Abstract
At first glance, it is easy to see that the structure of the text the author has given us follows Aristotelian rules. The rhetoric that unfolds in the narrative seems to obey the tripartite rhythm that for Aristotle characterizes the literary function: peripeteia (peripatheia) or the tragic passage of the protagonist from a positive to a negative state, suffering (pathos), and recognition (agnorisis). Let’s see.
Peripatheia
Lulu’s family photo, as it emerges from the anamnestic history, is as if torn into several pieces. The pieces were then reassembled in the frame of a display, but without hiding the lines of fracture. They are held together by the pressure of the glass, which itself is cracked in several places. As in a dramatic play of mirrors, the cuts Lulu makes on her skin perhaps serve to symbolize and thus bring to light those cuts that would otherwise remain in the darkness of the unknown and unspoken, condemned to incurability. From this point of view, one’s own emotional body (i.e., the whole fabric of affective relations that make it up) and the emotional body of the family are in a metonymic relationship (i.e., part for the whole).
The sociocultural differences between the parents (“different sociopolitical spheres” and “economic disparities”) and the tensions associated with them represent one cut; the division between the families of origin represent another cut; the “racial conflict” reflected in the attention to the nuances of skin color, a third cut; the migration from South America to the United States at the age of 4, another cut; the quarrels over the quinceañera: still more cuts.
In the background, then, is the pandemic, which I would read not only as a fact of reality that has atomized relationships between people (hence the need for video sessions during the first year), but also as a figure of the emotional situation at the beginning of the treatment, marked by the concrete and metaphorical risk of mutual “contagion.” Instead, the mutual “infection” (Civitarese 2022), understood as the capacity for emotional attunement, seems to have coincided with the analytic couple’s growing ability to play—with chess, singing, and telling each other about TV series characters.
These “playful” activities represented a bonding function, one of mutual recognition, where the weight of the trauma is resignified in a fictional or dreamlike dimension. If we allow ourselves to extend this view of ours, all the “cuts” and tensions already reported, as well as the moments of sharing, would only be an “internal” or centripetal allegorical narrative, that is, concerning the vicissitudes of the cure itself; this time: the emotional body of the analytic field.
Pathos
In the first session, the analyst is very careful to mirror Lulu with brief comments that either caption the frame of the “film” being told or catch the salient emotion of a scene. In a couple of hints, he barely accentuates the interpretative pressure by bringing attention to himself as a possible object of transference, when he says, “Including me,” and then “I’m not helping.” After the first comment, Lulu furiously responds that she has thought of “cutting herself off” so as not to have to suffer the maddening weight of the family reunion, like an animal caught in a snare. We could also read it as a reaction to the pressure in the session—the image of the “pool of blood” is dramatic. With respect to a girl who is already so fragmented, we could then ask ourselves whether these minimal increases in pressure might not in any case be difficult to tolerate, as it is also inevitable that it happens, and in fact configure those cuts that I metaphorized above with the image of the picture, but which in fact cannot be seen.
In any case, what can be deduced is that the analyst reads his own emotional states as projective identifications of the patient (“I wonder how fully I received the intensity of her distress”) and is therefore quite in touch with her. The general mood of the session is one of discouragement, anger, and confusion (“mess” × 5!). But here the real wound is like that of someone bleeding into their own tissues from a hemorrhagic shock. This is the image Bion (1970) used to represent psychotic panic: a situation in which the violent explosion of self fragments through projective identification finds no space to contain them, only an infinite space. One can catch hints of the cruel superego that is mobilized on these occasions via the characters of “priest,” “church,” “angry priest,” “racist relatives,” “spotlighted” (as from the police lighthouse), and the catastrophic solution of burning down the church or blowing everything up with a bomb (this is the first occurrence of the word in the text). In short, the final scene of Antonioni’s (1970) Zabriskie Point.
In the field perspective of “we,” (Civitarese 2023, 2024) everything I have just said would be not only Lulu’s metaphoric-oneiric narrative of climatic transformations in session, but also the analyst’s. We can use this point of view, which considers virtually every “fact” of analysis to be cocreated, because we have the notion of a shared or relational unconscious—How could one know what is on the unconscious level of one and what and of the other? It is as if it were an alpha function common to the small group of two, charged with transforming raw beta or sensory elements into alpha elements, now culturalized and therefore humanly meaningful.
Reformulated from this point of view, the phrase would be “We both sometimes feel in the darkest confusion, and we would like to blow it all up.” Listening in this way, the analyst would be obliged to also take responsibility for emotions and affects that he would otherwise attribute only to Lulu.
Agnorisis
In the second session we witness a surprising reversal of climate. After the “prologue” of Lulu’s story and the “first act” of the first session, it is as if we had stepped out of Hamlet and into Midsummer’s Night Dream. The change is so abrupt that it is almost impossible not to conjecture that the couple is engaged in a manic denial of all the pain represented thus far in the theatre of analysis by the image of the “pool of blood.” The fact is that, compared with the previous session, there are no interpretive cuts, that is, interventions aimed at diverting attention to how Lulu sees the analyst. On the contrary, both participate in a dance that seems to leave them in good spirits and hopeful.
But there is one problem.
The song they sing all the time is the one sung by the bomba orchestra. And the two of them play for a long time, mispronouncing this word and giving it rhythm. The question inevitably arises: Could all this fun, while dancing on a minefield, be nothing more than the pressure of the glass on the pieces of the torn photograph? At one point, it also seems to be the analyst’s intuition when he says, “There’s something you don’t want me to see.” Again, the theoretical/technical question arises: “You” or “we”? It would become “There’s something we don’t want us to see.” As a matter of fact, the last image of the session is of Lulu joking with an orchestra guy and almost throwing up.
My usual view is that any material that is chosen to be supervised or simply published always contains a fragment of a nightmare. Each time, the demand posed to the other is to be helped to dream again. Now, dreaming has always been the method of psychoanalysis, from Freud on. The changes concern only the extension of the modes of dreaming, from representation to feeling and then to action, and the extension of the analyst’s degree of unconscious participation in the process. But what might be a way—I mean, a theoretical-technical device—to rethink what has been said so far from the standpoint of a radical adoption of the dream perspective, that is, of valuing the hypothetical unconscious meaning of whatever is said in the analytic conversation?
In the movie of Lulu’s life, as I said, the cuts we described at the beginning are simultaneously many clips of scenes from the “analysis.” In order to get a better look at the first movie, we now have to turn it into a second movie that is instead about the three years of therapy. The cuts in Lulu’s story (out there and then) seem to clash with the obvious adherence to the treatment project, with the continuity maintained thanks to the long-distance sessions, and with the atmosphere of play and intimacy that we can easily imagine. Therefore, it seems counterintuitive to hypothetically refer to them as “cuts” in the here and now of the sessions. But to avoid yet another cut (splitting), we must instead think of them in this light as well, that is, as the oneiric-metaphorical representation of possible cuts that carve into the body of the setting and the therapeutic relationship.
A detail that struck me, or rather a detail of the story that I treat as a possible figure of the analysis, is the description of Lulu who in the face of her mother’s depression becomes “uncommonly well behaved.” The immediate association was with the sociopathic children Winnicott talks about, who make themselves hated precisely when they discover that someone cares for them, and who in this way try to break out of the false self. If we think about it, becoming “uncommonly well behaved” is the reverse process of coming out of a false self. Indeed, on the litmus test, that is, “redreamed” in session, or transformed into a dream shared by the couple (Ferro 2008), this episode would hypothetically be seen as a possible expression of a quality belonging to the therapeutic relationship, that is, the way the analyst and the patient could relate to each other under the sign of a certain complacency (“a model student”).
Similarly, the cuts in the two allusions to transference, which I read earlier in the relational key of who does what to whom and what is the conscious and unconscious response, now would read as “Sometimes we get superficial cuts in the skin,” or “Sometimes we sing songs like nursery rhymes but with awful content, and this helps us to contain these scary things.”
In the end it is as if the analyst gives up soliciting content, and instead indulges in the song and dance of which Meltzer speaks. The text of the session takes on an almost performative character. We almost see them dance and sing, the text itself sings and dances. Positive expressions of joy multiply (fun × 5!), even though the empanadas were a disappointment and the relatives from Miami (the [Tu] Mi-ami = You-love-me “haters”) look haughty.
So, it is true, we cannot ignore that dance and song have an explosive rhythm and sing the bomb. This leads us to speculate that there may be some collusion going on, which is aimed at denying psychic pain. But what we also witness here, and this is an ambiguity that must be tolerated as long as it takes, is the rebirth of both individual subjectivities of patient and analyst through at-on-ment in the aesthetic medium of song and dance.
This is particularly important because, paraphrasing Bion, we can say that you can sing the words that say “bomb” but not the real bombs (the traumas suffered but not experienced, as explained by Winnicott 1974). Seeking to be born is something we do all our lives; we never stop being born or growing psychically. But, in order to do this, abstract understanding (singing the potatoes or transformation in K/knowledge is not enough; we also need to “eat potatoes,” i.e., to go through lived experience, where sensations and emotions are involved). Paradoxically said, the body has to “psychically” grow, engaging intersubjectively in a nonverbal way, as it happens in the mother-infant relationship.
Again, if we accept this truth, we must conclude that our primary focus should be on the quality of the bond (or therapeutic relationship) in the here and now. Consequently, we need to develop what seem to us to be the most effective tools for learning as much about it as possible. My suggestion here, of course, is to use the we perspective or field lens.
In a 1975 song by Antonello Venditti, a popular Italian singer, the refrain goes “Bomb or no bomb . . . we’ll get to Rome.” 1 This is usually interpreted as an expression of resilience and confidence in the possibility of dodging destructive events, and thus reaching Rome (its palindrome is “amor” [in Latin: love] is the most beautiful name). Here, it seems to me, it is as if the couple manages to say terrible things to each other, by having structured a formal-aesthetic container that is sufficiently solid. Through this they are able to—or maybe better, this container allows them—to transform Lulu’s shame-related anger at being called “Bonbón” by her mother.
In this way, all the painful differences that have been expressed in the session as so many “cuts” and that I mentioned at the beginning, can be transformed into bonds of warmth and tenderness. I would not see the new intimacy that the couple has been able to conquer as defense or repair, but rather as creativity. By recognizing or “existing” each other, both patient and analyst become more true and real.
Footnotes
1
“E bomba o non bomba, noi, arriveremo a Roma.” But an earlier verse said, “E fu a Bologna che scoppiò la prima bomba” (“And it was in Bologna that the first bomb went off”), as tragically happened five years later.