Economics, talent of thinking

How to distinguish psychotherapies from psychoanalysis.

Original painting by Stefano Frassetto (2)

“…And well before my thinking, hesitating when coming into times and shapes, could identify my home putting side by side circumstances, he – my body – already was remembering for each one of them the model of bed, where the doors stayed, to where the windows were looking at, the presence of a corridor…”(3)

It was an exciting intuition, in Proust, but suddenly slipped into a melencholic description and then seducing, i.e. without any real lack – or, in freudian terms without any ‘mourning’ : but exciting is still that memory of inhabitated spaces, maybe his experienced volumes and the presence of that experience first of all in our night dreams, and elsewhere.

When listening at music, for example is its rithm able to move something that our mind, not just our body, could have sometimes removed ? That is why music become a specific, deep emotional experience, even tested  to amnesia and dementia (4).

Amnesias infact are specific for conscient thinking, while unconscious can’t suffer from them : and also his competence still remains in catching reality, even just a flash as the lack of only a past time is what the patients claim (5).

In moving diseases too, patients claim to be submitted to some obscure authomatism, without realizing who is the author for that : it can be seen as a paradox but learning a few musical sequences involving the body can make a good distance from the repetitivity of unintentional movements and check them. (6)

By a different way from night dream – as there aren’t any clear masking of our oneiric activity – music, or what a musical hearing moves in a subject, shows a hidden powerful reality that conscience can’t explain, confirming then the insufficience of the traditional term ‘destiny’.

A musical rithm can sweep away any mask to our unconscious, while conscience believes to separate and keep silent : but the coming back to surface that unconscious can act, as indefinitely going on to rule the body itself, suddenly happens as far as music is concerned. “Power of music, both as a  joy and a catharsis, has to get to you suddenly…” (7) To do what, then ?

Why geting suddenly to someone?

Freud, who could play piano and liked Mozart, tried to compare musical hearing experience with the visible ones (8): “Art works deeply influence me, especially literature and plastic arts, less often painting. I’ve been induced then to remain more time in front of them when I had the opportunity, with the personal aim to know them my way, i.e. to realize their own way to produce their effects. When I’m not be successful in that – as far as music is concerned, for example – I’m almost unable to feel pleasure at all…”

It is a conspicuous text on individual authority, when thinking happens to be exposed to debilitation, i.e. a separation between emotion and intellectual : but Freud had already abandoned hypnosis as he did learn by the neurologist Charcot in neurosis treatment, because Freud believed it a way submit the patient.

Taking distance from psychotherapies – which prove to be umpowerful in front of an unpredictable but induced aggressivity of unconscious – psychoanalysis would definitely be oriented as “…an alternative for claim, ‘sui iuris’ e non ‘iuris’” (9). 

Just three years before, in 1910, Freud accepted to meet the musician and composer Gustav Mahler, who was at that time seriously distressed. Mahler claimed that conversation with Freud, but also retracted a number of times their meeting : the ‘First Symphonia’ of 1889, maybe his most representative work known as ‘The Titan’, does get a risky and cruel meeting with the deep anxiety, which psychoanalysis avoids at all as a working method, by assuming any means available.

“Thanks to unconscious our body does experience new ways, that is new items… Analytical work is proposed to each subject as the opportunity for unconscious – made to be successful but previously failured – to be chosen again by the subject to be successful at last”. (10)

                                        Marina Bilotta Membretti, Cernusco sul Naviglio April 23, 2021

[1] Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) has been physician and teacher of ‘Neurology and Psychiatry’ at University in U.S.A. He issued  ‘Risvegli’ (1973), ‘L’uomo che scambiò sua moglie per un cappello’ (1985), ‘Musicofilia’ (2007) and others. ‘Ogni cosa al suo posto’ (2019) has been edited after his death. 

[2] Stefano Frassetto is born in Turin in 1968. After his degree in Architecture at ‘Politecnico’ he begun as graphic novelist for local magazines. In the ‘90s he edited in France, on ‘Le Réverbère’ and on ‘Libération’ : then he created ‘Ippo’ for ‘Il Giornalino’ and then the stripe ‘35MQ’ for the swiss magazine ‘20 Minuti’. In 2000 he came into ‘La Stampa’ newspaper as portraitist for cultural page and the insert ‘Tuttolibri’, then for the weekly ‘Origami’. Today he works also for the swiss magazine ‘Le Temps’.

[3] ‘Alla ricerca del tempo perduto. I/ Dalla parte di Swann’, Marcel Proust (1913) by L.De Maria - Oscar Mondadori 2017, Translat. by G. Raboni, p.6 

[4]‘Musicofilia’, Oliver Sacks (2009) Adelphi Edizioni Spa, pp.357-358.

[5] ‘Musicofilia’, Oliver Sacks (2009) Adelphi Edizioni Spa, pp.241-244.

[6] ‘Musicofilia’, Oliver Sacks (2009) Adelphi Edizioni Spa, p.287; p. 324-325.

[7] ‘Musicofilia’, Oliver Sacks (2009) Adelphi Edizioni Spa, p.377 

[8] ‘Il Mosè di Michelangelo’, Sigmund Freud (1913), ‘Premessa’ pp.17-18/ Biblioteca Bollati Boringhieri 1976. 

[9] ‘Lavoro dell’inconscio e lavoro psicoanalitico’, Giacomo B. Contri (1985) Ed. SIPIEL Milano, Collana ‘SIC - Il lavoro psicoanalitico’, p.12

[10] ‘Lavoro dell’inconscio e lavoro psicoanalitico’, Giacomo B. Contri (1985) Ed. SIPIEL Milano, Collana ‘SIC-  Il lavoro psicoanalitico’, p.28

 https://youtu.be/ZS6muBIjvpg 

“My name is Marina Bilotta Membretti. I’m graduated in Economics and I work in industry since forty years. I’m editor of www.tutorsalus.net which in Latin language is who cares of one’s own well-being, primary human safeguard, but so often removed.

TutorSalus.net is also an European registered brand for online publishing. I’d like to share the empowerment for individuals, and then society, of a proper and primary safeguard, that is a proper sanction – rewarding or not – to any offer we receive : it seems difficult among people all over the times, and expecially in authoritarian communities, as cultural habits freeze any sanction – beginning from the new-born babies – and feed resentful gradges up to encouraging aggression and violence. We can then see profitable to get in touch with people who are successful in keeping each other able to evaluate and communicate their own thinking really, to whom offering, and not just in words.

Digital culture can even improve ‘ad hoc’ sanctions, but after amending an ancient mistake. It’s not just a responsibility for institutions, as any slightest relation can be corrupted when the urge for pleasure does compel a conservative, or on the opposite, a rising reaction instead of favouring a well thought solution.”

                                         Bilotta Membretti, Cernusco sul Naviglio 19 marzo 2021

A ‘transference’ that is not.

In the picture, my first school book, “Roselline”[1] in a very recent edition : a patient, enjoyed work when children can discover unpredictable details in a drawing, or text, or even a speech.

In 1910, during the 'Psychoanalysis Congress' in Nuremberg Sigmund Freud explained an affection as far as an analyst is concerned, when meeting and listening to the patient : Freud used the same term 'übertragung', but giving it an opposite direction.

‘Gegenübertragung’ was then the name of an item, the ‘counter-transference’, by means of which an analyst could stand side by side to his patient pathology being aware of it but without been catched : any neurosis infact, if also silent, is quite a a virus and not sensitive to medicines. Editing the Cases was to Freud an opportunity to point the profitability other than the conspicuous labour for the analyst, to work on his own life experience.

Jacques Lacan did not add much more, on that rough ground and staying at a distance : his formal defence of the ‘language’ even exposed it to an almost behavioral method, which can favour a mind-laziness in patients, also strengthening their inhibitions.

Just in a few words[2] Lacan says about an unpredictable and well accepted fall of pathological repetition, which previously was hiding an individual competence : that was also a professional experience in Freud.

However it is only in “Il pensiero di natura”[3] that the appointment between patient and analyst comes out from a mystical and obscure ‘transference’, accepting the elaboration itself between two conscious partners in well different positions : without the availability to one’s own competence, no work can proceed, neither analytical work and its rules[4].

Mainly, the availability to be recalled by competence makes unuseful ‘transference’ or ‘counter-transference’ as rejecting work, neither of the patient nor of the analyst.

Without this (technical ?) passage, a coming back to ‘transference’ is just a risky regress and obstacles indeed any individual cure.

                                                  Marina Bilotta Membretti, Cernusco sul Naviglio March 10, 2021.

[1] “Roselline. Per muovere i primi passi nel disegno”, Rosella Banzi Monti – Edizioni Larus Srl.

[2] “Il rovescio della psicoanalisi – Il seminario Libro XVII. Jacques Lacan”, by Jacques-Alain Miller – Antonio Di Ciaccia, Giulio Einaudi editore Spa (2001).

[3] “Il pensiero di natura. Dalla psicoanalisi al pensiero giuridico”, Giacomo B. Contri (1994 e 1998) SIC Edizioni.

[4] “La formazione dello psicoanalista”, Giacomo B. Contri in ‘THINK!’ 2014, May 10-11, 12, 15, 17-18, 19, 21.

“Kant with Sade”[1], by Jacques Lacan.

Original painting by Stefano Frassetto[2].

The unconscious Freud opened does conceive ‘memory’ rather than ‘imagination’[3] : here it is the most interesting conclusion Lacan offers to Freud and maybe hinge of his own analytical resumption, as the conscience has been built on thinking representations, instead of being a constituent of human nature, and the ‘object’ itself being built[4] and not set up.

“Kant with Sade” was published seven years after the “Seminar on ‘The stolen letter’” where Jacques Lacan was noting that maybe, as Freud did put forward, a ‘repetition automatism’ could be present, in which – still by Lacan – the language would bring in the possibility of subtraction[5] up to the betraying of memory[6].

Any not allowed discomfort of a betrayed memory does open to the disease[7] and Lacan can well assert : “You are well in evil or, if you like, the eternal feminine cannot draw upward…”[8], where ‘feminine’ is not ‘female’ and the despising sound does beat the hearing though written, so burying any individual difference beginning to sexes[9].

Just a simple subtraction to our memory – in the very accounting terms, other than economical – is then a real lie, or better a ‘slander’[10] – says Lacan – towards our own memory, maybe not yet distinguished or singled out : but that opens to a generalized untruthful thinking, as ‘de Sade’ can propose ‘a republic’ where ‘the slander’ is rising to virtue. On the other hand, can we ask naive peple for making a judgement ?

“Let us limit ourselves to come back, just to assert his prospect, to the theory by which de Sade has established the kingdom of his own principle. The one of human rights. That is : no one man, due to the sole fact he cannot at all be property, or prerogative of another man or woman, could therefore demand to suspend the right of anyone to enjoy himself – or herself - each one to his own, or her, liking.”[11]

“(Kant’s – editor’s note) moral law is not then representing the desire when, not the subject but the object  fails ?”[12]

“It emerges that sadic people deny the life of people themselves.“[13]

A memory betrayed, lost his or her own sense of direction, can go mad : so that is asking for a pilot, even if outside and unrelated. And here it is the overturning by ‘de Sade’, which Kant theory made practicable indeed, turning at that point[14].

“…Non bisogna dire piuttosto che il sadico rigetta nell’Altro il dolore di esistere, ma senza vedere che per questa via egli si muta in un ‘oggetto eterno’… ?”[15]  

“In Sade we can see a test, crucial in our eyes, when he rejects the death penalty… Sade then stopped here, just where the desire link with the (individual – editor’s note) law… The apology of crime only pushes him to confess just sideways the Law. The Supreme Being has been re-established in the Evil”.[16] So what ?

But here Lacan lets that any imprudent reader can venture among the brambles of a deadly research, going away – even dizzily but as he himself, or she herself likes – from that ‘fundamental link from memory to (individual – editor’s note) law’ which the ‘removal’ denies, and denies.

                                Marina Bilotta Membretti, Cernusco sul Naviglio - February 12, 2021

[1] “This writing had to serve as a preface to ‘La Philosophie dans le boudoir’. It has been appearing in the magazine ‘Critique’ (n.191, April 1963), like a report of the edition of works by Sade to whom was addressed. Ed. du Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1963, 15 voll”, in “Kant con Sade” p.764 in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’ Vol.II, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a. 1974 e 2002, ‘Biblioteca Einaudi’. Titolo originale : ‘Écrits’ (1966) ‘Éditions du Seuil’, Paris.

[2] Stefano Frassetto is born in Turin in 1968. After his degree in Architecture at ‘Politecnico’ he begun as graphic novelist for local magazines. In the ‘90s he edited in France, on ‘Le Réverbère’ and on ‘Libération’ : then he created ‘Ippo’ for ‘Il Giornalino’ and then the stripe ‘35MQ’ for the swiss magazine ‘20 Minuti’. In 2000 he came into ‘La Stampa’ newspaper as portraitist for cultural page and the insert ‘Tuttolibri’, then for the weekly ‘Origami’. Today he works also for the swiss magazine ‘Le Temps’.

[3] “The repetition automatism (Wiederholungszwang) – notwithstanding its notion in that work is addressed to meet a few paradoxes in the clinic, like the dreams in the traumatic neurosis or the negative therapeutic reaction – couldn’t be conceived as an addition, even crowning, the whole doctrinal building. Here it is Freud inaugural discovery : that is a conceiving memory envolving one’s own unconscious.”, p.42 “Il Seminario su ‘La lettera rubata’” in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’ Vol.I, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri/ ‘Biblioteca Einaudi’ - Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a. (1974 e 2002).

[4] “Some voice phenomena, particularly those ones in psychosis, have precisely this aspect of the ‘object’…” p.772 in “Kant con Sade”, in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’ Vol.II, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri/ ‘Biblioteca Einaudi’ - Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a. (1974, 2002).

[5] “We can see here again (in ‘Critica alla Ragion pratica’ di Kant – editor’s note) what can lead Kant to express regret that no intuition can offer a phenomenal object to the experience of the moral law. We agree that along all the ‘Critica’ this object does escape. But you can hit it in the trace left by the relentless coherence Kant is using in demonstrating its escaping…”, p.767 in “Kant con Sade”, in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’ Vol.II, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri/ ‘Biblioteca Einaudi’ - Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a. (1974, 2002).

[6] “…A structure, even if still transparent to its data, shows then the fundamental link of memory with (individua - editor’s note) law”, p.45 “Il Seminario su ‘La lettera rubata’” in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’ Vol.I, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri/ ‘Biblioteca Einaudi’ - Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a. (1974, 2002).

[7] “ ‘La Filosofia nel boudoir’ (‘Marchese de Sade’ – editor’s note) arrives eight years after the ‘Critica della ragion pratica’ (Immanuel Kant – editor’s note)… We can say that the vigour of factum comes from the saying proposing its  rule to the jouissance, unusual in terms of law in the habit of Kant, as that is asking itself as a rule. Let us state the saying : ‘I’ve the right to enjoy your body, anyone can tell me, and that right I’ll exercise without any limit can stop me in the caprice of the collections I can have the pleasure of satisfying’. Here it is the rule to which they pretend to submit everyone will, as little as a society can make it effective with their restrictions…”, p.765 - 768 in “Kant con Sade”, ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’ Vol.II, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri/ ‘Biblioteca Einaudi’ - Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a. (1974, 2002).

[8] p.765 and a little further, p.788 “…the work never offers to us the success of a seduction where its spectre could as well find a crowning : the one (seduction – editor’s note) to which the victim… would agree with his/her torturer, or would enlist on his/her side due to a burst in the approval.”in “Kant con Sade”, in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’ Vol.II, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri/ ‘Biblioteca Einaudi’ - Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a. (1974, 2002).

[9] ‘La questione economica del masochismo’, S.Freud (1924) OSF Bollati Boringhieri (2012) Vol.10 p.7-8 : “I’ve named it ‘feminine’ even if many of its elements defers to childhood life…”

[10] “From Sade’s point of view you are anyway on the same side, good and bad; the insults couldn’t change anything… You need a firm heart to follow Sade when he extols slander, first article of the morality to be established in his republic”, p.788 in “Kant con Sade”, in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’ Vol.II, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri/ ‘Biblioteca Einaudi’ - Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a. (1974, 2002).

[11] p.770 in “Kant con Sade”, in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’ Vol.II, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri/ ‘Biblioteca Einaudi’ - Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a. (1974, 2002).

[12] p.781 in “Kant con Sade”, in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’ Vol.II, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri/ ‘Biblioteca Einaudi’ - Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a. (1974, 2002).

[13] p.778 in “Kant con Sade”, in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’ Vol.II, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri/ ‘Biblioteca Einaudi’ - Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a. (1974, 2002).

[14] “If Freud could assert ‘his’ principle of pleasure without even caring to outline what distinguishes it from its function in the tradizional ethics, … echoing to the undisputed prejudice of two millennia, to remember the appeal prearrangingthe creature to his/her benefit with psychology which enrols itself in a few myths of indulgence, we can only be grateful to the slipping rising, through the XIX century, of the item of ‘happiness in evil’. Here Sade is the inaugural step of an overturning of which, strange as it may seem if we compare it to the coldness of the man, Kant is the turning point and, as far as we know, never identified before.”, p.764-765 in “Kant con Sade”, in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’ Vol.II, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri/ ‘Biblioteca Einaudi’ - Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a. (1974, 2002).

[15] p.778 in “Kant con Sade”, in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’ Vol.II, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri/ ‘Biblioteca Einaudi’ - Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a. (1974, 2002).

[16] p.790 in “Kant con Sade”, in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’ Vol.II, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri/ ‘Biblioteca Einaudi’ - Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a. (1974, 2002).

Eros without body[1] ?

Original painting by Jacopo Ricci[2] and an excellent interpretation of Freud lesson in “Humour” (1927). Just for a moment – the time of a flash in thinking – conscience lets itself be represented as clung like an octopus on a skull that falls apart, then showing to the Subject how copable really is the anguish, as it doesn’t allow thinking. Humour is, by Freud, the willingness of a Subject to find an opening to a supposed ‘lack’, while when you fixate on a lack, you incur the disease, so weakening and disabling.

(Lou Andreas Salomè) : “…it is an exquisitely human fact that the man is - and at the same time is not - his own body, i.e. his body, despite it all, is a part like any other of the external reality. He can so externally be referred, with the help of his sensory organs, driving him back to an addiction which makes any other almost insignificant, like a children’s game, and lacking in tragedy. For that reason it is precisely the disease that makes us remember all that is innocent and touching in a man; but also, for the same reason, all this gives rise to feeling that someone is suffering because of all of us, and his own way of suffering becomes for us a symbol of what man is capable of.

(Sigmund Freud) : …Thinking over the interesting, but not always acceptable, observations you made on the relationship between man and his own bodily support, I wonder how you conceive the same relationship with such a surrogate which tries to be ‘I’ and yeti t may not be; an existing problem for our glasses, or dentures or wig, but not as intrusive as in the case of a bone prosthesis.”[3]

(Lou Andreas Salomè) : “…For example, in the erotic sphere, which touches a woman closely, I feared just about that my old age could enter too late (…) and that, as a consequence it could have deprived me of what most specific it has to give us, precisely as old age. …Because, together with the erotic experience, strictly speaking, we leave behind a dead end… where there’s only room for two people side by side, to enter an immeasurable expanse…”[4]

(Lou Andreas Salomè) : “…On the other hand, your essay on ‘Humour’[5] doesn’t convince me as much : I’ll briefly try to explain why. The reason is that the issue of relatives, whose backdated effects would condition the superiority of humour, basically is the same issue which trained us to take seriously all the data of reality which we, when children, preferred to bypass and which, due to all its rules and prohibitions, awfully deprived our connection to the reality of humour[6]…”

(Sigmund Freud) : …”Our mutual disagreement about humour, reminds me that I couldn’t solve one of your puzzles : why women much less nourish, and appreciate, humour than men.”[7] 

                                                             Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – November 14, 2020

[1] Quotes by “Eros e conoscenza. Lettere 1912-1936”, Ed. ‘Universale Bollati Boringhieri’ 2010.

[2] Jacopo Ricci, short biography. “Independent painter in Valenza-Alessandria (Italy), Jacopo Ricci is born in Milan in ‘80s (1988). He loves painting since he was a child but does turn on coloured pencils and brushes just at his Superior degree. He nowadays cooperates with online magazines, also for on demand commissions. In 2018 he illustrated ‘Dottor Tremarella’  and ‘Guarda Oltre’ (published by the author himself). In 2019 began also working on  serigraphy.”

[3] “Eros e conoscenza. Lettere 1912-1936”, Ed. ‘Universale Bollati Boringhieri’ 2010 – p.135

[4] “Eros e conoscenza. Lettere 1912-1936”, Ed. ‘Universale Bollati Boringhieri’ 2010 – p.163

[5] ‘L’umorismo’, S. Freud (1927) in “OSF” Vol.10 pp.499-508 B.Boringhieri is a short essay following ‘Il motto di spirito e la sua relazione con l’inconscio’ (1905) : Freud proved the result of his observations on patients, also anticipating his more precious what his most fruitful legacy really is : the individual competence in the care of one’s thinking, and the strenuous resistance to it.

[6] The letter by Lou Andreas Salomè is dated November 6, 1927 : the essay ‘Humour’ was read by Anna Freud during the Congress at Innsbruck in the same year, in September; it was published on ‘Almanach des Internationalen Psychoanalytischen Verlags für das Jahre 1928’.

[7] “Eros e conoscenza. Lettere 1912-1936”, Ed. ‘Universale Bollati Boringhieri’ 2010 -pp.167-169

“The Case of Matilde”[1] in n. 1/2017 ‘Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane’, Franco Angeli Editore.

“My written intervention here[2] just offers a feasible path where – in the ‘Case of Matilde’ as introduced by Marta Angellini and Monica Ceccarelli – focuses on ‘the ridge between psychomotor skills analytically oriented and a psychomotor psychotherapy’ (n. 1/2017, p.143).

Referring to well-known cases treated by Freud can lead us to a re-reading maybe fruitful and also practicable nowadays.

It’s meaningful that Freud decided to publish only few cases among all those ones he was treating, maybe because the innovation which just some of them got to the rising psychoanalysis showed a fruitfulness which could be repeated time by time.

Freud himself was modifying by logic, and step by step, the original ‘setting’ to which, however, an unbeaten profit has to be ascribed in the analytical work by anyone recognizes himself, or herself, heir.

In the Case offered we hear that Matilde[3] introduces herself with a ‘not certain’ query : she offers her body ‘as she didn’t live in’ (n. 1/2017 p. 134) and that she was moving ‘round around the room with an uncertain pace and with a very unsteady balance’ (p. 133). 

We face a youngest patient who has difficulty in recognizing herself as the leading part of a care made up by her adults – parents, teachers as the Author says – whom however Matilde informed  about her uneasiness. Matilde is proving then a cooperating patient : better, she begins and undertakes a specific initiative that is ‘the play’, so replying her psychomotorist offer, but adding her specific work that is her analytical work indeed, asking her partner nothing else but replying her subject and her thought. A play which is ‘the play of Matilde herself’ – ‘a very rich play’ and ‘careful and punctual’ (p. 135) which, as the Author explained, ‘has urged her’.

Matilde easily gets her help, puts on the table and on the subject what she couldn’t start out of the therapy room and that induced her to escape any demand or offer by other partners. 

Marta Angellini has informed us that Matilde was already establishing an alliance with mom, but opposed by her grandmother who banalizes also humbling mom, not very able indeed to defende herself – ‘her pregnancy has been spangled with fits of jealousy by grandmother… and Matilde has been looking at furious arguments between mom and grandmother’ (p. 134). Better, I’d say ‘envy’ as pathogenic indeed, by grandmother towards mom, and mainly toward Matilde as the-subject-of-envy.

Nothing we know about the father, as a partner himself : however he introduces himself together with mom, then cooperating into a ‘parenting support path with Adriana Grotta’[4] (p. 134). It’s interesting that since the second year of therapy, around four years old, Matilde experiences her sister birth, as a goal of satisfaction for both parents.

Matilde happily utilizes that birth becoming herself partner of her father, without any evident conflict with mom –‘she is staging the marriage… also assuming often feminine roles… she has more tune… with mom’ (p. 137).

Finally is in the unknown play of the swimming-pool and of the threatening snails (third year of therapy), into which she also acknowledge the convenience of words, and in the following conclusive play of the acrobat (fourth year) that Matilde comes at her satisfaction, and any further offer of intervention is in excess from now on.

We can cite Max Graf, father of little Hans, as reported by Freud and confirming the overcoming of a pathology claimed by the child : ‘It is two days I notice that Hans disobeys to me, determined but not impudent, with some even cheerfulness.

Does it mean that he doesn’t fear me, the horse ?’ (Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis of a fobia in a child of less than five years’/1909)…”[5]

                                                                                              Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – October 18, 2020

[1] ‘The Case of Matilde’ has been introduced by the psychomotorist Marta Angellini, with a supervision of Monica Ceccarelli for the column ‘Clinical cases’ on n. 1/2017 of ‘Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane’/ Franco Angeli Editore, (pp. 133-142).

[2] The text is citing also my written intervention to the ‘Case of Matilde” and published on n. 3/2017 of ‘Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane’ (pp. 475-476).

[3] Matilde is less than three years old at the beginning of the Case.

[4] Adriana Grotta is psychologist and psychoanalyst : she is editing with fellows the column ‘Clinical cases’ into the magazine ‘Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane’, by Franco Angeli Editore.

[5] In the Case ‘The child Hans”, Sigmund Freud describes, through the analytical method, a phobìa and its recovery in a child of less than five years,.