An “Ethical Code” for Authors?

When I first started thinking about the possibility of producing a paper on “writing psychoanalysis”, I had something very simple and practical in mind; not exactly along the lines of an American-style course of “creative writing”, but something of that sort. So I was aiming to speak about writing considered as interpersonal communication, which is the area that the people on the board of editors of the Rivista di Psicoanalisi usually find themselves dealing with, inasmuch as they function as editors rather than as analysts, -and it is also the level on which they find that they have trouble. As I slowly mulled over the (few) ideas that I had on the subject, while being influenced by recent vicissitudes in the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, gradually some thoughts which were connected a little more clearly with the ideal, triangular relationship between the writer, psychoanalysis, and the reader, emerged. At this fatal point (in the sense that chance plays its part, too) Alberto Semi asked me, without the slightest warning, what the title of my paper was going to be… and the outcome is something of a hybrid, perhaps rather unpleasant title in fact, even though softened by Albert's having wisely added a question mark to the original.

In any case, I will try both to keep to my original project and also to blend in with it some of the ideas which came into my mind later, after having tied myself down to a title. The later ideas arose partly in connection with the vicissitudes of the S.P.I.(*), which had