Difficult Identities

<p>Every human being about to be born is loaned a provisional identity. This identity is embodied in the name they are given as an invention internal need or generational obligation parental fantasy or delusion. Both the person receiving and the person bestowing the name—and with it the provisional identity—are unaware of all this.</p><p>Interweaving theoretical reflections and clinical histories Pia De Silvestris illustrates the dramatic nature the profundity and the cryptic complexity of the challenges posed by this difficult identity—challenges she has faced repeatedly throughout her psychoanalytic career. She sees the role of transference in psychic and relational life as a continuous search for the origin a force that develops continuously through a variety of exchanges and investments which seek on the one hand to weaken the bond to the original object and on the other to preserve it until death. Throughout the book’s chapters we see how it is precisely the product of the transference experience that permits the joint work of identity construction to begin. Transference is always the outcome of an experience of fulfilment and an encounter with the other; and it is desire of the other that promotes the search for the self.</p>