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He was waiting for a reply; a reply that failed to come. Why?
He waited and it tore him up. Every day filled with hope and then crushed with disappointment.
What should he do? Wait, wait, there was no other solution. The days passed … the letter arrived but it was already too late, he could no longer remember what letter it was, he read it … thought about how much he had suffered, and he ripped it up, stunned by his own stupidity.
The severed hands, gripping the steering wheel, had such longing for him that they dripped blood until they reconstituted his image.
It neither assimilated nor evacuated, it was only capable of processes of incorporation and excretion: nothing that heralded the semblance of a thought.
These short and dense narratives are examples of reverie, dreamt by Antonino Ferro while listening to patients.* Reverie is a core concept in Bionian and post-Bionian psychoanalysis and important in Ferro's and Civitarese's latest book, The Analytic Field and Its Transformations (2015). Reverie describes both a mental production evoked by the analytic process and a key form of analytic intervention. Reveries are miniature narratives, sometimes as compressed as an aphorism, organized around a central metaphor that expresses, one could say, feeling-thoughts or thought-feelings. In “The Letter,” the speaker spends much time waiting for a letter that, by the time he receives it, has become irrelevant. The letter, as central metaphor, is the object of misdirected desire and turns out not to be what the speaker wanted. The narrative evokes feelings of folly, futility, and wastefulness. “Synthesis” is organized around the metaphor of severed hands experiencing the “bloodily” urgent need to reconnect to the person as a whole