The Detail

As soon as this patient had made an appointment, the analyst was struck by his belief that he was being judged, justifying his willingness to fight. From the outset, the patient drew attention feverishly to the weight of his name and the negligence of his interlocutors with regard to spelling it properly. In his first session, a detail moved the analyst deeply, without his being able, at this stage, to grasp its full import. Noticing a sardonic smile on his analyst's face, the patient suddenly got carried away and evoked the irreducible state of conflict uniting him and his father, whom he presented as an intransigent man who was often belittling and invariably disappointed by his children and their perception of their father's prerogatives. This outline of an inaugural construction blurred a more furtive, and swiftly repressed, variation of this same detail.

During the session, an untoward thought came to the analyst's mind. With such a surname, how could one escape the inevitable evocation of the worst atrocities of war and of a heritage - his name - that was inescapable? This detail then assumed various forms and the analytic work slowly outlined the motif of his crusade. It organised for a long time the patient's relationship with the analyst and the content of his grievances: his opinions about globalisation, about the sharks that financial analysts are, about the future of the planet, about his phobia of school, where he always felt he was constantly being judged, or about a more current variation of this phobia, which, for the same reasons, concerned women and fed his sadness about not really being able to commit himself. He also expressed his hatred of the governing classes and of dissymmetry, or his refusal to have children so as to spare them an inevitably sordid fate and the presence of a father who would bring them nothing good.

For a long time, this form of fighting governed the sessions. The patient was testing the analyst. He had assigned him the role o