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I am aware that I am speaking to an audience made up of psychoanalysts: this allows me to expect that much of what I am going to say may be understood symbolically. Accompany me by reading in between the lines, as you well know how to do, because for the first time in many years I am not going to speak of clinical matters, and even the theory — deliberately without direct quotations from the authors referred to — will be implicit, or hopefully even intrinsic.
In a word, I am asking you to work on my associations, interspersed with more formulated psychoanalytical thinking.
Accompany me, setting off together, into a personal scenario.
The old house in the Apennine hills, built in stone taken from the local river, the cradle of my childhood and the setting for much of my oneiric life as well as that of my relatives, has a small medieval door leading to the cellars, accessed from the ground floor behind the main stairway to the upper floors.
Up until the end of the fifties it was a hive of bustling activity down there; I remember it well: men and women, the coming and going of carts laden with grapes, the unmistakeable smell of the must, thousands of bottles, tastings, business dealings and negotiations, we children taking it all in.
No trace is left of that world today.
Passing through that small door, one enters the darkness and perceives the mysterious density of the centuries, enclosed in their silence.
Descending the stairs by candlelight one passes through to a second, darker entrance hall full of casks and vats, from which other mysterious doors lead off.
One of these is bricked up.
A little further on an even smaller door, pitch black and showing signs of the passage of time, is the main attraction for the now rare visitor: from here one descends to the very bowels of the place, a warren of narrow galleries dug out of the tufa who