The Italian Connection Part 1

16 ..17

Coming to Spaziozero: I can confirm that the business about law 56 does not interest me period. Without fear of passing for a State supporter, I repeat what I have already said to you: the State has every right to control the conforming to the civil ideals that regulate civil co-existence. In this sense, psychotherapy is a conforming process, ergo, the State has the right to legislate psychotherapy. I say this in order to fix properly the objectives of the politics for psychoanalysis. My politics are not against a State that legislates on matters regarding conformism. I am not a revolutionary who wishes to impose conformities that are alternative to the current ones! My politics is a cultural politics. To those who are capable of thinking, I wish to announce that it is possible to think – perhaps not much, but well – outside those schemas received by tradition: binary logic – truth as adjustment, ethics as conformism to the dictates of the Super-Ego. Can you tell me how many today, even among our friends, have an interest in a programme so ‘intellectual’ (as they say with disdain)? I say this without irritation, but only with deep regret, because this means that they don’t think; and if they don’t think, it means that they have had no experience of the unconscious – which is a little pile of thoughts mostly inadequate for everyday reality. There is a nice aphorism by Brecht at the beginning of some short stories for a calendar: ‘A thinker (sic) needs few things: a little light, a little bread, a little thought’.
I conclude these untimely considerations with a political reference. Currently, a process of convergence between lacanian and non-lacanian analysts is happening in the world. This is the politics we should carry out to re-launch psychoanalysis: promote the social analytic tie, the transference of research work and the debates, such as this correspondence of ours. These is where nests the secret of the long Freudian analysis that began a century ago and that perhaps will end shortly, thanks to so many analysts who worry about things that are none of their business – psychotherapy and its laws, veterinary and perhaps the Stock Exchange – neglecting our good, old psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a secret we ourselves do not know, one on which I feel like working with the enthusiasm of an adolescent and the disenchantment of a mature man. I hope to have you among my work-mates. But I am telling you, if you go on boring me with law 56 and the ministerial commissions, you will see less and less of me at the meetings of Spaziozero.
Komischerweise I started off with the intent of writing a dialectically well-argued letter, and, instead, what has emerged is a very personal (personlich) letter. My teacher of German would reproach me, but I hope that you will not take it in the pathetic sense.

With affection,
Antonello