...........apeira
diktua Kupridi

......inextricable
nets of Cyprid
Ibico

I would like to turn to the past like the Angelus Novus painted by Paul Klee, looking at it with the awareness of a wild wind driving us towards the future (1). For this reason I choose to tell the history of analytic psychodrama in Italy not in an “objective” chronological order what, on the other hand, is possible to find in several texts (2 ), but through this “micro-history” which I am able to recreate today after that I have experienced it for about forty years. At the beginning, it is a story taking place between Rome and Paris geographical spaces connected by a train or a plane, but spaces of mind, too, where theories, methods and techniques met and became a job and, so, a destiny, my own destiny. The story started at the end of the Sixties. It was in 1967, in fact that Gennie and Paul Lemoine, who already worked in Paris as charter members of the Society of studies of practical and theoretic Psychodrama (S. E. P. T.), started organising therapy, training and supervision groups in Italy , too. In 1972 the Lemoines will issue a text which is still today fundamental: “ Psychodrama . Moreno 's psychodrama reread in the light of Freud and Lacan”. It is a brilliant synthesis of their theories.

I had had my training as a psychoanalyst in Rome , passing through the institutions: infantile neuropsychiatry, juvenile Court, and the earliest centres for educational psychology in areas on the outskirts of the city. My meeting with the Lemoines will be decisive. My interest in psychoanalysis will lead me more and more inside the psychoanalytic aspects of psychodrama, in a research work which keeps us in touch even today. I'll follow them in their wanderings as masters to different Italian cities; I owe them the jump to Paris and my cultural milestone in Lacan. In Paris, on the other hand, another master of mine lived and worked: Jacques Lecoq, I have been forever in debt to since my youth not only for the strictness of teaching of Theatre Movement “ but for both a teaching horizontal journey through the geodramatic extensions and a vertical journey: the raise of play level and the exploration of poetical depths”(3)

In the Seventies psychodrama groups flourished in different Italian towns the Morenian heritage was evident but as the training of psychodramatists required, according to the Lemoines, an individual analysis, at the end of their personal training, the different therapists made research headway following the experience they regarded as the most. So Jungian, Lacanian and Bionian trends rose.

In the Eighties the psychodrama of Argentine School spread in throughout Italy I took part in an experience of psychodrama conducted by Mauricio Abbadi, who will answer an interview of mine some years later (4)

In order to collect different experiences and researches I took part, with Ottavio Rosati in the foundation, in 1970 of the review Acts of psychodrama. The richness of the meeting of psychodrama with psychoanalysis was possible by means of the flexibility of the Morenian model, flexibility which permitted to extrapolate the psychodramatic techniques of the model itself, in order to weave them with different therapeutic methods and approaches. Rosati will follow a critical course in comparison with the experience of Freudian psychodrama which will lead him, also thanks to his meeting with Zerka Moreno to become a promoter of the Morenian active technique. In 1985 he will edit the first Italian edition of the Handbook of Psychodrama by Moreno ; in 1986, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Pirandello's death, he will succeed in having Zerka's.

Instead, my path was different, marked by my meeting, as I said, with the Lemoines and J. Lancan's school. After partaking in the continuous debate which led in 1981 to the foundation of the S. I. P. s. A. (5) As, I worked more and more for training I arrived at Apeiron (6) association that I founded and presided. Our analytic perspective didn't take anything away from Moreno 's richness of thought and invention, so often plagiarised as well as little recognised .So, I finish these considerations of mine about him quoting Rosati's beautiful expressions I completely share. “ This scientist, who liked children more than actors and actors more than intellectuals was able to summarise intuition, thought and feelings, what made him enviable and troublesome as few among social scientists of his time (...) the stone of scandal was to bring in science passion, in therapy playing, inside the audience action on scene. His revolution didn't concern psychiatry only, but the history of drama and his greatness is such that he can be compared only to the greatest dramatist in the century: Pirandello . (7)

As we experienced to day the theoretic structure of analytic psychodrama , in Apeiron, is centred on the daily work of the individual, who in the meeting with the Other ruffles and at the same time orders the individual organisation, in front of “a direction of cure. All this is transmitted to generations of therapists through a permanent training, Seminars, Supervision, Cartels, that also constitutes the basis of the teaching project of the training school we partake, as Sipsa-Coirag, according to what Law provides. Coherently with this theoretic description, we consider desirable for the psychodramatist's training an experience of individual psychoanalysis.

We present here a schematic statement how we practice psychodrama, in order to explain what we are referring to. The group is made up of 10-12 subjects, who have no real relationships in their daily lives. The group meets once a week for an hour and half in the presence of two therapists who alternate in the function of both animator and observer. It was an innovation of mine introducing, whenever it was possible, a second observer; the two read one after another their texts: this dispositive permits the constitution of an added observer, but it is also an account of the fact that there isn't the Truth of the text, but a truth which can be perceived through difference.

The group is always open to new elements, which prevents it from closing in itself assuming an adaptable aspect. One can be admitted to it through preliminary talks with the therapists to permit the demand and the knotting of transference over them.

In psychodrama, so as we experience it, scenes can be acted drawn from real life and dreams only. The animator, after listening to the subject, invites to act an event just happened or the story of a dream. The patient chooses among the members of the group his/her auxiliary ego, who are invested by the desire of the unconscious. In the development of the play an “exchange of roles” may happen with one of the auxiliary egos. During the play a “doubling ( which is the only moment when the look is set outside the play because whoever can put behind the shoulders of any character and speak instead of him/her), the “a solo” ( a monologue the player can act in a loud voice as a moment of truth).

The game played, the choice of co-actors and dubbing are questioned. The animator, staying a little away, to make easier the shared plays, leads the patient to be surprised through the interpretation which has the speed and the condensation of a metaphor. After the scenes played, at the end of the session, observation gives back by passing through the plays performed, the speech of the group.

The presence of two therapists inside psychodrama is due to the trial of a solution of the primary enigma, through the set back of the play. All that can happen because the animator is like the sphinx that puts the riddle at the centre, a play which becomes the matrix of the chance of thinking for everyone, knotted into the speech of the other. At the end only, thanks to the observer embodying with the telling, the phantom of he who dissolves the enigma everyone has just asked, so it is possible to listen to the signifiers permitting the speech born inside the group to be still open so that it can be changed into a new interpretable story.

Among the different models of possible groups, each of them with its own configuration (psychoanalysis “of” group as a whole: “in” group, “through” the group), so I identify myself with the project of Apeiron stating: “the dispositive of analytic Psychodrama (....) is distinguished as an open group there where the subject, taking part in it, is at stake, starting from his /her own demand his/her own path of knowledge, never the same for everyone but made up of his/her own time of “training and relating to “the construction of his/her own analysis”(8)

So the analysis of the subject, in-group through psychodrama, is regarded as that dispositive characterising the analytic relationship in the “individual” therapy, there where we speak of a “couple”. Even there in fact, in spite of the “physical” truth of the couple therapist-patient, the cell of any possible group is at work, regarded as a function: in fact the one who is on the couch speaks to someone who is in front of him/her just as the other, behind him /her, listens to someone who is in front (of you). Even here, therefore, there is which of the members has the function of speaking, which of listening to auxiliary egos members, the observer, who has been put in charge of the cure ...In the passage from story-telling to dramatisation, so psychodrama shows only that particular group of “psychodrama” that there is before every individual session.

It is interesting to remember that Sartre had already described the group as a movement produced by the fight against serial activity and alienation, stating that the relation I-you isn't existent out of the mediation of the group, which modifying its members is, in its turn, modified. In the relationship I-Group there is always “another” who is at work as third element It's the group which, starting from the small group of the family for the child, acts as a mediator between man and the world. The result of this mediation is an acquired mutuality leading to the creation of a container, regarded as a space that the group produces for itself, through a continuous fight. This is a process where every participant can integrate with a group that he/she contributes to build up: he/she is at the same time container and contained. So, The humanisation of man has been achieved through the mediation of the group. Claudio Neri expresses this concept through a beautiful metaphor: “ The analytic listening addressed to a member of the group reminds us that of certain music pieces, like Pierino and the wolf. This work by S. Prokofiev is composed in such a way that the listener can distinguish not only the tone and the voice of a certain instrument, but even as it corresponds to certain music pieces permitting to identify it with the orchestra and that instrument gradually develops. In the same way, it is necessary for the conductor to realise the individuals' skills and their particular styles. This recognition is also an antidote to the transformation of the group into a mass” (9)

As you can see, the passage from the philosophical plan described by Sartre, to that of therapeutic psychoanalysis in-group, is nearly linear. What for Sartre is dialectics, the word (man is a builder of signs!) in the analytic psychodrama is first of all play, a representation which isn't a guarantor for truth, but a space where the protagonist of the play may appear and make “mourning” evident apart from laying claim to adherence to facts. So the unconscious of narration may appear how is defined through the text of enunciation by assuming the action of representation, often coinciding with the working of the unconscious of the answering auxiliary egos members.

As you can see, the passage from the philosophical plan described by Sartre, to that of therapeutic psychoanalysis in-group, is nearly linear. What for Sartre is dialectics, the word (man is a builder of signs!) in the analytic psychodrama is first of all play, a representation which isn't a guarantor for truth, but a space where the protagonist of the play may appear and make “mourning” evident apart from laying claim to adherence to facts. So the unconscious of narration may appear how is defined through the text of enunciation by assuming the action of representation, often coinciding with the working of the unconscious of the answering auxiliary egos members.

Also in psychodrama, transference remains the most powerful approach to the unconscious desire. Transference is regarded as that necessary symbolic device because through it the originary desires and upheavals, the defences actualise and reproduce so permitting the subject to face the encounter with the leading figures in his life. The love of transference, like a copy of an old love, projects itself essentially on therapists but also on the other members of the group.

An exceptional example, of how reality is changed by the Other, is offered by Chaplin in the film Modern Times . The main character, finished his job, takes a red mall flag, a danger signal, a hoe, and goes away. He meets a worker's demonstration and finds him self at the beginning of the procession with this red small flag in his hands and just for this he becomes their leader.

It is, therefore, the group to “transfer ”a new meaning to something it didn't have, changing the initial situation; so it is every time that playing opens the analogical creative thought, and permits, through identification with the other, to borrow from the other an element, a feature, an imperceptible movement from repetition. Playing is regarded here as an ability to surprise us by means of the laws of the language pre-existing us, as a pre-text, the text gets in touch with, to reshuffle cards. Text which is played by the subject, author and stage director, who is, in comparison with anybody else, like a poet who re arranges all that concerning him, appealing to the Other of the group .We don't forget that playing, as Freud realised with a stroke of genius through his nephew's Fort-da, is fundamental for the birth of thought, in the moment when one can bear the postponement of drive fulfilment and one can accept the double rent between subject and image on the imaginative plan, and between subject and signifier on the symbolic plan. I think in fact that playing is “successful” when the subject meets himself/herself with his/her own impotence and his lack.

The representation is connected with the real story of the subject; fancy plays are to be avoided, because they are open to enjoyment which can include the symptom itself.

The clinical scene of psychodrama has some features, a precise setting, but it is unexpected in relation to the production of events. Topology is complex. A scene is reduced inside a frame, or a container, it is open by definition, shows the symptom which as such opens to the Other. The deciphering, interpretation of the scene reveals phantasmal scenarios and original conflicts though removed, and the transformations of words in the associative chain of the group are the seat itself, the place of subjective ups and downs. The scene still permits to trace the voice of a subject Other that, isn't either the subject to emit or the therapists or the listening subjects, but is due to the circulation of the chain of signifiers over-determined by the listening. In listening time what seemed a univocal meaning scatters and dissolves. The signifier becomes questionable, points out the multiplicity of subjective intentions and actions which cannot be reduced to the representation of the continuity of an Ego. In fact in psychodrama the subject is in the primary condition to revive “with jubilee” the fact that he is the object seen and at the same time the subject who can see, building the outlines, isolating them from the motherly co-fusion, which he /she pays with a sense of existential solitude. But being under the look of the group causes the collapse of the subject's answer who has no longer his usual time. That's what is “the impossible” of psychoanalysis.

Just to penetrate into this “ impossible” in psychoanalysis I will present a painting I will deal with even later, because for its simplicity it expresses just the risk of representation just at the moment when it is performed. The title of the painting is The painter in his study . His author was Rembrandt (10) it should be a self-portrait. We know how important self portraits were for Rembrandt particularly his characters' eyes they were always painted by him as the place where the mystery of the power of seeing, typical of the painter, is achieved Instead, in this picture which is a sort of meditation on painting, it seems that the painter, to get a gaze, has been compelled to give up his eyes. What does he show us, his spectators? What? The painting which is reflected inside the eye of the person who is looking at it. It is a painting always new and always different which takes shape in the retina. What is light is looking at me and thanks to this I realise that “ What I am looking at is never what I want to see”; otherwise, I can say “ You never look at me there where I can see you”(11) It is this the process gaze covers in psychodrama.

Rembrandt makes gaze protagonist in his painting, which always asks to seduce and to be seduced. The weft and warp of the back of the canvas turns into white on the screen, the place where there are no images but symbols alluding to the continuous change on the stage in accordance with the person who is projecting the film “would you see:” It seems he/she says “What can I do for you?” you, a spectator, you are like me, unimportant, and on the sidelines of space, you can't see the representation of the painting, but only me looking at you in an eternal wait of this play of glances. In the moment when the play comes alive the light reveals that the essential is that external oblique well fixed line of the painting starting and finishing in precise joints, a synthesis of movement and immobility characterising the unconscious. There is nothing else to see, but a light asking to be seen in the decay of the shape as it was to happen three centuries later through abstract art. The enjoyment turns into castration of the vision of recognition which fails. We are in the heart of the psychoanalytic aspect of psychodrama. The conductor occupies that place apart from the centre, like the painter in the painting; he is the only one who can see double, through the other therapist who plays the role of observer, the drama which will be performed for an instant soon after to disintegrate later like a mandala built with sand. But as his eyes are like Oedipus', he needs the spectator who looks at him, different, many sided spectators, while he is always there to watch over that empty space permitting the ex-sistenza of every subject between subjects. He is there in wait of listening a text able to be turned into play opening a window over a dream, spaces and time which like light pass from internal to external side and vice versa, images set between the borders of memory and future. It is the conductor to awake up, in the double role of both conductor and observer of activity and passivity, but through the only function of management of the cure to assure that there are all psychic conditions so that drama can happen and decay, representation of the unforeseeable, the unconscious

The conductor's look is trained at different functions in the interchangeable role with that of observer but both keep that inter-relation among subjects turning into a metaphor of the complex transferral situation and that Rembrandt expressed so wonderfully being at the same time painter while he is painting, the same position as the person, looked at, and at the same time he is a spectator who is looking inside the painting What can he look at? Better, what is he looking at, to represent it on the canvas? The creation and decay of the players' stories lasting just the time to exchange a look. The painting just painted has no meaning, and just for this isn't visible but there are only signifiers expressed through these inextricable nets making up the back of the canvas A passage from visibility to invisibility lying on the edge of vacuum drawn by so many bodies drawing it in a different way in each session, to deliver it again every time to the therapist. It is a triumph of metamorphosis leading to a new way of thinking in that mixture of real characters that in the moment of the play are called to be phantoms; invited evoked, loved hated, people in a chain of infinite signifiers.

Collective dramaturgy structuring the space of the unconscious in which as Lecoq would say, the fundamental elements are the chorus and the hero turning for us into the subject and the group “A chorus comes to the scene to the sound of percussion instruments giving rhythm to the collective. It occupies the whole stage, and then it retires on one side. Thus doing it frees a new space creating a recall for he hero to enter on the stage. But who can come and occupy this space?”(12)

The subject finds therefore in the group not simply a sounding board but the place and a first form of “ publication” (to use S. Gaudè's (13) expression) about the individual experience that the group works, modifying it, and that continues to represent by changing it. So we meet a first discarding between experience and historical truth which remains unknown to everybody including the subject; a second discarding is that between the individual experience and the weaving that the group warps from weft to weft from participant to participant in the course of the session connected with free associations of the play experienced up to become “ a contained in search of a container” where the author will be able to derive information but from a completely different perspective which the group has already redrawn.

The methodological value of psychodrama consists in combining technique with psychoanalytic theory as it is a real dispositive which is proper of a practice of word and in which the subject asks a demand and through the word he searches for the relation of desire with the demand that is heterogeneous.

Desire that meet the lack of the elaboration of mourning of enjoyment, lost but also desperately sought through the autonomous reflection of the patient, his/her “solo” but also in the “change of roles”, the “doubling” of other participants, the chance of speaking from the place of the Other, in the currently of dramatisation.

The language speaks to us but as such isn't reliable, we don't know where to drive at. At symbolic level, the subject can be represented by another signifier, which meets the telling of familiar novel and individual myth: generations, hate, love rivalry giving us our individuality. At imaginary level the visual representation meet the narcissism and “ the images that the subject by turns identifies himself to act, only as an actor, the tragedy of their conflicts. This comedy, placed in the genius of species under the mark of laughter and crying is a “art's comedy” because every individual improvises it, makes it mediocre or highly expressive, in relation to his/her gifts, certainly, but also in relation to a paradoxical law which seems to show the psychic fertility of any vital insufficiency” . (14)

To enlighten better the spirit and meaning of the work so as I wished to build it since I worked for Apeiron, I'll return to refer to the painting by Rembrandt I had previously analysed, The painter in his study. As we know it represents at the centre on the easel become main character, not a painting but the painting , we'll never know the real scene of. We find ourselves at once in front of a first disconnection due to the small space of the canvas which has to reproduce, dilated , the “vacuum” of the necessary space because there is the “vision of no vision”. No image can express in so a pertinent way the symbolic aspect of psychodrama , its epistemological belonging to psychoanalysis. In the psychodrama session the protagonist is the small empty space used during the play marked by the bodies of the participants, every time it expands virtually to collect the rise, development and dissolution of drama and return vacant to symbolise the lack.

It seems senseless the care devoted to the acting of vacuum of the space (Is it the clearing Heidegger spoke of?) in the painting, but as matter of fact the genius consists in showing everyday life in such a way as to force the gaze to wander about impossible places of the Real: holes, fissures, shadows, angles, plasters, moulds and cracks; the details in a word, of an old floor, reign by placing our feet of human presence and decrepit walls, border between internal and external to protect ourselves from absence.

We have previously used the canvas like a metaphor of the dialectic of the gaze and the animation in psychodrama. Let's return and draw from its wealth to stop now, on the role of observation and its reading, topic we have always spoken about little and with a certain difficulty. In the psychodrama session, when we reach the final observation and then the reading of writing, about the symptom as a symbol, is reserved attention to the traces of the unconscious speech, reign of desire. A written text that of the observation, which on tracing signs conceal them, to permit to speak to a “ topic” otherwise condemned to silence. In a letter to Lou Salomè on 25-5-1916 Freud advised Lou Salomè “ I know that when I write I have to blind myself artificially, to be able to concentrate on a dark point.”

Proust in the volume of the Recherche titled The Prisoner, caught the sense of the observation such as it has been elaborated by Paola Cecchetti, our colleague and fellow in the course of time in the work of transmission of the theory and technique of psychodrama. The author represents the death of a writer, Bergotte, about the writing we could say, in front of the vision of a negligible detail of a painting created by another great painter, Vermeer: the wall in the View of Delft: “ So I should have written. I needed more strata of colours I needed to make more precious my sentence, like that small side of yellow wall”.

Observation, place of stratification of listening exercises its therapeutic function, before in the abstinence of action, then in the stratification of writing, thus becoming a screen which the Other can write on, in analogy with what occurs in the scene painted by the Painter in the painting by Rembrandt, a scene which will be never seen either by spectators or therapist, but only by that infantile Freud speaks about: “the unconscious is infantile: it is that part of personality which in that age has separated, not following the evolution of the whole and therefore has been removed”(Clinical case of the rat man)

It is the training to that observation to the negligible, to what language can't express, what is particularly cared in our school; an observation enabling Rembrandt to paint his studio corner as if his gaze couldn't see and just for this reason it could pass- through following strata each of them with a different consistency and structure in surface: up to the point of reaching the white edge of lime . Rising like a veil to show cracks where are hidden the dirty ridges of all that is dirty that time scorns. They are those traces of dirty where sensuality is hidden, attraction and repulsion of the infantile look that are removed, in the observation those ridges write starting from every subject the plot of the mnestic apparatus of the group.

In our hypothesis of observation, the psychic content of the session is represented in a more suitable way through a written rather than an oral text because the structure of a mnestic apparatus, as Freud described it in A note upon the "mystic writing pad ", is a typewriter.

I ask the question in such terms: if psychism of a group is built and organised by a subject to another subject like a text, which can be the instrument representing it? Today, after experiences in the direction of oral restoration, I'd say the writing and the spaces where is structured of. There is no text without a psychic origin, as well as no psychic exists without a text. Perhaps aren't the continuous and tireless writings by Freud to tell and build his researches about the psychic apparatus? Also why did Freud dream and transcribe his dreams jumping the passage of telling the story? The group speaks through the subject , the conductor inscribes him in space through the play, the observer writes tracing back the metaphors produced by the unconscious, building up from a session to a session the metaphors of plays occurred and represented on a sheet by a written trace. As Freud said , “The surface where the annotation is kept ...turns in such a case into a sort of materialised part of the mnestic invisible apparatus. Just like in the Wunderblok, the writing of the observation which happens when the session is over and is delegated to the reading closing the hearing with the group from unconscious to unconscious witnesses the contradiction between the persistence of the trace and the virginity of the recording of tracks, the surface is always intact to collect new traces like blank pages.

Therefore there is at first the representation of words and the visual figuration, the minimalism of dramatic representation, and then memory the essence itself of psychism . The reading of observation at the end of the session is then the resistance opening to the breaking of the trace . The complexity lies in the series of written observations that, always following the scheme of "mystic writing pad” and disappearing every time “ breaks off the close contact between the sheet of paper receiving the stimulus and the wax tablet keeping what has been impressed on it . That coincides with the idea I have had for long , even if I had it for me in relation to the way how the perceptive apparatus of our psyche works”

So every observation, writing of memory disappears to be replaced by another, creating a sort of continuous apres coup the only time the unconscious knows as the new writing has in itself all those which preceded it and those which will come later, writings that no one will see.

How not to think again of our painting by Rembrandt? The subject of the painting will change every time that the painter will paint but it will be severely forbidden for us, his spectators, like the primary scene; always visible, it will be “the back” of the painting similar to itself in technique of the weft and warp of the canvas.

I think it necessary to conclude now our speech by recording the description of a session.

We are at the resumption of the sessions after the summer break. The group meets in the usual space where a light change has been effected: he real “ removal” of the carpet from all the studio, in a way you can see the parquet floor below.

“ My bedroom has this parquet floor”, A. states , one of the participants in the group in the moment preceding the beginning of the session. It seems only a brief comment destined not to be noticed, but starting from it , as we'll be able to see the text of the unconscious sorts out which will be recorded by two observers. Another patient begins to speak, M. who asks the group: “ can you remember my problem with varicocele I have become a father!” In the session which had immediately preceded the summer break M. had “played”, while he was sitting stiffly, the phone call by means of which he had communicated to his girl friend, the same who, on the contrary, has made him a father today, his decision of leaving her. Today, standing , coming and going from the bathroom and the kitchen , the Annunciation is played. Then, to represent “the forsaken” girl, the choice had gone to a woman who had already finished her analysis, so she was there for the last time . Instead, today a girl is chosen, whose deepest desire seems to be in this stage of her life, becoming a mother. The choice of he/she who is appointed to play a role is always of great importance. As far as I'm concerned, it is a choice excluding from the group and makes One, one less. On choosing we often say not by chance, I follow a process of exclusion. This separation prepares another one: between those who play and are in different spatial point and the rest of the group. It is into these silent cracks of a spoken text that the unconscious language hides itself, just like inside the strata of the wall painted by Rembrandt the quality itself of light shows to tell nothing if not the “thingness” and absence of past time , of dampness, of the river flowing outside...

Let's return to our scene of Annunciation. It isn't an angel to give the announcement but a pregnancy test which is visible to everyone through the Signifier “a pink little ball”, from this moment on in the group there is a growing wave of feelings, images, thoughts going to flip through that “pink little ball”, announcement of a female birth but also of some more which cannot be recorded by subjects, but listened only by the animator, yet, he/she cannot send it back to the group, to avoid that the violence of interpretation halts the chain of signifiers got tangled in the Real. Through the words of those who intervene in fact ambiguous stories emerge, by free associations and the Doubles, stories about a menstrual delay which may announce both pregnancy and menopause, about the misadventures of a missing child and finally brought back to his parents , about the “innocent” seduction of a daughter on her father's side through the description of different images of animals...so the question circulates: who really wishes this baby? Is death preceding birth, the real protagonist of the session?

At this point the session twists and shows what is the perversion forbidding the Name of the Father and that the new proposed play tries to strip the leaves off to reach the core. A scene is represented where a deranged dog biting everybody and a father who orders his son- though with a great sorrow-to eliminate. His son is the same A. from whose opening short comment we had started. In the choice of characters happens a first decryption : as his father, A. points out the father “in love” of the baby girl we had already mentioned at; as his girlfriend the oldest lady in the group, as dog he chooses a patient who accepts with a brief freeing comment : “if there is a neurotic dog, that's me!” At the end of the play, that mouth which could only bite, can speak, with an announce: “ please, don't regard me as a hopeless case!”

The short opening comment of A. (the floor of the room we are in is like the one in my bedroom), seemingly insignificant, reveals now by means of the “removal” of the carpet , the return of the removed : the imaginary place of the play is always the primary scene, “the small pink ball” represents in this session of resumption the signifier. The writing of observation has the task to perceive what hasn't been- said during the session, told by the chain of signifiers: in our case passing from the conception of the baby to the fancy of seduction , from the baby to the animal, up to the “crazy dog” we demonstrate that “ the small pink ball” isn't the origin of the subject and species , but the place of no origin and death lying before every birth.

As we can see, the verbalisation body that is circulated during the session has been dropped. It is the body of the play which is at the same time track, files, transcription. so making up the writing of observation, posterior reconstruction of the present which is decipherable in that postscript ; in our case it has been the opening comment.

In this sense we can consider the painting by Rembrandt as a metaphor of what is the writing in the observation. A second degree metaphor as The painter in his study can be considered, in turn, a treatise of meta-painting where a baby –painter without any look can lead all the instruments and psychic conditions which are before painting the scene of the painting , all the elements orchestrated by light to sing the power of absence: the mystery of shadow, of time which is space, of space which is light , of light which the origin of pleasure of the scopic drive. Similarly, observation hasn't stopped on the reconstruction of the events of scenes and their meaning , but has drawn the horizon of the reading traced by the unconscious.

Notes:

(1) W. Benjamin, Angelus Novus, Einaudi, Torino1962 (1955)

(2) E. Croce ,the flight of the butterfly (Il volo della farfalla), Borla, Roma 1990;D. Miglietta, Feelings in scene (I sentimenti in scena), Utet,Torino 1998; O. Rosati,Acts of psychodrama (Atti dello psicodramma). Preface (prefazione),Astrolabio, Roma 1975

(3) Lecoq, Poetical Body (Corpo Poetico), Ubulibri

(4) The interview was issued in A reanalisi, yearII, April 1988.

(5) The S.I.P.s.A.-Italian Society of analytic psychodrama- it was founded in 1981, with the fusion of several groups which had already experienced analytic psychodrama Even today the magazine Areanalisi maintains a strong link with S.E. P. T., in the search for a common theoretic conceptual orientation .

(6)The study centre Apeiron has been at work since the eighties, it became in 1992 a specialised section of the Sipsa, basing its charter on “constant training”

(7) O. Rosati, quot.

(8) Studies on Cartel ( Studi sul Cartel), Edimond, Roma 2002

(9) C. Neri, (Group) Gruppo, Borla 1966

(10)

(11) Lancan the seminar, Book XI (Il seminario, Libro XI) Einaudi, Torino

(12) . Lecog,quot.

(13) S. Gaudè,

(14) Lacan, Writings (Scritti) I ° vol., Einaudi, Torino, p.84

.