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Abstract
This is a revision and expansion of a classic paper that was first delivered as a speech, in October 1994, for the 10th National Conference of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society, and then published as a chapter of the seminal book Emozione e Interpretazione. Psicoanalisi del campo emotivo [Emotion and interpretation. Psychoanalysis of the emotional field], edited in 1997 by Eugenio Gaburri.
Notes
1 The first part of this work – which is a revised, expanded version of the paper “Immagini e pensieri dal campo” [Images and thoughts from the field], delivered at the 10th SPI National Conference on “The Analyst’s Response and the Transformations of the Field” (Rimini, October 1994) – was originally published in 1997 in the edited volume Emozione e Interpretazione. Psicoanalisi del campo emotivo [Emotion and interpretation. Psychoanalysis of the emotional field] (Gaburri, Citation1997).
2 In the original text, I compared these kinds of metaphor to countryside or hillside landscapes from Tuscany, or from the Langhe or Monferrato in Piedmont. At first glance, these areas may often appear rather wild and uncultivated, whereas they are in fact the product of centuries of farming; even when they look untamed or neglected they may actually be lying fallow, waiting for future rewarding cultivation – although they scarcely show all the work that has already been carried out to that effect by farmers, by the land itself, and by the seeds.
3 Alongside Ferro, who has pioneered the study of these concepts, Civitarese (Citation2014, Citation2017) is the author who has explored them in more depth in recent years.
4 From this point onwards, the displayed quotations will be exact transcription of the three original texts I make reference to (Borgogno, Citation1994–Citation1997, Citation1999; Borgogno & Vallino, Citation2006–2013). The text that is not set displayed paraphrases other parts of the same texts.
5 The psychiatrist he used to see in the early years of his analysis – a skilled and intuitive person – had actually taken this view, diagnosing Mirko with blank feeble-mindedness and discouraging both him and me from harboring any illusions in relation to the outcome of the treatment.
6 All the italics, in the whole paper, were already present in the original quoted texts.
7 On re-reading Mirko’s case today, this situation strikes me as typical of those migrants who, dispossessed of their motherland, are then forced (with plenty of suffering and conflicts) to change their language and habits.
8 At that stage, Mirko came to see me two or three times per week.
9 The patient referred in this way to the supersonic airliner Concorde. In Italian, “concordi” is the plural form of the adjective “concorde,” belonging to the semantic area of concordance, harmony, oneness, unanimity.
10 “Qui casca l’asino” is a saying with numerous equivalents in English, from Hamlet’s “Aye, there’s the rub” to “Now we come to the crunch.” Perhaps the closest in the light of Mirko’s reaction is “It’s the last straw that breaks the camel’s back.” Mirko is at first insulted by the reference to an ass, but then acknowledges that it is a hard-working and resilient creature.
11 Mirko’s “exhausting bodily suffering,; the “mulish obstinacy” of his disposition, often causing him to be taken for someone “weak-minded”; his deep-rooted perception of himself, in the family and at work, as a “beast of burden” who had to be this in order to survive and have a place for himself; his ”feeling of having been rejected and repudiated by his mother” after her pregnancy and also at the onset of puberty-adolescence, when his first movements towards individuation and autonomy had begun.
12 I owe Stefano Lussana the following observation: our conversation started to take a different turn and become more human when, “as in a dream,” I transformed Mirko’s dream of an “airplane that flies and then crashes” into the memory of the flying ass game, a game where even the smallest mistake or lapse of attention could lead one to “fall down” into defeat and humiliation.
13 More specifically, this material can be found in the fifth chapter of Psychoanalysis as a journey.
14 Racker (Citation1968) emphasizes how important it is that the analyst goes beyond what is glaringly on the surface – for example, being able to see how oftentimes, concealed beneath hatred and an oppositional attitude, there is a rejected and disallowed love.
15 Only later did the time become ripe for talking about the anal and narcissistic aspects of his behavior, dominated by obsessive attacks on linking. Had we done this before, Mirko would not have understood: he would have felt colonized by a foreign language imposing him to carry a new burden, demanding to suppress his origins and renounce his rights and his original identity (the Nazis in the “Concordi” dream).
16 This paper appeared originally in 2006 (Borgogno & Vallino, Citation2006–2013).
17 An example of this can be found in a beautiful essay by Lussana (Citation1987), who, commenting on Varda’s film Sans toit ni loi, emphasizes the “low-key, even invisible activity” the analyst should stick to while working with patients who have been severely damaged in their specificity.
18 From the Latin word “famulus,” the term “famiglio” indicates a domestic servant “adopted” by a family in exchange for odd menial jobs.
19 Through the “mediation” of Mirko’s cat, it became possible for us to start exploring his sexuality. Mirko observed how the cat’s “mamma-mamma” was quickly followed by a panting “purr-purr” that involved all the senses (smell, sight, touch, and orality), accompanied by an erection and a frenetic “attempt at mounting.” Mirko’s observation that the cat’s closeness led to an erotization on its part of its own oral satisfaction, and that hunger and sexual appetite are closely linked, opened up the opportunity in our sessions to talk about his complete inexperience in relating to women.
20 We said “two” because we had already evoked the Leaning Tower of Pisa in a previous phase of the analysis with reference to his limp.
21 Although I did maintain an analytic attitude when I thought it necessary, I considered this “extension” of our relationship exclusively in terms of a friendly and humane bond.
22 Translator’s Note: Mirko’s letter makes reference to both meanings of the Italian word “gru” (reflected by the two meanings of the English term “crane”), i.e. a wading bird and a machine used for moving heavy objects.
23 I do not think it far-fetched to suggest that this metaphor, together with the others I have mentioned above, provides apt examples of what Bion (Citation1970) called the “language of achievement.”
24 Winnicott too maintains that hate and resentment will inevitably be experienced by the caregiver: however, while the latter should not deny these feelings, they must also abstain from retaliating, making the child (or patient) pay for them (1949 [only 1947 ]). In this connection, Winnicott also believes that certain lullabies, nursery rhymes, and songs express nothing but the parents’ need to convey their hate somehow in situations where they cannot in any way act upon what they feel (Dias, Citation2016): they are, in other words, ways to “pause” the baby, put it to sleep, and thus create a moment when the parents can take a break and rest. Child analysts and psychotherapists know well that “singing” can also represent a way of “calling back to the relationship and reality” children and adolescents in the autistic spectrum – much in the way it occurred with Mirko and myself. Having said that, I cannot deny that at first, when I started doing this, I did feel a little mad just like him, even though I noticed that my singing calmed him down – seemingly giving him, by means of my own expressive and imaginative freedom, correspondingly more freedom in dealing with aspects of himself which he feared I or other people might consider mad. Ultimately, beneath much of Mirko’s madness there lay a real poetic intelligence which became accessible to him when, with my help, he became himself able to “translate it into prose.”
25 This passage sounds surprisingly as if Mirko had read (although in fact he has not) Bion’s writings on the analyst’s and the patient’s “passion” (Bion, Citation1963, Citation1977) underlying all authentic transformations (Bion, Citation1965). In Mirko’s case, the vitality of such a transformation is clearly noticeable in the extra-analytic exchanges from the last years of his treatment.
26 This style can also be observed, at an early stage of its development, in the first part of this work: the section referring to the Rimini conference, subsequently published in Gaburri, Citation1997. Alongside the paper “From co-created environment to words and personal history: transference, countertransference, and working-through in a long analysis of a deprived schizoid patient” (see Borgogno, Citation2011), this piece of writing earned me the functions of training and supervising analyst in 1995.
27 Needless to say, even though I have not quoted their works, Freud and Melanie Klein have been the “initiators” of my psychoanalytic way of thinking.
28 Translator’s Note:. Literally, “May the ‘wound’ turn into an ‘opening’ for both members of the analytic couple.” The word play “ferita” (wound)/“feritoia” (opening, loophole, embrasure) conveys the idea that a wound can turn into an aperture that will help to reach the patient, opening up towards the future and new ways of seeing.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Franco Borgogno
Franco Borgogno in an emeritus professor of clinical psychology at the University of Turin, a training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI) and of the IPA, and a former associate editor of this journal. For his work of promotion of psychoanalysis at the university he was also the recipient of the Sigourney Award (2010).