Laura. Or the sexual boundaries of need

Abstract

In this paper the author deals with the problem of the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis and starting from a clinical case develops different theoretical perspectives. The patient in question, who refuses to use the couch, comes to analysis four times a week and states that he will use the couch «once the analysis is finished». The author starting from this clinical case and Freudian statements,
says that once the analytical rule has been pronounced «say everything that comes into your head», this has no universal character since it conserves the vestiges of a singular history, the discovery of repression in psychoneurosis. The author therefore asks: What does the rule «say everything that comes into your head» mean to the person to whom it is addressed?
He perceives the framework as a «borderline being», like the ego, as a projection on the surface of analysis.
Its later approximation to the position of Winnicott (holding, regression to a state of dependence, etc.), reaches a point of divergence, when Winnicott abandons the Freudian perspective, and seeks to isolate and treat outside of the life drive, outside of infantile sexuality, a psychic spacehuman environment which fails in the first moments of life. At the same time he indicates the relevance of Winnicott, underlining the importance of being able to address oneself to the patient in his own dialect.
The paper also includes ideas of Laplanche, relating to the theory of seduction, suggesting that the analytic device, apart from its artificiality, reproduces the «fundamental anthropological situation», that is the unconscious seduction of the adult towards the child, in which its effects are mixed with the relationship of care and tenderness, which accompany the first moments of life.
Finally it suggests that the fundamental rule of «say all that comes into your head…», leads towards auto-erotic thinking and in this sense states that «The objective is not to introduce an absent infantile sexuality, once more the excess of the “necessities” are witness to their compulsive presence, but rather to restore and even to invent its plasticity. Should not all the technical playing of Winnicott be interpreted in this sense on occasions? Infantile sexuality is not only an object of psychoanalysis; it is a tool for it».