We had just finished a supervision session during which my preceptor had made some observations about the phylogenetic determinants regarding the psychic disturbance.
He invited me to pay attention to the details of the clinical history of my patient which repeated themselves from generation to generation, as if to constitute a music score aged with time (played by different orchestras and in different times) which acquires that minimum variation that gives it the gift of originality, but whose essential structure remains unaltered. We were walking slowly along the narrow country road which skirted the Professor's cottage. Suddenly, we were both captured by the sight of an old man who was sat on the doorstep of a massive main door, whose face was sweetly lit by the orange sunset.
I could not rationally understand what intrigued me about that man. The only thing that I managed to notice was his totally inexpressive presence, but which was not at all disturbing: today I would say "neutral". The Professor, taking a long drag on his hand-rolled cigarette, stared at him with discretion then he looked straight into my eyes and limited himself in saying: "You see? We are only involucres".
His observation was sufficient to answer the mental activity which the vision had provoked in me. I had not understood, on a logical level, what my Master had wanted to tell me, but that definition was perfectly cut for what I had felt; on the other hand there was no doubt that that "thing" which we had seen was nothing other than an involucre.
Many years of work, multitudes of hours listening to the existences of many people would have past before I could have completely elaborated the affective impact which that vision had determined in me.
I thought about it again many years later, in the atmosphere of an indescribable closeness to the truth, of a four-hour long session, whilst I was listening to the associations of a patient.
This person had come into psychoanalysis having a perception of himself and other human beings as mechanisms without sentiments: "There was a period in which I thought of people as perfect machines that can immediately perceive everything about others"; now, being at the end of his micropsychoanalytic work, he expressed himself in this way looking at a photograph of his father: "The other day, while I was studying that sonata, I realised that I was forced to make a caesura: evidently the musical phrases breathe on their own. It is something that cannot be taught, they are like breaths; I have noticed that I take breaths at intervals when I am playing. I used to know a person who spoke with a flat voice (the patient had spoken for years with an inexpressive voice, I would say 'computerised'). "I control my voice continuously, I never let it go", (now he had found the way to outflow an enormous affect which he expressed, in accordance with his psychic structure, in a compartmental but very intense way) "One breathes when one speaks: the sentences have a beginning and an end. And despite the pauses the speech remains bound, the speech continues. Before, I used to do everything to break up the discourse so as not to keep it bound. In the music there is an internal breath which imposes itself. I would like the music to lead me where it wants...I don't know why...where life takes me...and I don't even understand what I am frightened of: perhaps I'm frightened of him. I think that he didn't want to be continued. My father wouldn't admit depending on anyone, like me, after all. I do exactly what that bastard used to do, if only I could have been a bastard too! Everything has a beginning and an end, the musical phrases are like people, an actor who comes forward on the stage, says his part and retreats. It frightens me to find out that one lives like this...that my life is only a line pronounced at a certain point".
The patient is disorientated by his insight and justly so; on the other hand it is not easy to reach the vision of the essence of our existence: a fleeting cue spoken on the fore-stage of the Universe. We spend our life to gain the possibility to say that cue completely; there are those who do it with rage, those who do it with resignation, those who do it with violence, those who do it with dishonesty, those who do it through gritted teeth, but few of us are able to realise that that cue, which is our life, has little to do with us.
Since, and this is the central thesis of the present work, we are nothing other than a kind of amplifier of brightness of an emission of Images that wanders in the illusion of space time serving itself of involucres.
Images which populate our ontogenetic involucres represent a double activity of persecution-protection. This concept may seem strange but observing the material of the following patient we can gain a concrete idea.
The patient is in therapy due to a severe paranoiac syndrome, partially contained by a paroxysmal alcoholic behaviour. Her life is a Dantesque circle: cyclically it presents the paranoiac vicissitude of "Everyone hates me", "No one understands me" and "It's all their fault" which often leads to abandoning herself to the dipsomaniac crisis that is lived with shame and ulterior depression.
The nucleus that nurtures the appetency for alcohol has been well analysed with a satisfying emotional abreaction, nevertheless, cyclically, this young woman has to interpret her alcoholic crises. I express myself in these terms because by now she seems to recite a role which has been given to her and from which she cannot free herself.
After that, for the umpteenth time, she tries to reedit her favourite repetition, in other words, using the minimum real or phantasmal pretext, enlarging it, blowing up the hot-air balloon of the paranoid novel, feeling sorry for herself and leaving the session protesting against the world, she manages to find the possibility of analysing her behaviour.
Let's listen: "I fall into self-pity and perhaps it is only an excuse to get someone to cuddle me. One has to fight for everything... Before, I wanted to run home, wallow in self-pity and start drinking. I don't know if it was to punish myself or others. To say: "because of you I drink, because you don't understand me, because you don't cuddle me", but frankly I'm pissed off with thinking of these things! Inside me there is a great acting bitch and I am the audience and I continue, in spite of myself, to act a role which has tired me. And I convince myself that things only go wrong to me. I am thirsty of vengeance, I would like my mother to pay for everything she has done to me (the patient had been abandoned by her natural mother few months after the birth). I feel nauseated speaking about these things but I still speak about them. I am glad that I didn't leave this time. Now that I think about it, when I used to decide to drink I was totally drunk even before sipping the first glass. I played at being my father".
Note that the patient realises for an instant an important dynamic: the role of persecution-protection of the Image.
In situations which put us in touch with the Void we hide ourselves in a facet of the Image for reactive automatism, or better still, the energetic disequilibrium caused by the contact with the Void, necessitates the putting into act of a protective screen which binds the Involucre.
The patient had begun the session with the consideration that things were going much better for her, having realised for the first time that finally she had her own house, therefore she was free of various persecutor- protector "Masters"; in front of a changing situation which eliminates within her the internal limits and widens the boundaries of her potentialities, she shelters herself in the imago of her drunken father once again, in whose presence she reedits a persecutory vicissitude that is, at the same time, the source of intense sufferance and a reassuring reference.
Until the patient does not fully elaborate the separation from the phantasy of the persecution-protection of the bad womb which abandoned her, to reach an adult dimension of free solitude, and until she does not accept the ineluctability and the relativity of her own destiny, she will not be able to do without the projective mechanism of resentment and marginalising protest towards the Universe.
The activity of the internal images is incessant and we are the executors of ancestral desires which reactivate themselves above all during the oneiric activity. Such a situation is well described by the recurrent phrase of each micropsychoanalysis: "I am living somebody else's life. My life is not my own". Or even as a patient expresses himself in a more colourful and efficacious way: "My life? I feel as if I have a virus, as if it were not my fault. I am only a puppet controlled by something greater than me. It's not me playing the music: there is something playing me!".
Then again, a great part of the micropsychoanalytic work is nothing other than a process of actualisation of the human psychism
Scienza e Psicoanalisi