The first session, the real one

A while later, when I had been dutifully turning up for two sessions a week, I felt dissatisfied with the leisurely pace that had settled in. As I stepped out from the elevator on the landing in front of my analyst’s practice one day, I almost caught my hand in the old-fashioned door. Lying down on the couch, moments later, I complained, “This is going nowhere. Also, I almost chopped off my fingers in the sliding door of your elevator!” This outburst failed to provoke the sympathetic response I had hoped for. So I picked up where I had left things the previous session. It all evolved around my disgust with food when I was a child. “The only person who understood I simply couldn't swallow my food was Mrs. Crawley (the lady who looked after me when I was a child),” I said. “She used to put out her hand in front of my mouth and tell me to ‘spit it out’ and throw it away.’ And then it clicked: the hand that Mrs. Crawley held outstretched before me had three missing fingers (she had had an accident at work when she was young). The poetry of free association had linked the elevator and Mrs. Crawley’s hands.

At that moment, psychoanalysis started for me. The first session, the real one, isn’t necessarily the first one in time. That much I could have guessed. But I needed that perfect moment disconnected from chronological time. The perfect moment took place that day when words from the past were given a new life in the present. When it became meaningful once again to “spit it out.”



Πηγή: Απόσπασμα από το κείμενο της France Jaigu "Two layers of time: Experiencing the first session", από το πρώτο τεύχος με τίτλο "We're all mad here" της σειράς βιβλίων Culture/Clinic 1: Applied lacanian psychoanalysis, εκδόσεις University of Minnesota Press

Εικόνα: Michele Bitetto