Seminar 1. 8 July 1977. The Italian Seminars

First, I must apologize for not being able to speak Italian, but I am consoled by the thought that the subject I want to discuss is one which I find very difficult to talk about in any language, even when I am able to mobilize all the English that I know. I shall have reason to revert to this point later.

What are we concerned with? What are we all here for? What are we going to talk about? Of course, we could say, “psychoanalysis”, but the word simply doesn't mean anything. It is a term which is used if we want to “talk about it”, but it doesn't say what “it” is. You can't smell it, you can't touch it, you can't see it, and indeed it is very difficult to say what the sensible component of psychoanalysis is.

In so far as we claim to have a scientific outlook, it is usually supposed that there must be some supporting evidence. What I would like to touch on here is how important it is to have a foundation of fact, and how those facts should be observed by us.

My training in the British Institute of Psychoanalysis, my experience with John Rickman, with Melanie Klein – all of it was verbal. Are we supposed to be blind and deaf to everything except what comes in through the ears? When a patient comes to see me, there is, in fact, a body which I can see for myself, and to that extent I can fall back on the evidence of my senses and on the information which my senses bring me. I don't think that we can afford to ignore what our senses tell us, because the facts are very few anyway.

So far, the most valuable thing I have is the evidence of my senses and the information that my senses bring me. When I say “senses”, I am borrowing a term from anatomy and physiology and using it as a model in order to be able to talk about other things for which I haven't the same sort of evidence. In this respect I am dependent upon having

a healthy nervous system which can be irritated – using the term in a physiological sense: our nerve endings are irritated by the universe in which we are l