On the Word's Work

For me, I guess, writing is rooted in long sittings with Pinocchio when I was a child, which my mother and I took turns reading aloud. Perhaps, on an oedipal level, it has also to do with transgression and reparation (a pair of concepts that, as it happens, bring together our analytic parents). I mean a certain taste for intertextuality, a sort of spontaneous attitude to weave threads coming from different disciplinary fields. Not only, therefore, an urge to cross boundaries, but also to synthesize: to reunite what is separated, to solve a puzzle, to put back together the pieces of a broken vase. It is no coincidence that I titled one on my more personal books Transpositions (Civitarese 2017). I can't stay in enclosures, but I've learned over time that I don't have to worry about my tendency to disperse myself into quite disparate readings and interests. After all, anyone who engages in writing, including writing nonfiction, is obeying an obsession that has a demonic quality. Although it operates in the dark, this internal presence leaves little room for distraction.

What fascinates me about psychoanalytic writing is its more “literary” side, to the extent that it creates worlds. Every author who manages to find a distinct voice expresses her understanding also, and perhaps above all, through style. Freud, Klein, and Winnicott are prime examples of this. Style is not spurious or secondary to logical argumentation. When style happily marries concepts, it completes them in the same way a perception coordinates fluidly with body movements and vice versa. This ineffable (literally: unexpressable in words), elusive aspect also intervenes in the very process of writing. Writing, then, is like struggling with this obscure “force” to bring it to light and thus exorcise its evil power. As with Orpheus and Eurydice, it is to pretend that it is always possible to snatch a glimmer of sense and meaning from the darkness of our ignorance. As the myth tells us, whatever the tragic