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From Sciacchitano to Perrella
Milan, 27th September 1997
Dear Ettore,
I know you are very engaged with Spaziozero, but I take advantage of your delayed reply to request from you a consultation on Paul. Don’t be surprised. As you may not imagine, I have had a Catholic upbringing. The apex of my religious formation, which today is the basis of my atheism, is that faith is born out of charity. Otherwise said, for me, God is unconscious, but is also an evident effect of the social relation. With regard to this, I am writing to ask you for a good translation from Greek of Corinthians I, 13, 13. The German and French versions are a little different from each other. The Bible de Jérusalem says: ‘La foi, l’espérance et la charité demeurent tous les trois, mais la plus grande d’entre elles, c’est la charité’. More romantically, the Einheitsübersetzung translates: ‘Fürjetzt bleiben Glaube, Hoffnung und Liebe (sic), diese drei; docham größten unter ihnen ist die Liebe’.
I think that this citation by Paul is pertinent, and very relevant, to our debate. Psychoanalysis makes its apparition (in the sense of an Epiphany), in a way that can be judged, in the social bond between analysts and non-analysts. Therefore, a politics of psychoanalysis cannot act correctly, unless it passes through the renewal of the social bond between us – the Greeks’ metanoia. If one wishes to reform psychoanalysis, this bond, too, is in need of reformation. The rest – commissions, laws, Ministerial departments – is needed, but is secondary to the politics of psychoanalysis. To say it with Freud, the primary process remains the social bond between us. I say this because it seems to me that, among us, the interest in the social bond has been relegated to a secondary plane, and, instead, the false question about psychotherapeutic formation has been brought to the most prominent plane. Therefore, whatever remains of my Catholic formation becomes disquieted.
I wait for your opinion and wish you a good weekend,
Antonello
From Perrella to Sciacchitano
Padua, 29th September 1997
Dear Antonello,
Your letter dated 27th September makes me think that, when you wrote it, you had not received my reply of the 24th, which I had also sent to you. I shall not spend much time talking about yesterday’s meeting of the Council of Spaziozero. It went very well, as I imagine Contardi will have already told you. In any case, the important aspect is that the turn – suggested by you in your ‘Pauline’ letter, and by me in my intervention at this meeting – seems a worthwhile attempt to everyone. Spaziozero must become a truly political movement, and, for this to happen, I think we need to deal with the points on which our opinions diverge – because, as all divergent things, although divergent these are also convergent.