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Summary
The title of this article could at first sight appear to imply the liquidation of psychoanalysis as a model of the mind and as clinical practice. Instead , what the author actually does is advance a perspective according to which, in the wake of 'psychogogy' -- that is, the magical practice for summoning the dead, "those who have outrun the time of their life, or seen their day", for purposes of divination -- in order to facilitate on the part of psychoanalysts the bringing about of the time of the death of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis survives itself, despite the thousands of limits increasingly and restrictively imposed by epistemology, anthropology, sociology, biology, and custom, in the course of the tumultuous development of the past century. "Evoking" psychoanalysis implies rewriting the history of its long agony, crushed by the colonizing hegemony of heteronomous discipline, to recover those germs of complex, historicist, relational and relativistic thought, which Freud as well as his many followers so often announced without providing them an acceptance, either congruent with their own constructions, or by the psychoanalytical movement.

The concept of genesis is one of those fundamental concepts around which could revolve on the one hand the intended advent of the death of psychoanalysis, through the recognition of its condition of cultural and institutional fossil, and on the other the opening of a space adequate to its germinal, embryonic elements. Psychoanalysis, at its onset, prepared the concept of genesis in the sense of the original, and in particular that well known, subsequently rendered unknown (repressed), leaving virtually in the dark the other, semantic aspect which regards the generative, the becoming, the possible, the creative, the actually and inflexibly unknown. All that which refers to this procedure (and not process) can easily become reductive and suffocated by what Bion called the "satanic jargon" of psychoanalysis.

Ample reference is made to Bion, beginning with a pitiless attack on 'Bionese', leading to the proposal of a pattern of psychoanalysis isomorphic to the neotenic condition of man -- as embryonic animal having developed its own morphogenesis and formed its own formation, with no predetermined aim, in an indefinable and constitutive, cognitive opening.

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There is presently much discussion in Italy as to a legislation which would "normalize" the profession of psychotherapy, through university diplomas or accreditation by legally recognized schools. In fact, psychotherapy is considered one of the technical-scientific practices: included, albeit ambiguously, in the order of technological occupations; for example, the practice of medicine (in fact, therapy) which assumes knowledge of an object completely autonomous of its observer -- the psyche rather than the body -- to which techniques are consequently applied which avail themselves of tools; not scalpels, medicines or diets, but words and behavior (indicative, prescriptive, comforting, pedagogic, or what have you) intended to provide a remedy for the ill/illness. Whatever the theoretic reference, each psychotherapist applies a set of hypotheses which presumably have been confirmed experimentally or statistically: exhaustive information on this discipline and an exercise to develop the sensory/motor coordination necessary to that specific technique (the training), aspects fundamental to this professional training, methodologically analogous to any other technologically definable training.

This discourse would be flawless if the accent on the compound term "psycho-therapy" were placed on the second half of the term, relegating the first to the shadows. However, when considering the psyche, is it possible to propose so linear a discourse? Could we speak with equal lightness of a therapy of the mind when considering the unresolved -- and perhaps unsolvable -- problem to which substance the concept mind is intended to refer? To what objective knowledge, or one firmly believed to be such, to what epistemophile (countered, as the Greeks would have it, to opinion or empirical data) could we make recourse when we discuss the mind? According to Foucault (1978):

"Only through modifying our discourse to conform with the structure of discursive practice (that is to the dominant episteme, to that set of rules imposed in a given historical area, the use of which regulates not only the spoken language, but thought about anything which becomes part of the experience of man) can the subject accede to the discourse -- in other words, take the floor".

However, if the epistemology of psychology were made up of a set of certain and objective assumptions of knowledge, each one deriving from a different discipline and in itself sufficiently defined (by biology, sociology, etiology ethology, theology, philosophy, cybernetics), the area of psychology would be a square crowded with hucksters, each one proffering his truth which is truer than the others, vociferating loudly in order to drown out any voices of dissent. No reciprocal listening (as is the case in any area of epistemology), no reciprocal stimulus -- admiring and perhaps envious (as occurs in the arts), but a tendency to exclusion which would be more appropriate to religious fundamentalism.

Apropos of the present uncertain status of psychology, James Hillman (1979) asks whether it is possible to arrive at a collective model of psychology; a general myth, in which our specific, individual variables could integrate and act. And this -- always according to Hillman -- would involve the search for our patron (allotropic term up until 1700), the father who creates and who is the creative principle in us. This is the first task () and as long as the confusion as to our paternity is not eliminated, there will always be justification for those who consider our psychology bastard; neither art nor science, neither medicine nor religion, neither academia nor free, neither investigative nor curative, but rather a syncretistic amplification, a pot-pourri, or a pot-pour rire, of any- and every-thing having to do with the human soul. Until the father is found, each of us must be torn between phenomena, inventing languages, diagnosing, preparing techniques with which to separate and bind together the innumerable aspects of the soul, as uncertain about what we are doing as we are about our author, from whom both our authority and our authenticity would derive.

I do not know whether the various brands of psychology will ever find a common "father". What will perhaps remain reasonably visible will be the colonizers (philosophies, sciences, religions) which, perhaps by coupling variously among themselves, have made their mark on that area of thought which contemplates itself in the shadow of the unthinkable. As long as psychoanalysis affirms itself as one of the many preachers of its own truth as regards the psyche, and in order to pursue the illusion of the therapeutic effectiveness of its practice (responding either with arrogance or contrite courtesy to the admonitions of a Popper or a Grunbaum), it will be absorbed by the great discordant chorus of psychologies and, blinded by the ephemeral splendor of its colonizer (Medicine), will remain in danger of recognizing increasingly its Author with the resultant loss of authority and authenticity. In this pers0pective, the process of training psychoanalysts becomes extremely problematic; the training of candidate-analysts must either repeat that same procedure of colonization of Freud (despite his admonitions about psychoanalysis becoming the handmaid of medicine) subsequently adopted by the psychoanalytical institutions, or else free psychoanalysis from these encumbrances by abolishing all formalization of the process of training. I maintain that it is time for a radical rethinking of the adapting vision of the mind, of the object of analytical practice and, consequently, the model of candidate training. However, I also maintain that the short road to becoming analysts, limited to self-legitimization, is more an anti-institutional rebellion than a culturally founded plan. Without an authoritative authenticity, psychoanalysis is in danger of breaking down into a myriad of currents lacking spirit, both in the scientific debate and on the professional market. We will agree that the Author of psychoanalysis was Freud, in his life as in his works. Thus we include Freud in the considerable ranks of mythological fathers, of Nations or of the Church. Of these figures, so compact and univocal in their sacred aura, we can only be exegetes, each one convinced that only his reading definitively captures "what He really meant!" Exclusive depositaries of the Word, the so-called schools of Freudian thought, multiply and -- as occurs in religious sects or in political parties making reference to a single founding father -- fight and excommunicate each other reciprocally, instead of passing over with constructive criticism the history of the fathers. The extraordinary Freudian adventure (Freud himself described himself as "an adventurer rather than a scientist)") began with the practice he defined as "self-analysis" : there is no conjecture as to the object of the "psyche" which would not be minimally credible if it did not consider also the mind which produces it, its singular history and the affective, emotional and (pre)judicial ties affecting it. For example, in the preface to the second edition of Traumdeutung, which he began writing in 1897, the year previous to the death of his father, Freud describes how it seemed to him a passage taken from his own autobiography, his reaction to the death of his father, and therefore to the most import event, to the most serious loss in the life of any man.

This explicit reference to a family event is on the one hand a transparent and courageous indication of how intimately interconnected are the explorative mental meanderings with the affective and cognitive strategies constituting the historical fabric of the searching mind; it is precisely this indication on the necessity of self-analysis (never exhaustive, completed or "terminable") which should be considered the most precious legacy of Freud's teaching. On the other hand, that reference indicates the constitutive status of lie of any formulation the mind proposes. In Italian, the only verbal declination of the word mente (mind) is mentire (to lie). And yet, the narrative act of lying is the only one in which we can with certainty say what is "true" because indisputably "true" is having knowingly said one thing for another. And then, there is Bion's statement that the lie always has need of a thinker. But to what lie do we refer when we assume the significance of lying intended as fare mente? The mind (mente) becomes, thoughts come to mind, and beginning with this AUTOPOIETICO event a thinking subject constructs his statements. But both the event which occurs and the construction made of it is unleashed from one specific and singular terrain of cognitive and affective experience. There is no objective reality, no encounter with the world, which is not a hybrid, that is the result of a violence (ubris)¹ of individual preconception on perceived data. Every concept, every experience, is unknowingly a reference to that primary violence, and therefore no mental act is extraneous to the relativity and fortuitous relational nature in which it was formed and which it can be cultivated.

In this perspective also the analytical process is therefore by necessity false: whether addressed to oneself, or to the other, or to the relationship as a whole, it is in any case a question of being confronted with this type of ubris. Freud called this transference and made of this lying the foundation of his entire analytical practice. But the transference field had for him very narrow limits; it emerged only in the analytical situation and he qualified it as such. It exclusively concerned the patient and not the analyst; it was activated by drives, the repressed, primary experiences of which could be re-enacted in the analytical relationship as a result of an error of person favored by the concealing of the analyst (analyst-screen). The transference consisted only of the transferring of the object, with the subject of that operation remaining a constant of that operation. The transference was resolved with its elaboration aimed at a conscious recollection of the repressed events. Success in analysis coincided with the discovery of the deceptive character of the transference -- as well as any other symptomatic or
oneiric comportment (camouflage, shifting and similar), -- and therefore, with the triumph of the truth. There has been a century of debate in the field of psychoanalysis on these themes -- in all directions --, reinforcing the Freudian propositions as well as their relative extension.

The transference is deceptive in the sense that the person to whom reference is really made is concealed behind the semblance of the person present at that moment; the analyst. In the classic acceptation, the experience is always the subject's, subsequently rejected by the mind (repression) and successively reproposed, camouflaged. However, should the subjects of these multiple mental acts be included within the individual complexity? And should each one see the same thing hybridizing it subsequently with his own personal history in a totally singular way? And should the mental universe -- supposedly "one" in that it is an expression of the unique individual expressing it -- were rather a multiple one? Freud anticipated this vision with the construction of the second version, taking it up again with the concept of introjected identification in his affirmation in 1921 that individual psychology is above all social psychology due to the multitude of types of presence animating the psychic life of the individual. Thus, he concluding the following year (1922) that were the Ego merely a part of the Self modified through the influence of the perceptive system and the representation of the real external world in the psychic life, we would be dealing with a simple situation. However there was more to it than that.

This more, which implies sliding into another dimension, consists of the process of introjected identification, that is a process of an alteration of the Ego which we must describe as the rising of the object itself in the Ego. And subsequently, the process -- above all, in the early phases of development, is very frequent (Freud does not tell us why this should be only 'frequent in' and not 'constitutive to' the development of individual identity), and authorizes us to conclude that the character of the Ego is a sediment of the abandoned object investment, containing in it the history of those object choices (...) If and when these get the upper hand, or became too numerous, overwhelming and mutually incompatible, a pathological result is imminent (...) and perhaps the secret of cases of what are called 'multiple personality' consists in the fact that the single identifications take possession in turn of the consciousness of the individual.

The altered identification of the Ego, the progressive crowding of presences of intentionality (and thus not inert presences or mnemonic traces) in that area of experience of the individual connoted as his own internal world, and the expropriator character of this process -- the cornering of the individual awareness -- constitute the basis of a theoretical prospect of man, no longer intended as the result of reciprocal adjustment, more or less successful, between impersonal and only metaphorically anthropomorphic aspects: that is, the intra-psychic conflict is seen in group terms. In other words, between one emerging state of subject and one of otherness (composite) assumed as one's own, not only as a consequence of the fusional or symbiotic devices which characterize the most primitive mother-child relationship, but also as a consequence of the actively intentional inducements on the child by those making up his family universe -- who also, more often than not, are in conflict as regards the child itself, its birth, its education, the hegemony of its affects.

Thus, we have three orders of argumentation by which to prove the Italian language to be right as regards the word mente (mind) which can only be declined as mentire (to lie):

1. Each statement as to the empirical experience, and as to lived experience, is not the expression of an adaequatio intellectus rei, but is the fruit of a copula (ubris) between a pre-concept device and the thing from time to time relevant in present experience. Probably, the ruling cognitive expression referred to human knowledge implies the violent overwhelming which precognition (the dominus) exercises on the object which becomes known²;
2. The objects of the experience are for the most part mutually fungible, when they function as representatives (signifiant) of objects with which there has been a particular significant relationship. The term transference was coined to express the mentality of the patient before the analyst; however, this does not describe the analytical relationship (which would be rather the elaboration of the transference), since it can aid understanding the particular ways of any interpersonal relationship, or particular ideo-affective transference onto somatic or behavioral sets (the symptomatic structures, as manifestations of an intra-personal transference):
3. The identifying multitude greatly weakens the presumed sovereignty of the Ego. This weakening is not because the cultural figure of the intimate imaginary scenario is submitted to the presence of that natural figure, the Self, which avails itself of the economic power of drives. The fable of nature versus culture no longer holds; thus, the conflict should be understood at times as the reiteration of conflicts between identifying personages (also including the personage/son who at any moment can take hold of the individual consciousness, to paraphrase Freud³, and at times as the contrast between the transforming necessity induced by every emerging thought (as reorganizer of the individual's habitual relationship with the world) and conservative necessity pertinent to the identical foundation of individuality.

The practice of psychoanalysis cannot thus be exempt from the encumbrance of "fare mente", in the sense of mentire (of lying), given that this very practice rendered relevant the historicist, relational, possibilist dimensions (countering the meta-historic, monadic, causal dimensions constituting the metaphysical structure of meta-psychology). Every "discovered truth" is thus a deceit, in the sense of a fanciful approximation of "how things really are". The substantial difference between psychoanalytical "lying" and "lying" in any other cognitive sphere consists in the fact that the sciences do -- operating, that is, transformations in the world and in man's relationship with the world, discovering truth (daily more transitory and partial) having nothing to do with the substance of things but only their way of appearing before an increasingly more perceptive and powerful gaze availing itself of instruments rendering it increasingly more distant from the unclouded gaze of the child. The psychoanalyst instead has only that naked eye with which to open to the unknown, in his relationship with the patient, with all the stupor, the scandal, the doubt and anxiety, experienced by Freud at the beginning of his story. By naked eye, unclouded gaze, I intend a way of seeing which, rather than promoting a single scope, surprise and surprisingly, is open to comprehension and uninterested in the explanation, which is not caught up with the forms over the horizon, seeing (illuded by?) that which is beyond sensible limits. The gaze of the mystic, of the poet. A disarming gaze, therefore, one which induces in the one invested by it the dimension of the armor or arms with which he confronts the world, for the most part prejudicially hostile. A naked gaze renders naked and, in this circularity of references, where there had been constraint there is the possibility of growth. At that point, the reciprocal, hostile confrontation yields the way to an encounter in a reciprocal amorous interest: not ubris but eros, in the straining to conceive that which is one's own.

It was in all probability with this gaze that Freud began to look at his patients, finding himself at a certain point involved in affective situations so disturbing⁴ as to induce him to take up once more his "scientific" armor, screening that gaze with the naturalist and positivist culture of his times. Culture renders the disarming gaze neither more perceptive nor more profound; aiming it selectively towards particular horizons.

There is evidence of this brusque hybridization in Freud's correspondence with Fliess (Freud, 1887-1904). Following a correspondence lasting up until May 31, 1897, in which he explains to his mentor his theory on the historical-relational origin (roughly indicated as theory of trauma) of the neurosis, on September 21 of the same year, Freud writes that he has abandoned that point of view, presenting a set of considerations which are striking for their hastiness and superficiality, as though he wished to quickly eliminate a cumbersome cadaver. This occurred at the beginning of the process Freud defined "self-analysis", which beginning with the letter of September 21 to Flies, in which he admits that, on the weight of those considerations (above), he felt ready to abandon two things: the complete resolution of a neurosis and the certain knowledge of its etiology in infancy. He then admits to serious embarrassment at having failed in his attempt to reach a theoretical comprehension of repression and its play of forces (...) for this reason, the factor of hereditary predisposition recovers a sphere of influence from which he had decided to remove himself, in order to shed light on the neurosis.

Freud continues, pointing out that although the abandonment of his attempt to see in the symptom the translation of real experiences represented for him a "catastrophe", he was not at all depressed, and that although he would certainly not go about spreading the news to the Philistines, the sensation he experienced was one more of triumph than defeat.

But whose triumph, and -- albeit subdued -- whose defeat? If we apply here Freud's idea on the conflict between identifying presences, we could hypothesize that the triumph is of the father, dead only a few months, menaced by the son, of having his "sins" of seducing his children unmasked⁵ and the defeat is Freud's own, in the sense of emerging subject, that with this veritable act of contrition suffocates his own word in order to conform to the episteme of the fathers. If we can believe that Freud's self-analysis was developed more as a "reaction to the death of the father" than as creative reorganization of his knowledge, we can be justified in seeing all the successive Freudian constructions (theoretical and constitutional) as battlefields between paternal positions (and/or filial positions) and authentically innovative thought. This because all experience and effort is based on the conflict between conservation and change: these two teleological polarities appear as orders of necessity inherent to the neotenic or embryonic condition (see following) of man, and they would appear to be spoken respectively by one or the other of the two semantic declinations included in the concept of conscience: the necessity of conservation is for the most part proposed by moral conscience (Gewissen), while the necessity for change is mainly proposed by the neotenic conscious (Bewusstsein), confined by Freud to the function of perception, but which extends to every aspect of the formation of thought and its every action.

After having made his moral conscience prevail, disguised by scientist statements, in its dramatic abjuration of the neurotic, he returned often, if only briefly, to the problem; for example, in 1910, when he defended his right to be scandalized by the results of an investigation which conceded to fortuitousness of the family constellation so decisive an influence on the life of a man. He added that it was naturally mortifying to think that a just God and a benevolent Providence did not protect us more effectively from similar influences at the most vulnerable stages of our lives⁶.

Freud reached the highest point of his reflections on the conscience (as the result of a combination of moral tradition and original cognitive act) in PSICOLOGIA DELLE MASSE E ANALISI DEL'IO (1921) when, rethinking the hypnotic suggestion, he affirms that the fact that the Ego experiences as in a dream all that which the hypnotist commands and affirms, and he reminds us of the obligation to remedy an omission of ours; that of not having included among the functions of the Ego ideal also the exercise of the examination in reality. It should not surprise us, he continued, that the Ego should consider as real a perception if the psychic aspect normally appointed the task of the examination of reality pronounces in favor of that reality.

Later on, he would advance a decidedly historicist hypothesis on the nature of the Ego ideal and thus on the "group" basis of the Gewissen and its power largely determined in the examination of reality, in confrontation with the limited nature of the Bewusstsein: Every single is a constitutive element of many masses, it is -- by means of identification -- subject to multilateral ties and has built its own ideal of the Ego based on various models. Each single is therefore part of many collective souls (...) and, beyond these, can raise itself to a minimum of autonomy and originality.

In this passage, he makes no other mention of the pathology of "multiple personality" and treats the identifying skein as constitutive element of identity (or transgenerational identity) of the individual, who must disentangle himself to that "minimum" extent to which he autonomously can. However, as at the beginning of his "self-analysis", when he hurriedly liquidated his neurotic, he repeats the same restoration of common sense, returning to the order of the dominant episteme, with two very marginal notes. The first was added as a footnote in PSICOLOGIA DELLE MASSE E ANALISI DELL'IO (1923), in which he affirms that as regards the validity of that attribution (the examination of the reality of the Ego ideal), one doubt seemed reasonable, and required an in-depth discussion.

The doubt and the resulting in-depth examination would never again be approached either by Freud or any of his followers. To the contrary, the argument would be peremptorily closed by Freud (or, rather, his "collective souls", his moral conscience) with a second note, which appears in L'IO E L'ES (1922) in which he hastily declares that his attribution made of the examination of reality to this super-ego was erroneous and required a rectification. The fact that the examination of reality remains a task of the Ego itself should correspond to the relationships of the Ego with the world of perception..

In no other point in his works, does Freud mention with such severity and originality the possibility of intending the conflict outside the limits of an adaptive philosophy according to the economic laws of drives, and contributes with specific discipline to the crisis of PRESENZIALISMO COSCIENZIALISTICO with which Descartes believed it possible to define, once and for all, the assumption of a metaphysical truth of thought: in the measure in which the subject of the cogito is also other in relation to the Ego represented as a monolith, the cogito ergo sum could thus be rendered more complex: Someone thinks in me, and that which I see and think of me is then the product of the thought of the other in me. However, in thinking that another thinks in me, in some way I identify, and it is in this identifying -- minimally and never totally and definitively -- that an adventure opened for me never previously conceived of elsewhere, a beginning in which I am about to be.

I should think that the "triumph" of the "collective souls" in Freud affected a systematic mutilation of his most autonomous and original thought. In MEMORIE DI UN MALATO DI NERVI, Daniel P. Schreber, the paranoid upon whom Freud constructed a bizarre theory on the genesis of homosexuality, extraordinarily stated that God in person was on his side in His struggle against him (Schreber)! However, Freud, or any other human being for that matter, will have experienced something of the sort, even if in the place of the figure of God we find the complex figure of Family Tradition, cloaked in the "strong" positivist scientism which already at that time showed signs of weakening. Freud then transposed the violence of his rejection of that in himself which could threaten the stability of his internal institutions onto his method of managing the psychoanalytical institution he created. His anathema flung at those "followers" of his guilty of offering obtuse resistance (like incurable patients) to the truths sanctioned by his "science" are familiar enough (1914). This transference like way of seeing the psychoanalytical institution still constitutes the larger part of Freudian patrimony -- the most original part of which is suffocated by the monumentality of the International Psychoanalytical Association, with its stamp of North-American, scientist pragmatism, observed by the institutional cultures of various nations. The affiliation of analysts to their national societies and those of the IPA follow a typically family model (is this the pattern or the patron of psychoanalysis?), by which candidates are submitted to a judgement of conformity to what would be the "psychoanalytical truth". That occurs through a process of indoctrination, increasingly meticulous and prolonged, of the trainees, consisting in the insidious procedure of didactic analysis; the patient/candidate is welcomed into the community of "mature" analysts only upon providing proof of having made "his own" the vision of his analyst. That which the mind (mente) of the analyst knows and believes to have ascertained experimentally (a theoretical model and not the mystery of the soul) must become known and believed by the patient, who will adhere to the signified of his conflicts according to the model proposed by his analyst, thus exchanging his own truth-in-the-process-of-becoming with the "truth" of the theory borne by interpretations.

On the other hand, the value of Freud's entire work consists in an extraordinary demonstration of a process of self-other-formation. This process is developed in the space which Freud opened between Self and self, between self and his patients, between self and his mentor Fliess and between self and the community of psychoanalysts. In this single, vast relational space, although formally distinct in various settings, the germs of Freudian thought were initially produced. In this polymorphous womb, confused lumps of mental material progressively took shape, although often enough the womb was shaken by abortive shocks. The extraordinary merit of his work consists in his providing us with documentation, step by step, on the conflict between his necessity of conservation of the conscience and his necessity of creative transformation , and his offering us thus an exceptionally vast and dramatic panorama of man's toils intended to raise us to a minimum level of autonomy and originality.

The Italian word formazione (training) comes from the Latin translation of the Greek morfo-genesi, the model of which paradigmatically comes to us from biology. It is a question of that process for which some undifferentiated cells develop in such a way as to create organs and tissue which are extremely differentiated and capable of thus giving new form to that lump of living material making up an embryo in its primitive phases. However, while in biology morphogenesis leads -- by means of the most diverse metamorphic stages -- to a complete and stabile form, in the affairs of the mind, the forms it assumes in the development of individuals of culture and organizations are never perfect (according to a philogenetic telos) or stabile. This incompleteness of human morphogenesis has caused the converging of modern thought (philosophical, biological, and anthropological) onto the concept of lack as that condition which requires a continuous and specific self-reorganization of man as single embryonic animal. The neotenoic concept refers in a far more pregnant way to this anthropological vision, because this concept is very frequently utilized by psychologists and psychoanalysts to indicate that specific dependence of man on the mother in order to survive, which is far more prolonged in man than for any other animal species. In these terms, the neoteny would indicate a particularly slow development of the biological and mental conditions necessary for the individual's self-sufficiency, and this phenomenon is then called in cause as a condition which would favor the very complex maturing of man and also the onset of infantile behavior or experiences at an adult age. In this case of hybridization, a preconception which sees man at the summit of the scale of evolution -- in the sense of the most perfect of animals -- exercises a violence on a lexical term, bending it to its own anthropological construction. In zoology, in fact, the term neoteny indicates that phenomenon for which certain individuals of certain species of invertebrates reach a reproductive capacity in the larval period, before undergoing the metamorphosis which leads to the definitive adult conformation. In some cases, this character becomes stable and is genetically transmitted. Applied to man, this term indicates the fact that he, in his stable condition of embryonic incompleteness, is able not only to sexually reproduce, but also and specifically, to symbolically conceive of the world from the most tender age, to exercise thus his peculiar creativity ⁷.

The embryonic lack of man consists therefore, both of the insufficient specialization of his organism as regards the environment and his indefinite cognitive opening. These lacks coexist, and are two ways of manifesting of the embryonic quality; that is, they are not in a cause and effect relationship, in the sense that the cognitive opening does not originate in the adaptive incompleteness (or vice versa). Umberto Galimberti (1999) examines the mythological and philosophical lineage (Plato, Thomas Acquinas, Kant, Herder, Schopenauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, on up to the ample documentation provided by A. Gehlen) of the representation of the state of lack of man, as regards animal "perfection",
considering technology the remedy which man produces in the (mistaken) conviction that with it he will finally render "perfect" his structural biological-cognitive imperfection. To the extent to which psychoanalytical anthropology does not consider the structural lack of man (it uses widely the term lack when referring to objects of drives, or the regulative order of speech or the paternal function), analytical practice appears for the most part as technical remedy and "treatment", availing itself of the deceptive representation that there is an object-mind (mente) to be treated with particular manipulatory procedures. In this point of convergence of psychoanalysis into the variegated field of psychotherapies, psychoanalysis loses all specificity, while any other more explicitly guiding or persuasive technique proves to be therapeutically more effective. It is in this context that the psychoanalytical market must shortly become exhausted.

We should then think of psychoanalysis as an isomorphic practice to the embryonic condition of man; as a relational process in a continual state of becoming, the interlocutors of which are simultaneously involved in a formative, morphogenetic experience. We have seen how relevant for Freud himself was his state of conscience (his "collective souls" as regards the "autonomy and originality" of his thought; self-analysis proved to be an exercise in listening more to the voices of the fathers than of personal, germinal ideas. These ideas, for the most part, were prematurely rejected or domesticated with metapsychological jargon.

The experience of Bion, who in the final years described himself as an "analyst in training", shows us a process of self-other-formation, in which self-analysis -- as an experience of reconsideration of his entire life -- made possible a radical restructuring of his thought. During the last decade of his life, after having dedicated all his talent, up until the late 1960s, to constructing a gigantic hybridization between what was already known of psychoanalysis (with particular reference to the work of Melanie Klein) and his creative daimon, he became aware of the imminent existential catastrophe, which he summarizes representatively at the end of his last work (1979) as his having for his entire life been imprisoned, frustrated and forced by common sense, reason, memory desire and -- the biggest bugbear of all -- understanding and being understood. This was an attempt to rebel, to bid a farewell to all that. That attempt was represented by Memory of the Future (M.F. 1975-77-79), a book which he described as a psycho-embryonic attempt to write an embryo-scientific description of a voyage from birth to death, asphyxiated and oppressed by the pre-maturity of 'knowledge', 'experience', 'glory' and self-intoxicating self-satisfaction.

Not having yet read the third volume of A Memoir of the Future, The Dawn of Oblivion (1979), I will avail myself largely of the considerable contribution of F. Di Paola (1995) in his guide to the reading or rereading of Bion, which is unequalled as to completeness and depth. Di Paola tells us that, during the last ten years of his life, Bion was committed to contesting radically the jargon which psychoanalysts (himself included) had created and adopted in order to expound its own logic. Di Paola also states however that logic has never been truly a theory of thought (pensiero), but rather a theory of the thought about (pensato)" substantially limited to the description of the statics of thought -- to the post factum justification, based on axioms and deductive rules which have been established and remain, strictly speaking, an open question.⁸

At the point at which Bion addresses this dynamic, he proposes an "embryo-logy of the mind", consisting of the "microscopic" observation of the devices of the mind as mind-in-formation. These devices appear as larval ideas, not yet defined in any concept; rough ideas which must be "domesticated" before encountering culture and its institutions. The already known, whatever the syntactic, relational or institutional forms, can be a container capable of nurture the emerging, providing it with rational and aesthetic instruments with which to take form. On the other hand, however, the emerging -- to the measure in which it threatens the stability of the already known, anticipating its change which Bion defines emphatically as "catastrophic" -- may not find an adequate reception, and thus, at every step of evolution, it is in danger of being suppressed at birth, becoming 'still-born' (MF, III, 446). In other words, a fetal idea can kill itself or be killed, and not only metaphorically speaking (II,417-18). Bion addressed the conflict between the not yet known (the fetal idea, the thought without thinker) and the already known (the establishment internal/external) in the same perspective he proposed between necessity of change (of formation in a morphogenetic sense) and necessity of conservation, developing on oneself the drama anticipated by Freud with his striking image of the individual raising himself from his own "collective souls" to a minimum of autonomy and originality. Di Paola, commenting on A Memoir of the Future (op. cit.), states that "imagining himself 'buried' under his own jargon, he anticipates the vision of a "Bion" submersed under the cumulus of stereotypes, "grids", "vertices", darts and male-female symbols, clumsy "group" phraseology -- in short, an avalanche, of the well-known "Bionese". Prophetic anticipation, considering the historical irony with which the 'satanic' powers that be (MF, II, 302) of the jargon take revenge on their most strenuous opponent, inflicting on him, in a kind of lex talionis retaliation, the punishment of massive jargonization." He goes on to say that "the Satanic Jargonieur" was offended: in some way the psychoanalytical jargon began to be eroded by eruptions of clarity. He was forced to seek refuge in narrative. Camouflaged (disguised) as fiction, the truth, in bits, slipped through (MF, II, 302).

But of what truth does Bion speak? Obviously not a rationally constructed truth, which would by necessity be lying, apart from the logical model adopted. Bion speaks of the "thing in itself"-which-becomes; which at the moment it should be de-finite (de-finita)would be simply finished (finita), terminated, dead. He thus felt constrained to "find refuge in fiction", but in a type of fiction which was unique. According to De Paola, A Memoir of the Future, as a drama in three acts, documents a psychology. Demonstrating to the reader how many contrasts, dilemmas, 'explosive' risks (catastrophe anxiety is not only theorized), what Dante-like Purgatory (MF, II, 349, 418) psychic change cost the author, Bion is no longer addressing the reader in need of partitioned notions, intellectual cavils which would alone replace (and defend against) the responsibility of a different experience with themselves, the 'courage' of a placing in question of one's own existence (and therefore, when it is the case, of the way of performing a certain occupation). Saying who writes also 'says' indirectly who reads.

Di Paola also remembers Harris Williams who in the Intern. Journ. Of Psychoan. (1983, 10) wrote that placing in question his own prejudices and jargon, his historical 'vertices', inevitably placed in question ours, as readers, as well -- the particular idea that we have of him, and perhaps also of ourselves.

In these comments is the announcement of the ("catastrophic"?) change which psychoanalysis could encounter, if we wish to give sense to the narrative perspectives which have developed over the past decade in the psychoanalytical movement⁹, availing ourselves in particular of the re-founding experience of Bion. The word psychagogy, which appears often in the writings of Bion, indicates a religious or magical ceremony which, in certain cultures, was intended to evoke the soul of the deceased, normally for reasons of divination: a presence, locked in its past, is evoked, rendered vividly present, conducted (agein means to conduct) into the present, in order that he predict the future for us. We might see "a memoire of the future" as a poetic locution referring to a psychagogical practice. The "defunct", the past, the already known is the many-strata, relational foundation of individual identity and has a specific power of attraction, assimilates every idea, every vision, every dream generated by autòs (autopoiesi, auto-nomia, aut-enticità), which attempts to reorganize incessantly the neotenic couplings of human beings. The Freudian "unconscious" as a space of repression, is totally an already known which makes itself present, beyond a critical awareness, as an a priori law, the law of the defunct, the moral conscience. Each time that this "unconscious" is activated, the future is assimilated to the past, and divination predicts only the already been which, in more or less an identical way, repeats itself. If this unconscious is observed by one who, in his turn, is immersed in his own already known, it can be only confirmed -- perhaps using the most sophisticated rational arguments which, in psychoanalysis, constitute the armament of "satanic jargon". In the opposite view, it is the defunct instead (literally, "he who has completed the time of his life") who is rendered present in order to conclude the time of his death. Concluding here implies the possibility of his heir's not remaining con-fused with him, implies taking that reflective, critical aesthetic distance in which he can "minimally" affirm his originality. However, in that the past concludes the time of its own death, not only must it be remembered, it must also be evoked, called out from the opacity of the unconscious, and interrogated. As of a mother, her dreams, her fears, her loves, as the suffering in the attempt to raise oneself from the "collective souls", as the unexpressed was entrusted to the children so that they might find the way of her expression? If we succeed in listening to the voice of the mother, thus evoked, who alludes to her own unexpressed which, becoming transcended in the child, searches for her way to enter into the world. Then it happens that in the son there will be the roots of her personal originality. Originality does not imply the impossible being beyond one's own history, but a singular way of taking up once more one's own history (one's own origins) not to repeat it, but to trans-form it, offering it to that present which renders future the still unknown past and not the already known unconscious. Bion indicates often a connection between that which is conceived as emerging though and that which is conceived as embryo in the maternal womb.

According to De Paola, at the maximum metaphoric level, there is an analogy between gestation/birth of the fetus/infant and gestation/birth of the idea: in both cases, there is a time of ripening and a time of precipitation (catastrophic change), just as there exist immemorial vestiges which are nevertheless still active, between that which was virtuality and that which will be event.

As the embryo, as it forms, induces a transformation in the maternal body, up to the "catastrophic" point of birth, so the fetal idea threatens to transform the cultural "body" in which it was produced. In both cases, the container of the thing being born experiences a deep crisis of destabilization, of deformation in relation to the form up until that point assumed as stable identify. The anxiety which emerged legitimizes the use of the adjective "catastrophic" to describe a transforming change, and the rejection of part of the "body" container is an immediate remedy for this ill.

In order that an embryo may proceed with its development in an environment which contains ("sufficiently good", Winnicott would say), it is necessary that the cognitive body be equipped with that negative capacity already formulated by Keats and then by Bion. It is the capacity to tolerate change and is founded on the shifting of the existential center of gravity towards the future and becoming. The mind which does not reject its own conception has faith (Bion connects this irrational certainty to genius and mystic) in its ability to find itself once more, grown in its own continuity, beyond change. In this psycho-embryonic process Bion distinguished two figures: "pre-mature" and "em-mature". While he connotes as premature mind which holds firm its center of gravity of the already known, he defines as em-mature the fetal idea, in that it proceeds towards ripening¹⁰. But more than seeing a relationship between two subjects (such as mother and child), he sees the relationship between to stages of overall experience of a subject: the human subject in its entirety is embryonic, immersed in an indefinite morphogenetic process, and when he embraces this condition and, trembling but with sufficient faith, he faces the new, he will be em-mature, while he will be pre-mature every time he retreats before the event taking refuge one more in his pre-concepts, in the jargon, in the conformance to pre-constituted codes.

The analytical practice, in this perspective, as traits isomorphic to the embryonic condition of man, in that it is a morphogenetic practice which involves, personally and reciprocally, analyst and patient who are bound by a common evocation of their own "deceased" (of their own history, ideology, common sense, theories, psychoanalytical knowledge) and by the common effort to explore their nature -- one, one hundred, one thousand times -- until the coagulation of the unexpressed of the already known is not utilized as organizer of new forms of existence. The analyst will have confirmation of the fact of being authentically in training (formation) if he succeeds in tolerating the provisory nature of theoretic models, incessantly revisited in that they are always approximate, implicitly contradictory, historically contingent. This is the only material that he is offered, in the light of his relational experience with the patient, as plastic material, in the process of becoming, in the expectation of new reorganizations. If he succeeds in communicating this tension to the patient, then the patient will feel it in himself as an invitation to follow his example, with the same courage; thus, and according to Harris Williams (see citation above), Bion assumed a psychagogic function for us as readers. Recognizing our capacity to not remain trapped in our "pre-maturity", we will facilitate the emergency and the exploiting of the "em-maturity" of the patient and, definitively, the relational structure of our conversation.

This specifically psychoanalytical pattern could then free us from the condition of being one of many ingredients in the psychological soup, to which with apt irony Hillman referred (see citation). Our metaphor of psychagogy should be understood not in a transitive way in the mould of "pedagogy", but in a reflective-communicational way. The analyst is called on to evoke his own past or his own discipline filed away, not to know its archeological secrets (although there could be even improvised recollections or clarifications), not to obtain the grace of renewed certainty in exchange for renewed fidelity, but because in making the past, successively, to bring about the time of its small deaths is to transform it into germinating originality. In this perspective, "self-analysis" should be seen as a formative-transforming process which occurs in the space between many subjects, personal and institutional, and substantially centered on the force of distinguishing between the imposing voices of moral conscience and the faint voice of one's own creative conscience. This evocative tension of the analyst is transmitted to the patient (and not his personal history or doctrine: although the analyst will mention it, this is not the point), and in the fluctuating communication "fetal ideas" of which the analyst knows little or nothing and which can find in the mind of the patient the most suitable environment for their maturing. There is no analyst, not too rigidly "pre-mature", who has not seen expressed in the words or choices of the patient, fleeting intuitions had perhaps much earlier and then forgotten. The patient is invited to maintain this evocative tension, with its double reflective and communicational declination and -- from the circularity of the interrogatives which bind the two interlocutors -- transformations are produced, retreating, sudden blindness, and new expressions. When I recalled Hillman's concept of pattern (patron or father), I was not referring to a specific psychoanalytical theory. The pragmatic, psychagogic model is a relational, historicist, hermeneutic model, it is a procedure applicable to any cultural structure instituted in the already completed formation of the individual identity of the analyst. The clearer and more complex the theory embraced by the analyst during his didactic training, the more material there will be available for his neotenic reorganizing capacity. Thus, not only is a deep knowledge of a theoretical system necessary, but in order that this be evoked as a "dearly departed", it must be reconsidered lovingly. Probably if I had not loved, and did not still love, Freud in his human and scientific drama, I would not have succeeded in "evoking him" so constantly and with such passion. In absence of love, our Authors will remain present in our loyalty and in our professional qualification, and we ourselves will be tempted to conserve them as severe judges to whom to entrust the certainty of the road we have chosen. However, as Bion said, the "satanic jargon" will envelope every thought of ours, crushing at birth any possible birth of an idea. It is only in the faith of our becoming, through the thousands of rebirths and deaths of our pasts, that it is worth living and dedicating ourselves to this "impossible" craft of ours.

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NOTES

1. hybrid (generated by individuals of different species) derives from the Greek ubrizein, meaning exceed, surpass, overcome confines, and also rape.
2. F. Nietzche (1884) maintains that the entire cognitive apparatus is an apparatus of abstraction and simplification -- not directed to the knowledge of things, but to the dominion of things.
3. Following this Freudian perspective, there would be no sense in speaking of a regression at infantile phases, but of a reactivation of the figure of the child equal to that which occurs in the reactivation of the parental figures. The difference consists of the fact that when it is the latter of these who are reactivated, they can be seen as expressions of the quality of being adult.
4. The perturbation is produced on two fronts: that of the relationship with the patient and that of his relation with his own internal/external institutions, violated since he began discovering the family histories of his patients.
5. Immediately after the death of the father, Freud began reflecting on some of the neurotic manifestations shown by a brother and some sisters, and suspected that they had been in some way involved sexually with the father (E. Jones, 1962); one of his own vaguely incestuous dreams of his daughter Mathilde seemed to confirm that the seductive attitude were actually very frequent in the behavior of the parent. This development of similar would provide a reverse sense to the myth of Oedipus, placing the figure of Laius at the center of the tragedy.
6. In UN RICORDO D'INFANZIA DI LEONARDO DA VINCI (Freud, 1910), he seems, in the context of a completely meta-psychological discourse, at a certain point returning to the tension of the 'scandal' and added that this stressing the importance of the most remote experiences did not imply a devaluation of the influence of those later ones, but while later impressions speak during analysis with a reasonably clear voice through the mouth of the patient, in favor of the rights of children it is usually the physician analyst who must raise his voice.
7. I have considered deeply this problem (D. Napolitani, 1988, 1995), reconsidering the literature on the subject, with particular attention to J. von Uexkull and L. Kriszat, 1967, A. Gehlen, 1983, E. Morin, 1984, 1987, 1989, and Maturana and Varela, 1985, 1987.
8. Psychoanalytical logic follows a causal physiological model which is included in a cosmogonical representation, following a paradigmatic process inherited from ancient Greece. Of cosmogony, Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1972) state: "Instead of recounting the successive births, cosmogony defines the first, constitutive principles of being; from historical account it is transformed into a system which expounds the profound structure of the real. The problem of genesis, becoming, changes in the attempt to grasp, beyond the changeable, the stable, the permanent, the identical."
9. This applies to all the books of Spence (1982). Historical truth and fictional truth.
10. The prefix "em-" should not be confused with the "im-" of immature, which is a negation, being a neologism coined by Bion to indicate an "about to be".

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REFERENCES

Bion, W. R., A Memoir of the Future, Karnac, London (1984).
MF I, 2975, The Dream, transl. Ital. Il sogno, Cortina (1993).
MF II, 1977, The Past Presented, transl. Ital. Presentare il pasato, Cortina (1998).
MF III, 1979, The Dawn of Oblivion.
De Paola, F., Il tempo della mente. Saggio sul pensiero di Wilfred Bion, Il Sestante (1995)-
Foucault, M., Le Parole e le cose, transl. Ital., Rizzoli (1978)-
Freud, S., L'Interpretazione dei sogni, transl. Ital., in Opere, 3, Boringhieri (1900).
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Morin, E., La vita della vita, transl. Ital., Feltrinelli (1987).
Morin, E., La conoscenza della conoscenza, transl. Ital., Feltrinelli (1989).
Napolitani, D., Verso un'antropologia gruppoanalitica. Al di là della dicotomia individuo-gruppo, Riv. It. Gruppoan., II, 2 (1988).
Napolitani, D., Si è per esser-ci. Riflessioni epistemologiche sul soggetto collettivo, con particolare riguardo all'opera di E. Morin, Riv. It. Gruppoan., X, 1 (1995).
Nietzsche, F., Frammenti postumi 1882-1884, tranls. Ital., in Opere., Vol. II, 1, Adelphi (1986).
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