Ticket to Ride

«We shall choose to describe [the psychic processes] as they occur in the favourable and clear examples afforded by the latter […] the apt examples, which […] are for the most part lost to view» (Freud, 1913, 193). With this quotation by Freud in mind, Paola Camassa and Francesco Napolitano (2007) proposed that there be a Section of the Rivista di Psicoanalisi dedicated to the presentation of clinical examples which represent the testing and confirmation of theory. The clinical presentation, in isolation from its context, must bear laboratory-like characteristics, «where in isolation means clearly defining the objects and limits of the experiment for the purposes of the intended objective, and the Freudian laboratory is that of the dream par excellence» (Camassa and Napolitano, 2007, 797 translated).

The theoretical model, which I hope to clearly «capture» in the example I have chosen, employs a dream that gives shape to a fundamental question that this analysis looks at: the centrality of the functions that belong to the intermediate area.

Bollas (1999) observes that the dream appears to be real because it is produced by us: we create it. This production by the subject undergoes dynamic development within a favourable mental environment, in contact with another mind, and it bears the characteristics of a work-process which is built up session by session, break by break. However, the common practice in psychoanalytic literature of citing «clinical sequences»,1 as a concentrated form of the session in a crystallized hic et nunc (which always points the reader towards some past and future time) makes it difficult at times to capture the psychic work of the patient who, in contact with another mind, creates worlds and undergoes subjectivization. In the dream the subject blends together images, narratives, emotions, fragments and work carried out along a journey in order to form a personal Gestalt, which in itself is the very aim of the analytical work: that is, a freer p