Freud's Last Works and Present-Day Psychoanalysis(*): Trying to Think with Freud (From Castration Anxiety to Anxiety about the Death of the Self)

The Centro Milanese di Psicoanalisi recently invited me to take part in a symposium devoted to Freud and present-day psychoanalysis and this is what prompted me to write this article, which summarises the ideas I am currently working on. I can thus say that the opportunity my colleagues gave me acted as a catalyst, but it also offered me a space in which to channel my thoughts.

By way of a premise, I will try to outline the theme of the discussion I wish to undertake. Freud's greatness consists not only in having laid down guidelines for the theoretical and clinical interpretation of the unconscious, of neurosis, of mental illness, but also in having bequeathed to us the invention and discovery of an indefinable way of making our minds work with a view to the understanding of psychical phenomena, involving our patients in this too. The most subtle element — which places psychoanalysis halfway between art and science — is that the degree to which the instrument of emotion, affect and fantasy (free association) can be used is highest in analysts, at least as far as the practice of analysis is concerned: listening — listening to oneself — telling and suggesting to the patient how to learn to construct and utilise this function. What I mean to say is that analysis joins the experience of emotions, of fantasies of thought, of constructing and conferring a meaning with the experience of being aware of them. In other words, the advance in the ability to understand human phenomena, which takes place in the analyst-patient relationship, has, in the his