The Tub

The moment when an analytic treatment begins is rarely contemporaneous with the decision to have regular sessions. A busy “business man”, with an overloaded schedule, who seemed to have little interest in the existence of other human beings, entered analysis. There was only one “obstacle” for him, his migraine pains, which were the alleged reason for his seeking treatment. The sessions continued, totally taken up with his “professional concerns”, as if he was trying to pour into the analyst's mind what was at the origin of his blockages. There seemed little hope of making use of any of these elements in his external daily reality and the rare allusions to other scenes closer to his inner life were also treated as his own “business”. For a long time, this factuality dominated the sessions and confined him within the distressing impression of not really being able to gain access to his psychic life. The initial statement of the fundamental rule as well as further reminders of it seemed to have no effect. Thus, a sort of strangeness was established which, at the beginning of each session, created in the analyst a certain anxiety that gradually appeared to be the sign of an incomprehensible transference action.

One day, as he was giving an account of a family meal, he named (in Italian) a traditional dessert on his mother's side of the family that he appreciated particularly. To his great surprise, the analyst repeated part of this name, pronouncing it in the French way, “castagne”. The polysemy underlined by this reprise thus engendered a surprising mutation: it was as if an entire network of associativity had suddenly been mobilised. There then appeared, in a complex enactment, strongly contrasting parental imagos, between an extremely cold mother and the exciting figure of a father “of the horde”, then diverse associations related to long concealed infantile bodily anxieties, which no doubt lay behind the headaches. Starting from this inflection point crystallised by