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My thanks to Elena Molinari, without whom this article would not have appeared in Rivista di Psicoanalisi
I had never left the consulting room with a child. Before the clinical experience which I shall start by recounting, the place of the analysis was for me strictly confined to the room and the adjoining bathroom. Leaving the physical place in which therapy happens was interleaved with a profound transformation of my theoretical thinking, as I shall try to show briefly in two fragments of therapy.
Pietro is 11 years old and in the first year of middle school. We have been meeting twice a week for three years. As soon as he arrives, while still in the entrance hall, he tells me he has lost his scarf, and then stands in silence. I obviously think there is something Pietro wants to communicate to me, and imagine it may be about something that he has lost in the past and about the imminent loss of our meetings, since there are only a few sessions before the Christmas holidays.
A: What colour was it?
P: It was orange.
A: When did you notice you didn't have it?
P: I don't know.
A: I'm sorry, I know how horrid it is to lose something.
Pietro comments dispiritedly that he liked that orange scarf a lot. I am surprised by this sadness because he usually laughs off any grief. I notice that this loss mobilises a mixture of indistinct but urgent thoughts in me, which polarise around two possibilities: to go out and look for the scarf because I think that the real place of the experience may be outside, or to set off into the inner world and increase the «thickness»