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In “Constructions in analysis” (1937), S. Freud compared the analyst's work to that of the archaeologist searching among vestiges, with the big difference that the object of our work is alive, and working with it causes fear, pain and suffering. Last year, during a visit to Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius, impressed by the strangeness of the atmosphere, by people carbonised by lava, eternal statues in a shocking atemporality among the archaic objects and traces of the place, I picked up the thread of psychoanalytic reflections on such ruins, vestiges, the layers of “ash” also present in the human psyche and their relevance in the work of the analytic cure. How to communicate the unthinkable, the unsayable, the un-representable, the barely figurable? How to transform traces of your “ancestors’ ancestors’ ancestors”, even as passed down from Superego to Superego, or via inter-transgenerational transmissions? How to transform the formless into form?
From S. Freud to D. W. Winnicott, and W. Bion, from A. Green and J. McDougall, via D. Anzieu and R. Roussillon, the author is proposing to revisit the psychic vestiges as they are expressing during the analytic process.