Clinical Work with Emptiness and Sexuality: A Commentary on Maurizio Balsamo's Paper ‘Sabina’

I was very pleased to read Maurizio Balsamo's highly subtle description of Sabina's analysis. Without further ado, he invites us into the analyst's consulting-room in order to follow, step by step, the work that he does during a session. We then immediately find ourselves in contact with the heavy atmosphere that reigns in the room - the heaviness of the transference and of the countertransference to which it gives rise. Then comes the time for interpretation - surprised by it, we cannot but come to life again and get down to work. We are struck by the differentiation that the analyst makes and by the tenacity of the further processing that he undertakes in the face of the defensive movement that counters his interpretation. We are moved by the feeling of pleasure that manages to emerge and take its place beside the deadliness that tries to put a stop to everything that may transpire. Maurizio Balsamo allows us to accompany the work of transforming his countertransference feelings that he was able to accomplish during the session and to travel along the remarkable interpretative pathways that he opens up. Those countertransference feelings were pushing the analyst aside, anger was never far from incapacity, and sleep was coming close to absence. Rooted firmly in distancing and in falling asleep, and processing both of these, Maurizio Balsamo's interpretation was indeed very lively. Lively and also mobilizing, because it succeeded in functioning like a ‘libidinal cathexis’ at the precise moment when the analyst was about to abandon the search for anything that could be libidinally cathected, just when decathexis was waiting to take over. On the edge of absence and decathexis, there came an interpretation that in several ways was inventive: the passive and passivizing emptiness became the emptiness of someone, of an agent; the massively engulfing emptiness was split up into “two ways”, “two things”; the emptiness of death was distinguished from what stood right next t