Greek Chorus and the Tactful Therapist

ABSTRACT

The article explores the metaphor of the “Greek chorus” as an image of the position of the analyst who, in the analytic field model, reverberates and returns the emotional content, sometimes slightly modified, so that the patient can listen to his or her own voice and enact a movement of transformation. That of the chorus, a voice made up of several voices, is also an antimoralistic, non-superegoic position, in which the analyst recognizes that he/she can accommodate the most diverse perspectives, emotions, and thus emotional truths that belong to the human. The authors show the relationship of their model to tragedy and, through clinical vignettes of both adults and children, they illustrate the technique of the analytic field in the light of this metaphor. The chorus corresponds to the we, to the overcoming of the I/you split made possible by interpretation. The analyst’s interventions give voice the chorus he/she creates together with the patient.

KEYWORDS:

• Drama
• chorus
• dream
• comment
• interpretation
• tact

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ “Three times I tried there to wrap my arms around his neck, Three times his ghost fled the empty closure of my hands, Something like a blowing breeze or a flying dream” (Odyssey 11, 206–208).

² See: Civitarese (2008), Civitarese and Ferro (2020), Civitarese (2021, 2022); Civitarese and Ferro (2020), Civitarese and Ferro (2022).

³ We all know his playful sonnet “Vowels:” A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels/Someday I’ll talk about your secret birth-cries,/A, black velvet jacket of brilliant flies/That buzz around the stenches of the cruel,/Gulfs of shadow: E, candor of mists, of tents,/Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of parsley:/I, purples, bloody salivas, smiles of the lonely/With lips of anger or drunk with penitence:/U, waves, divine shudders of viridian seas,/Peace of pastures, cattle-filled, peace of furrows/Formed on broad studious brows by alchemy:/O, supreme Clarion, full of strange stridencies,/Silences crossed by worlds and by Angels:/O, the Omega, violet ray of her [or his] Eyes!

(English translation by A.S. Kline in 2003. Rimbaud, Selected poems. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/31Vz8WV).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giuseppe Civitarese

Giuseppe Civitarese, M.D., Ph.D., is a psychiatrist and training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), and a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) and of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). He has been the recipient of the 2022 Sigourney Award. He lives and is in private practice in Pavia, Italy. Among his latest books are: Sublime Subjects: Aesthetic Experience and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis, London 2018; Psychoanalytic Field Theory: A Contemporary Introduction, London 2022; The Hour of Birth: Psychoanalysis of the Sublime and Contemporary Art, London 2023, in press.

Sara Boffito

Sara Boffito, Psy.D., is a psychoanalyst, Member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), and of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), and IPA expert in Child and Adolescent psychoanalysis. She works in Milan with children, adolescents, and adults. She is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She is also member of the editorial board of Rivista di Psicoanalisi (Journal of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society) and of the COWAP IPA Book Series (Routledge) editorial board. She published papers in international journals, collective volumes — among the latest “The Mule and the Dancer: Freud, Moses and the Dilemma of the Hybrid” in On Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism”, edited by Lawrence J. Brown (Routledge 2022) — and presented at international conferences. She has also translated foundational English-language psychoanalytic authors such as Melanie Klein, Thomas Ogden, Nina Coltart, and Dana Birksted-Breen into Italian.