15 ..16
Galli also wants to publish our correspondence in Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane… Now we must really render our letters publishable… Sort yours out and I shall also do the same with mine. Soon, I will send my text on the ‘One’ to Rovatti (1).
Now, let’s come to St Paul. I did not have a Catholic upbringing, which gives me the option of thinking that I am not an atheist. Literally translated, the text you have sent me sounds like this: ‘But for now [nynì] there remains [ménei] fedelity, hope, and love [agápe], these three: but the greatest among these is love’. Some linguistic considerations: nynì is the time of waiting for revelation (apokálypsis), thanks to which it will be possible to see the divine directly. It is no longer for speculum in aenigmate. It is the present for the hopeful and anticipating waiting of revelation. The anticipation of revelation has the triple form of that which remains – triply insisting (the three ‘theological virtues’). The Greek pístis, as the Latin fides, means fidelity before meaning faith. Belief has nothing to do with it. What it has to do with is fidelity to the alliance, that is to say, to the Word and to Logos, which is its initiator. Hope is the openness to the advent of revelation (that is, of the return of Logos in judgement), whereas agape is most certainly love. ‘Charity’ is a completely nonsensical translation. In Greece, even today, to say ‘I love you’ to a lover one says s’agapò. The three virtues have a verb in the singular tense, which could also be sustained in anticipation by the neutral plural (‘these three things’). Grammatically, however, this seems to me sustained by each one of these three, as if all three were only one thing (that is why, earlier, I made reference to their triadic relation).
I hope that these hurried notes are helpful. In any case, I welcome your Catholic upbringing. At last I have found someone who has understood that the problem of psychoanalytic transmission can only be resolved on the higher plane of love. This plane is truly so high that we all would rather take it as a metaphor, whereas it is the very matter of our lives.
See you soon,
Ettore
(1) Italian philosopher and editor of out-out. Head of the philosophy department at the University of Trieste. Has an interest in the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis. Widely published in Italian.
Reply from Franco Baldini
Milan, 2nd December 1998
In the series of letters exchanged between Antonello Sciacchitano and Ettore Parella, widely published in the journals Scibbolet and Arché, as well as on the web, Sciacchitano makes erroneous references to me on two occasions.
In his letter dated 2nd July 1997, Sciacchitano writes:
‘The thesis A (to which, I think, Baldini also subscribes) holds that the State cannot regulate psychotherapy just as it cannot regulate any other process of subjective formation, which has to occur in full freedom.’