The Meeting of Our Minds

I can’t separate my rereading of this seminal article by Aron from the context in which I first encountered Lew and his work. A group of Roman analysts and I invited Lew to speak about Relational Psychoanlysis on April 4, 1998: it was a wonderful surprise for everyone, both personally and professionally. The psychoanalyst, who said such interesting and novel things, explained them so well, and directed the NYU Post-Doctoral Program, was also a young man, full of passion and joy, who wore an earring! Something unthinkable in the Italian psychoanalytic scene at the time. This blend of professional wisdom, profound psychoanalytic culture, and authentic, passionate humanity has characterized our friendship, which has lasted more than 20 years.

I knew this article because it was the third chapter of his book “Meeting of Minds” which my wife Susanna Federici and I later translated into Italian. Translating a book requires a special intimacy – linguistic, expressive, and conceptual – with the author. Many times during the translation, we stopped to ask ourselves: “Would this way of translating his thoughts into Italian be appropriate for Lew?” We wrote to him more than once to discuss the matter, and his responses were always fast and enlightening.

Today, rereading “The Patient’s Experience of the Analyst’s Subjectivity” and trying to comment on it, the same question comes to mind; and even though Lew is no longer with us, his voice remains in me, full of that dialectical passion that accompanied all our numerous meetings. I continue to be struck by the original way Lew approaches the issue of self-disclosures, highlighting not only how “the analyst subjectivity is a means to search for the patient’s subjectivity” and above all “the impact of the analyst’s subjectivities on a patient o