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A paper portrays a line of thought: once a point of departure has been chosen, the thoughts grow and gradually their direction becomes more precise and is further developed. Thus, at the end one traces a certain itinerary, and the author himself is more or less aware of having chosen one among many possibilities.
The reading of a paper proceeds in the same way; every now and then the reader is distracted and, moving away from the author's trajectory, he outlines a variant of the course.
I will try to describe, starting from my impressions, those that seemed to me characteristic of Lucio Russo's line of thought, and I will add the fruit of my «distractions», the inevitable partiality of which I am aware.
Partial … and on my part.
1. This preamble is neither rhetorical nor redundant since it is intended to indicate that our gathering here at this Congress surely has an effect on our sense of psychoanalytic identity. What I mean is that what happens here (beginning from when this meeting was first thought about, up until its conclusion) reflects the same process that usually takes place in an individual: during the course of his life, in fact, the individual carries out multiple syntheses and refinements of the impressions that he has of himself, sometimes extremely discordant ones, of his intentions and of what he has accomplished, but at the same time he maintains, more or less, a feeling of identity that we could say has both spatial and temporal characteristics.
In order to support this, it is necessary to assume that a characteristic style of ego functioning is active: the ability to continually produce syntheses — even though that in itself forms an imperfect result. To produce or to make syntheses when, as Russo described, they come to be offered to you by the Other. The effect is a feeling of identity, of being able to recognize oneself as an individual and to feel oneself as such, despite the discrete and discontinuous multiplicity that we know is there, in each of