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‘The only subject-matter of psycho-analysis,’ Freud concluded in 1926, ‘is the mental processes of human beings and it is only in human beings that it can be studied’ (Freud. 1926: 254). It's a bold claim, grounding Freud's defence of psychoanalysis, its forms of intelligibility, against the presumptions of the medical profession. At immediate issue was the question of ‘lay analysis’ - the practice of psychoanalysis by analysts who were not medically trained - but Freud was also embroiled in a series of questions that continue to structure the encounter between psychoanalysis and the humanities: What is psychoanalysis? What does it do? Where and how does it happen? How do you learn to do it?
‘I will begin by pointing out that I never refer to my profession … as a form of treatment’: the opening pages of Andrea Sabbadini's Boundaries and Bridges situate his work within that ongoing reflection on what psychoanalysis is, or can be. Language matters to Sabbadini, not least as a means to resist both the medicalization of the profession carried by the very word ‘treatment’ - widely accepted, of course, by psychoanalysts - and, more broadly perhaps, the mastery implied by the idea of ‘treating’ another person (dealing with, acting upon, applying a process to achieve a particular result) (Boundaries: xiii). By contrast, what Keats might call ‘negative capability’ -