A WOMEN. In the text of a session brought to supervision, a colleague writes about Ms. H., âa womenâ instead of âa womanâ. Somebody points out the error and so he realizes that what he is dealing with is not a single patient but a plurality of patients of various ages. In particular, the various versions of Ms. H. involved in obscure relationships, as she called them â that is in destructive sentimental ties. When Ms. H. tells her sadomasochistic stories, the analyst defensively connects them only to the material reality and does not make a link with a possible unconscious significance with respect to the analytical relationship in the here and now. For example, stressing the fact that Ms. H has a successful career, he highlights how much she is sought after by headhunters. In this, however, the group of colleagues immediately sees a figure in the analytic field. The analyst presenting the case realizes how at times he struggled to see in Ms. H. the little girl who at four years of age was still not able to talk. For example, instead of âallowingâ this little girl to metaphorically eat Nutella (one day when she mentions it), he pointed out that it is a mixture of fat and sugar. In short, he addresses the adult, chooses to focus the conflict, does not sufficiently welcome Ms. H.âs request to be nourished by the play and the intimacy of the analysis. By doing this, he fails to set the right level of communication and hinders the mental growth of the patient during the session. Suddenly, the double meaning of the headhunter hologram in their relationship becomes clear.
ABANDON. Anna Prohaska who sings Monteverdiâs Lamento della ninfa.1
ABSENCE. In LâAfrique fantĂ´me Michael Leiris2 writes that being away from a woman can make one feel like living in the absent. Dissolved and vanished, she doesnât exist anymore as a separate body, but has become the space, the ghostly carcass through which one moves. Iâve always been struck by this sentence because it expresses very well the idea of spatialization of the object. Painting â especially Romantic painting inspired by the aesthetics of the sublime â is extraordinary for how it evokes in the landscape the shape of the object, which is often mysterious, enchanting and threatening all at the same time. What is brought to mind are paintings such as The Mouth of a Cave (1784) by Hubert Robert (Figure 1), or At the Waterfall (ca. 1850) by David Calypole Johnstone (Figure 2), or A Mountain Pass (1830) by William Turner,3 all of which, as it were, previous âversionsâ of the famous painting The Origin of the World (1866) by Gustave Courbet which decorated Lacanâs house in Guitrancourt. The same is true for Camillo Sbarbaroâs4 poem Esco dalla lussuria, where the harsh relationship with the object is effectively transfigured in the ghostly landscape of the city. In this, the Kleinian contribution is everlasting. Every newborn can only continue to move in the motherâs body. Being born is an illusion.
ABSTRACTION. Unforgettable pages in Heideggerâs5 book containing his seminars on Kantâs first Critique, in particular those dedicated to the definition of the concept (unity in the multiplicity or ârepresentation of what is common to several ob-jectsâ) and to the prerequisite for any thinking of the concept or sense of self. âTo abstract fromâ (astrarre) means simplifying, reducing a variety of beings to a common quality, eliminating differences and collecting similarities. In this way (through a sublimative transformation) you get the status of subject.
From a psychoanalytical point of view, the emotional unity between the mother and the infant is a sort of primal abstraction and occurs firstly in a purely sensory and indistinct dimension, and then in that of the emotional/sentimental space. Only at the end does it become possible to synthesize the concepts of logic. As Wittgenstein6 writes: âKnowledge is in the end based on acknowledgementâ. The body that is lost in rising to the concept is the body as a source of obscure and vague sensations. In this sense, to subjectify oneself does not mean to lose but to take on the body in the sense of adopting the necessary emotional categories, the âsensible conceptsâ indispensable to life.
ADOLESCENCE. Winnicott and Ogden give us two valuable keys to understanding the adolescent. The former writes that unlike the child, the adolescent does not play with toys but with âworld affairsâ.7 The latter writes that in his infinite goodness God created the adolescent, otherwise it would be too painful to separate yourself from your children. In their brilliant simplicity, these two points offer a view of the adolescent as a fascinating being and help us to understand him (and to put up with him).
AESTHETIC CONFLICT. Winnicottâs8 review of Marion Milnerâs book, On Not Being Able to Paint contains an ante litteram interpretation of the Meltzerian concept of aesthetic conflict. Winnicott notes that creativity is born from the âprimary human predicamentâ that the infant faces: âthe non-identity of what is conceived of and what is to be perceivedâ. What does it mean? That to
the objective mind of another person seeing from outside, that which is outside an individual is never identical with what is inside that individual. But there can be, and must be, for health [âŚ] a meeting place, an overlap, a stage of illusion, intoxication, transfiguration.
The first concept we have of life would have to do, in short, with the area of âoverlapâ between the joy caused by the smiling face of the mother and the unsettling wonder about her true feelings. The psychoanalytic notion of the aesthetic conflict gives theoretical substance to the ingenious intuition expressed by Keats9 in what are perhaps his most famous lines: ââBeauty is truth, truth beauty,â â that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to knowâ.
Winnicott10 then offers a convincing interpretation of the meaning of the aesthetic experience:
In the arts this meeting place is pre-eminently found through the medium, that bit of external world which takes the form of the inner conception. In painting, writing, music, etc., an individual may find islands of peace and so get momentary relief from the primary predicament of healthy human beings.
In the sense of harmony and in the pleasure that it inspires, the work of art would be, in brief, a promise of happiness (according to the Stendhalian definition of beauty). By offering an opportunity for identification between an emotion and an outer form that induces it, by analogy with the relationship with the breast, the aesthetic experience would nourish faith in the love of the object. If this possibility is prevented and the motherâs duplicity and sphinx-like impenetrability have the upper hand, the consequences can be rather serious. Winnicott adds:
When the motherâs behavior does not correspond to the cathected internal mother image, the child does not experience frustration, unpleasure, or anger. What happens is that the child tends to lose the capacity to relate to objects. If the capacity to get angry is retained, things are not too bad.11
AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE. It has to do mainly with the rhythm. Every game of lines, colours, or sounds as a story of the intervals between moments of meeting and separation from the object. For Derrida,12 it is the concept of the trace, a term that extends, or brings it back, to any perception the dialectics of identity and the difference of the system of language, a socially ordered deposit of signs. In the quotation that follows, this notion is contained in the two terms âpoliticallyâ and âarchiveâ:
In my opinion, there is trace since there is experience, that is, referring to the other, difference [diffĂŠrance], referring to something else, etc. So, wherever there is experience there is trace, and there is no experience without trace. So everything is trace, not only what I write on paper or what I log into a machine, but also by making this gesture I make a trace [âŚ] Animals trace, every living being traces [âŚ] There is no archive without trace, but not every trace is an archive to the extent that the archive requires not only a trace, but also that the trace is properly controlled, organized, politically under control.
AFFECTOLOGY. How I Ended This Summer13 can be considered a film about a fatherâson relationship. In a meteorological station lost in a beautiful but inaccessible place in the Siberian Arctic, a young intern, and a more mature employee live together for some time. They spend their days visiting various instruments which measure the wind and water current speed, temperature and atomic radiation. Then they transmit the data via radio to a collection headquarters. The collection is often difficult because of the weather conditions. The man assumes a fatherly attitude towards the boy. He watches him furtively, nourishing some concerns about his diligence on the job or making sure he does not put himself in danger (white bears are a constant threat). At a certain point, seeing that he is not focused enough on his job, he reproaches him bitterly and urges him to cross the line between adolescence and adulthood. The boy, however, slowly moves towards paranoia. He imagines that in the past the man got rid of another employee because the latter failed to perform his duties.
The surprising aspect of the film is the beauty of the landscape which, mixed with its dangerousness, lends itself as a metaphor for the vicissitudes of any relationship where the two parties are deeply committed and where a strong bond of dependence is created. Collecting meteorological information becomes a metaphor for the continuous monitoring that we, consciously or unconsciously, all do in order to gather emotive signals in the field of relationships: an affectology.
AIRBAG. A charming advertisement by BMW aired a few years ago on France 2.14 A newborn is being breastfed when, due to an abrupt movement, he is pulled away from the motherâs breast only to bounce back softly onto it. At this point a voice explains the allegory: âRappelez-vous les sensations de votre premier airbag!â [âRemember the sensations of your first airbag!â].
ALLEGORY I. Following some of Benjaminâs remarks and Derridaâs deconstruction, Paul de Man re-emphasized the role of allegory with respect to that of the symbol. While the symbol would be directly linked to what it symbolized, in a way that seems to be natural, obvious, intrinsic to the thing itself, allegory comes back repeatedly to denounce the unbridgeable gap interposed between words and things.
Now, more than symbolic, the language of dream is an allegorical language, and in this it denounces the essential split that founds the subject. In essence, âspeaking about anything elseâ (in Italian âparlare dâaltroâ, i.e. literally âspeaking about the otherâ) in allegory means speaking and being spoken by the Other. In this lies the originality of the Freudian interpretation of dream language: freeing it from a banal symbolic reading and placing it instead in the context of the dreamerâs network of associations. ...
