The Relation to the Unknown

A man who had been in analysis for a year had been talking in recent sessions about a painting he did a few years ago. One day, he arrived with a large painting with its front side facing his coat. The analyst said nothing and let him organise himself with it. After a moment of hesitation, he put the painting down at the end of the couch, leaning against the wall so that both he and the analyst could see it. It was a dark painting, glowing with light in places, showing two human forms whose faces were barely outlined other than as figures of death that were leaning in an oppressive way against a black mass in which everything was merged. Between this man and this woman - for one could clearly recognise a couple - a lighter mark of paint seemed to depict a child witnessing the scene.

He talked about the painting that was an attempt to evoke the memory he had of his grandparents killing an animal in a sort of unequal and confused fight. “I will have to do the painting again,” he said, “so that the child can see better what's going on.” That's how he saw himself - for the child half-hidden on the side of the scene was, of course, himself - fascinated by the dark area. Looking at this painting today, he was looking at it again, but from the other side of the mirror, at what he was still unable to see. Presenting all this in the session and in the particular setting that he had invented, he let himself be seen looking and looking at himself. In the plane

of symmetry of this setting, between the background of the painting and the foreground of the spectators, in the undecipherable obscurity of the mass in the centre of the painting, was the terror of a hole, of flesh, of the sexual, and of death.

In this scene, different aspects constitutive of the relation to the unknown (relation d'inconnu, Rosolato, 1978a) are condensed: the enigma of death and sex depicted through an attempted sublimation which tries to give shape to the unrepresentable and, beyond the object, to cir