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After the oral presentation of a long case history, Francesco Corrao, one of the masters of Italian psychoanalysis, commented to the presenter as follows: «You have entertained us for about an hour with “Mr Projection/Projective Identification” and with “Mr Attack-on-the-Breast”, but after one hour we still know nothing about the life — in particular, the inner life — of Mr Mario Rossi».1
Erving Goffman's famous book Asylums includes a chapter headed «The moral career of the mental patient». Before being hospitalized, he writes, a man may have been an engineer or a printer, married with children or a bachelor, leading a life that is more or less tranquil or more or less tormented; but once he is in hospital all that disappears, everything becomes like everything else, that man becomes like all the other hospitalized patients, and his life becomes a mere term in a manual (e.g. schizophrenia), a collection of symptoms, medications and so on; but of his existence no trace remains.
I confess that when reading the case histories presented by candidates for associate membership of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society I have sometimes found myself thinking: «The career of the psychoanalytic patient»: before analysis he was an engineer or a printer, married with children or a bachelor, and so on, but now he is a collection of projections, identifications, attacks on the breast or — according to a different school — an accumulation of foreclosures, negations or whatever.
We ought to be able to take up the challenge of Hannah Arendt, who claimed in The Life of the Mind (1978) that psychoanalysis was interested only in the deep foundations of the psyche, a non-individualized generic interiority, a more or less chaotic hodgepodge of events to which everyone is subject rather than being in any sense their agent and which sweeps away everything in its path — a monotonous uniformity.
As a psychoanalyst I do feel wounded by these words, but I cannot deny that, in reading some reports o