The Experience of a Totalitarian Regime and Psychoanalytical Thinking1

When Miss L came to see me, she was complaining of physical malaise, anxiety and sleep disturbance. We initiated a face-to-face psychotherapy.

In all this time, I had a diffuse impression that I was waiting for something to happen. That elusive something was to make possible a «true» analytic therapy, comparable to what comes up with other patients: some free associations, some memories, some insights, some working-through of transferences, all accompanied by some affective halo. These terms suggest a minimum, to express the “analytic lack” of this therapy.

While Miss L was talking, I thought: “What a pity that such a beautiful, lively woman had no lover”. It was the thought of another woman that would have wished to share her patient's enjoyment of life and, at the same time, it was the thought of the virtual man with whom she could have lived together.

Aged thirty-six, Miss L lived between her parents and her job. I say “between” in order to delimit a place where there was nothing. The suggestion of this imaginary place came to me from the fact that, beginning