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A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?
As a reader and an enthusiast of psychoanalysis, I was very precocious. I read a work by Sigmund Freud for the first time at the age of fourteen: “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” of course. As a patient, however, my introduction came even earlier. My first experience as an analysand—this is the term I am accustomed to using, rather than “patient”—dates back to when I was eight years old, in Naples, the city of my birth. My parents took me to a child analyst—a woman who was to become a trainer in the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana-SPI (the Italian branch of the International Psychoanalytical Association-IPA)—because I was undergoing a depressive period. There at the clinic smiling girls made me play many fun games and draw lots of pictures; today I know they were mental tests, but at the time I thought they were the therapy. Instead I remember nothing of the analyst herself. All I know is that after a few sessions I refused to go back, because I found it all quite boring. After a while, my depression disappeared. Today I wonder: Was that brief psychotherapy a success or a failure? Did the psychotherapy or the games of the amiable testers cure me? Or was the remission of my depression spontaneous? In other words, the same, awful epistemological doubts that still arise today when we confront speedy or unexpected recoveries.
When in 1967 I joined the Psychology Faculty of the Sorbonne in Paris, my ideal was already to become a psychoanalyst.