The Italian Connection Part 2

10 ..16

As far as I can see, all psychotherapists have rushed to register on their list, and others can’t wait to do so. On the side of the analysts, some (not many) have shown a comprehensible reluctance to enlist under the flagship that calls to the wild. But, I ask myself, why should these few obstruct the many who, coherently, tend towards what their nature has shown as being the Supreme Good – subjugation not to the unconscious, but to the discourse of the master? Is it a challenge? If so, what has psychoanalysis to do with it? Why do you want to use the good name of psychoanalysis to prevent people from achieving what they believe is good for them? Because it isn’t good? But they don’t know that. Let them kid themselves. Or are you less tolerant than I am? Can you not tolerate the ignorance of others? In analysis, I have been working with (against?) the will not to know for twenty-five years.
And now I come to more painful notes: what use can we make of Spaziozero? Spaziozero is called to take a political position otherwise it will soon disappear. This will not be easy, because in this movement there are three theoretical souls that, somehow, correspond to the Platonic ones: the vegetative, the animal, and the intellectual. Cold and mechanical, the vegetative germinates in Baldini, who wants a scientific psychoanalysis without a subject, teachable in some private university that is run by a rector (2). Noble and passionate, the animal soul resides in those who believe that psychoanalysis is the ideal apex of psychotherapy. For these, among which I see wandering you restless shadow, the truth of psychotherapy is not the State – as I have said – but psychoanalysis itself. This is a bedazzlement generated by political passion, which does not escape to the analysis of the intellectual soul. For this soul, analysis is an endeavour that reforms the intellect, with no other aim than that of leading the subject to the Freudian Urteilsverwerfung, the ethical operation of a revision of the judgement concerning the removed desire – an operation that is useless to the powerful, and rarely belongs to the conforming psychotherapeutic programmes.
Not many sustain this ethical and theoretical position. Nevertheless, a few can be found, for example, in the psychoanalytic association known as APLI, Istituto Per la Formazione Teorica Permanente (3). I know that you are not keen on psychoanalytic associations, and in many ways I would agree with you. They are either bureaucratic Churches, or Mafia gangs. If I waste my time in a psychoanalytic association, is because I believe that I can get out of a binary logic that ‘conforms’ the Ego to the Super-Ego – the miserly fruits that the by now secular history of the analytical movement has made us taste. Naturally, I do not have a well-defined programme in my head, other than to commit myself to the political enterprise. I only need the few principles I have mentioned to you, and a few realities concerning the reform of the social bond between analysts. Did Freud have the whole of psychoanalysis in his head when he abandoned hypnosis (still, unfortunately, he did have the IPA in his head)?
Dear Ettore, yes, let us abandon the hypnosis of psychotherapy. Let us abandon it to its destiny, and let us get back onto Freud’s path. This is intellectually far more stimulating, and politically even more rewarding.

Bye bye,
Antonello.