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London, 6 May 2006
Dear Professor Freud,
To the memory of my father, Emilio
The rich correspondence you have entertained with your colleagues throughout your life has encouraged me to overcome my initial reserve and address myself to you to wish you a happy birthday.
My choice of the two words preceding your name, Dear Professor, is not coincidental - indeed, as you have taught us, not much ever is. The Dear stands for my affection for you, or at least for what you have come to represent for me - and I am sure this is coloured by idealization and projections of all sorts. In a word, by my transference to you as it has evolved in the many years that I have been in contact with your ideas, studying and later teaching your texts, practising your theories in my clinical work as well as applying them to my understanding of the personal lives of myself and of those around me.
Associated to this word ‘Dear’ there is also for me a private memory, distant but still crystal-clear (or so I want to believe), which I would like to share with you. I was about 5 or 6 years old and my father was away from home for a period. My mother had convinced me to write a letter to him - and there she was, as so often in my childhood, sitting next to me to try and help me. As I wrote Caro papà, she insisted that I should replace the Caro with the superlative form Carissimo. I refused. ‘Dearest’ being a longer word to write than ‘Dear’, she decided that my disobedience must have been a symptom of my laziness. Yet I believe (or, perhaps, I just want to believe) that I was already aware then that my reluctance was not - or, better, not only - the sign of a limitation in my character, and certainly not of a limitation in my love for my dearest father, but of something else