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Facts, traumas, and events are silent from a psychoanalytic point of view. In order for there to be transformation we need another mind, and that the two minds (patient's and analyst's) form an emotional-affective-semantic field that may set off the metabolisation in pictograms, narratives, stories, and dream. The miracle of analysis is that in doing this we not only transform «the stones of facts» into thoughts, emotions, affects and narratives (which is fundamental) but above all develop those instruments capable of carrying out these operations: the tools for thinking of which Bion speaks. And which will be at the Centre of our IPA Congress in Boston: Changing World: the shape and use of psychoanalytic tools today.
These instruments must be in operation in the present field so that they can set in motion - sometimes with enormous effort - the transformative process en route to the psychic, the symbolisable, and the oneiric. I would like to try and describe some of these operations which enable a thought to be born, alphabetisation (which I will not call mentalisation because the term has acquired a semantic halo too rich in other connotations).
A child in analysis draws for us.
I would like to start with some drawings made by a boy in analysis which seem to me to allow us to visualise both the progress of mental growth and the figuration of a model of the mind to which he will make implicit reference during the whole of the analytic work.