Bruno: Voice, Smells, Rumblings

Forty year-old Bruno came into analysis as a result of invalidating panic attacks and a perennial state of anxiety. A bronchial asthma sufferer from childhood, Bruno recalls that his mother would never leave him on his own, while his father was a virtually non-existent figure. During adolescence, his asthma cleared up, reappearing on rare occasions over the past few years. Recently — after his third year of analysis — it came back for several days, causing the patient to experience a state of great anxiety: a sense of incurability and irreparability was severely undermining the little faith he had in the usefulness of analysis. Along with the asthma, Bruno had been complaining of an almost chronic state of nausea, which he calls disgust.

The following three fragments of sessions reveal, in my view, a particular over-investment in the voice, both as an object and tool of sensoriality, which carries strong elements of idealization and persecution, seduction and rejection.

For Bruno, there are two sides to the voice: on one hand, it has a strong aesthetic value and is captivating and deceptive in its appeal; on the other, it is mixed up and contaminated with the noises and splutters of coughing, or with that particular sense of disgust which rises from the depths of the digestive system and which, at times, makes its presence felt in the session through the stomach's «rumblings and grumblings».

In short, the «beautiful voice» seems to merge with asthmatic coughing and nausea. The themes of voice, asthma and nausea started to regularly emerge in the analysis roughly a year ago, when the patient's panic states diminished, allowing him to go about the city more freely. Above all, this was due to the fact that the patient had begun to spend some nights alone, albeit in a constant state of pre-alarm, when his flatmate had to leave for work. He specified: «She's a flatmate — not a partner or a lover».

After having led an intense sex life, acted out defensively, Bruno stopped hav