The Pleasure of the Analytic Hour

There are a great many studies of pain in analysis, pain that is considered one of the «elements» of psychoanalysis: we need only think of Bion's statement that we become what we are capable of suffering. Pain is considered the necessary ingredient for transformation. The avoidance of pain leads to a series of, often very costly, defences and even to outright pathologies. Balzac's novel The Wild Ass's Skin warns us of the dangers implicit in the avoidance of pain. Pennac, in turn, warns us that «pain is curious. The most authentic pain defends itself against itself by spinning phrases»2: and here we are, straddling narrative and narrative transformations as therapy for suffering.

I would like to mention two Italian books: Un tempo per il dolore[A Time for Pain] by Tonia Cancrini (2002) and Il dolore dell'analista [The Pain of the Analyst] by Maria Adelaide Lupinacci et al. (2015), which address the same point some years apart. But on this occasion I would like to focus my attention on a less frequently covered topic, that of the pleasure of analytic work.

In Italy, a few years after Freud's death, with the arrival of television, we had the phenomenon of «dramatized novels»: in other words, the televised reduction of many celebrated classic novels into instalments. These were novels whose plots were well known to some people, and unknown to most. All you had to do was buy the novel before the serial version came out: in this way, the unpredictable can be predicted. In a short space of time, as I recall, came Jane Eyre, Nicholas Nickleby, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and many more besides.

A few years later there came the television serials: in every episode we find the same lead characters and different secondary characters; each episode has a different, relatively self-sufficient plot. Over the years we went from Rin Tin Tin to Special Squad Cobra 11. Only subsequently would we see the start of something derived from this in certain aspects of Soap Operas, the tele