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I have been treating Fabrizio, a young man of eighteen, for a few months. So far what strikes me most about him is that he a very lukewarm patient: he is lukewarmly depressed, and he is lukewarm is his social involvement with peers, lukewarm in his occasional (though ongoing) consumption of street drugs, and lukewarm in his sexual encounters with a succession of girls. Equally lukewarm is his interest in music, though he plays a guitar fairly regularly.
One day Fabrizio breaks out of his lukewarm mold and is suddenly eager to make me see a connection between the lyrics of two songs written twenty-five years apart. Actually, the connection is obvious—and one I had been aware of—but my lukewarm analysand tells me he has made a “discovery all his own,” which prompts him to suggest an alternative “conclusion” to the songs, distinctly different from what either songwriter had in mind. According to Fabrizio, his conclusion is far more consistent with the earlier lyrics of both songs than are their actual endings.
In the first song, “God-Part II,” Bono, the songwriter and leader of U2, the rock band, pays homage to John Lennon with a “variation on a theme,” in both words and melody, on one of Lennon's lesser-known