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Prepublished paper for the 41st International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Santiago 1998
It is the instincts, the feelings, that constitute the substance of the soul. Cognition is only its surface, its point of contact with what is outside itself.
It is here in this highly specialized psycho-therapy situation rather than by direct observation of infants that the state of affair that is normal at the theoretical start in infancy can be studied.
At the beginning of an analytic session, what frame of mind must I be in if I am to respond to what I think the situation requires of me? I place myself in the analyst’s position, when, having forced myself to maintain as much as possible freely floating attention—as will be seen, this is no easy matter and sometimes encounters serious difficulties—I hear the analysand’s communication from two points of view at once. That is to say, on the one hand, I try to perceive the internal conflicts that inhabit it and, on the other, I consider it from the point of view of something addressed, implicitly or explicitly, to me. The conflicts to which I refer do not concern the particular dynamic conflicts that would emerge in interpretation, but rather the way in which the discourse in turn approaches and moves away from a kernel of meaning, or a group of such kernels of meaning, which
are trying to break through to the conscious. One does not have to have a very precise idea of what activates or, on the contrary, impedes or diverts communication to perceive the movement that sometimes carries communication towards the most explicit or most precise expression, sometimes distances it from the verbal fulfilment of what is striving to be communicated. One may, therefore, perceive these variations intuitively without knowing the exact nature of the focus aroun