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An analytic session is one of the few social spaces that remain beyond the reach of outside eyes today. By virtue of this jealously guarded privacy, what happens in the analyst's consulting room inevitably arouses a curiosity that can only be fully satisfied by experiencing it for oneself - that is, by doing analysis. It is a well known commonplace of fiction, and not only of films, to circumvent this obstacle and allow the reader or audience to penetrate into and eavesdrop on this secular Holy of Holies. In such cases, the cinematic account effects a kind of simulated profanation of the secret space of analysis, disclosing what the maker of the film imagines is taking place inside it. So the human comedy has been enriched for some time now by a new narrative space and by two fixed and complementary roles, those of psychoanalyst and patient. This has resulted in the creation of a new genre of sociopsychological storytelling, which expresses its truths often by maltreating the analytic situation for the purposes of the narration, staging new versions of ancient plots with a slant now comical, now serious and dramatic.
A «clinical» short film. The short film A Therapy, bearing the signature of Roman Polanski, presented at the Cannes film festival in May 2012 and readily accessible on the Internet, is an extraordinarily intelligent take on this kind of profanation, here in the service of the ephemeral and important phenomenon of fashion. The result is a splendid narrative fragment, devised and accomplished with care in every detail, with the ultimate aim of demonstrating the exceptional quality of Prada, the luxury fashion label that commissioned the film. The company was an enlightened client, giving free rein to the great director to exercise his creativity in this brief, concentrated token of his inventiveness. With a few rapid but intense strokes, the action tells the audience that Prada and psychoanalysis are two high-grade multinational realities. Placed on the sa