted that this had to do with her wish for an inexhaustible breast for her
daughter, as well as for herself. She could now ‘wean’ Christine, explaining to her that she had ‘had
her due’. In the tenth and last consultation the mother remembered that her own mother had been
unable to breast-feed her because of an infection.
In this therapeutic consultation the therapist had succeeded in understanding a central narcissistic
scenario. The mother was projecting on to the child an infantile aspect of herself, namely the
representation of the deprived child she had been or thought she had been. Food became a
displacement of the desired maternal object. The mother in turn identified with the ideal mother she

7
would have liked to have, a mother providing limitless gratification. By enacting this scene in the
interaction with the daughter she was able to ‘fill herself up’ through her child and avoid facing her
own
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rage at frustration and deprivation. A direct connection remained between these infantile aspects of
herself and the wished-for gratifying mother, in particular in the breast games and other instances of
acting out.
The child accepted the role assigned to her by her mother, probably to protect the mother from
depressive feelings. At the same time she dug in, not without hostility, against the latent threat of non-
differentiation thereby entailed (confusion of identity between herself and the image projected on to
her), emphasising what distinguished her from her mother, such as skin colour. The resulting
interactive behavioural syndrome was an unstable compromise embodying this dynamic.
During these consultations the mother established a positive pre-transference and proved receptive
to the understanding offered her, while the therapist responded with a positive counter-affect that led
her to accept the image of the feeding mother. This positive relationship made it possible to interpret
the mother's projection on to her daughter and her fear of not being the ideal mother, in a repetition of
her own past. To the child—in the mother's presence—the therapist interpreted her interest in
reconstructing her pre-adoption history and thereby in registering her difference from her mother, as
well as her fear of making her mother sad if she failed to demand food from her often so that she
always had the feeling of being a good mother.
This situation seems to us to be representative of a common type of narcissistic scenario of
parenthood. In our view, understanding and interpreting it made it possible to modify the relationship
and to ward off a psychopathological trend with unforeseeable consequences in the child. We believe
that these interpretive interventions allowed a preconscious link to be restored in the mother and
possibly in the child; although their mutative scope was necessarily limited (we do not claim to have
brought about an in-depth transformation of the psychic organisation), they may have untied a knot
blocking the child's psychological development.
These interpretations differ from the type used in classical analytic treatment in that they deal not
with the transference relationship with the analyst but with the tissue of fantasies that is woven
between mother and child. When supported by a ‘positive pre-transference’ of the parent on to the
therapist, these interpretations often permit a short—or even very short (less than twelve sessions)—
therapeutic process, the essence of which is that the parent takes back the projective identification
made with the child. The child is thereby ‘deparasitised’ by the removal of the conflictual overload
applied to him by the parent's ‘narcissistic scenario’; these therapeutic consultations are thus definitely
valuable in eliminating obstacles to the child's future psychic development. This possibility of change
is in our view facilitated by the greater openness and mobility resulting from such parents' states of
psychic disequilibrium (crisis).
In order to ‘reinternalise’ the parental narcissism in this way the parent has to go through a process
resembling mourning. The parent's capacity for intrapsychic working through of this process
determines the limits of these therapeutic consultations, which sometimes lead to an indication of
psychoanalysis for one or other of the parents or for the child.

Transgenerational Transmission
In conclusion, the ‘narcissistic scenarios of parenthood’ studied by us in our clinical practice with
parents and children may help us to understand the psychic influence of parents over children, one
form of which is ‘transgenerational transmission’. By ‘live’ observation of certain ‘infantile histories’
that resemble the accounts given by patients in analysis, we see parents enacting different ‘scenarios’
that—sometimes decisively—influence their children's narcissism and its defensive vicissitudes,
which in turn have repercussions on the parental functioning. The parent's narcissism and that of the
child then become subtly entangled in a shifting structure that impacts on the objectivity of the vision
each has of the other.
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All this gives rise to equilibria of different kinds, some of which contribute to the structuring of the
child's psychic development; however, certain ‘narcissistic scenarios of parenthood’ implicate the
child's narcissism and will result in pathology in the short or long term.
When working as adult analysts with patients who tell us, for example, of their ‘hyperdemanding’
or ‘hyperfeeding’ mothers, we are always liable to reconstruct their childhood history in terms of two
opposite extremes. On the one hand, we may accept without question the analysand's accounts of
maternal intrusiveness in which the patient appears as the passive victim of his mother's narcissistic
needs; or, on the other, we may construe them as defensive constructions whereby the subject for
various reasons—including narcissistic ones—tends to emphasise the invasive and persecutory aspects
of the mother. Only the patient's transference experiences in the analytic situation and the analyst's
counter-transference reactions, when subjected to detailed scrutiny, will reflect the full range of
internal interactions that will broaden and flesh out the analysand's accounts of his past relations. It
must, however, be admitted that it is never easy to decide which aspects of the transference expressed
in analysis stem directly from parental ‘narcissistic scenarios’, because the latter have, at least in part,
formed part of the subject's own narcissistic functioning.
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(Initial version received 30/9/97) (Final revised version received 9/4/98) (Translated MS received 11/1/99)
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Article Citation
Manzano, J., Espasa, F.P. and Zilkha, N. (1999). The Narcissistic Scenarios of Parenthood. Int. J. Psycho-
Anal., 80:465-476

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