Hymenality in psychoanalysis: A reading of Boundaries and bridges: Perspectives on time and space in psychoanalysis1*

More Than Just a Job could be the subtitle of these notes on reading Andrea Sabbadini's book, Boundaries and Bridges: Perspectives on Time and Space in Psychoanalysis (henceforth BB). The expression, which the author uses to explain what psychoanalysis represents for him, echoes Bion's famous ‘Making the best of a bad job’. There is something that unites the two expressions at a deep level, and which I would certainly suggest has the features of a profound ethical position. What do I mean by this? That both authors feel that they are engaged in something very serious and very important. All work is noble, of course, but as analysts we are concerned with human suffering. There is a reason why Bergman starts one of his most famous films with the statement that the first duty of a doctor is to

ask for forgiveness! And what would the reason be if not that we are always finding ourselves fatally unequal to the challenge, while at the same time asking someone else to trust us and to show us their most painful and secret wounds?

This is the first point: renouncing narcissistic omnipotence. Sabbadini poses the problem right at the start, engaging in a subtly polemical dialogue with a possible colleague‐reader, following the tried and tested rhetorical model of Freud, on the question of what our work means. The key word is treatment (Behandlung in German). The author demystifies the connotations of the English term, and in doing so right at the outset he gives his discussion the friction it needs to become airborne. What is wrong with the term ‘treatment’? The fact that it conveys a medicalized (in the pejorative sense of the term) idea of what we do. The analyst who ‘treats’ his patient is easily seen as someone applying a technique to a more or less passive subject. Instead, Sabbadini conceives of analysis as