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Natalino—so named because, he told me, he was born on Christmas Day (Natale in Italian)—was 24 years old when his analysis began; he came from a family with a country background and was the youngest of seven siblings. We began the analysis, now in its ninth year, at four sessions a week, after three or four preliminary meetings.
It is difficult to convey a unified view of the patient because of the tangle of different clinical pictures he presented, as if his mind were 'in pieces' (in all senses of the term), each of which so to speak needed adjusting on its own account before reassembly with the others.
The 'story' was that of a child who had formed a symbiotic relationship with a seriously depressed mother; when his mother died during his teens, he at first exhibited obsessional symptoms of increasing severity, but this defence eventually failed, giving way to a delusional state between persecution and a desire for restoration of his rights.
The beginning of the analysis and the whole of the first two years were marked by terrible violence and anxiety; the patient could not bear either to lie or to sit on the couch. I stayed in my position, sitting in my armchair, in 'my usual analyst's place', while he sat in a small armchair in a corner of the room, more or less opposite my chair.1
It seemed like the positions taken up by boxers in a ring, and the brother, the violent and destructive part of himself, who answered to the nickname of 'Raging Bull' or 'Jake La Motta'—or rather, as I experienced him, 'Jack the Ripper'—was indeed a boxer.
The first long months were a time of terror, for him and certainly for me too, at Natalino's terrible violence and his suicidal designs—'but only after a massacre', so that he and the evil that had been done to him would be publicized in the papers, a massacre that would wipe out all of his family and, of course, me as well.
Fortunately, I, too, had a 'boxer brother', that is, a psychiatrist colleague who would immediately, subject to t