© PSYCHOMEDIA - JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PSYCHOANALYSIS - The Imaginary in Psychoanalytic Metapsychology

1. FOREWORD.
The 36th Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association (1989, Rome) heatedly discussed the theme "Common Ground in Psychoanalysis: Clinical Aims and Process", in an attempt to answer Wallerstein's question, "One psychoanalysis or many?", which had opened the previous Congress (1987, Montreal). The problematic approach itself to this subject reveals the undercurrent of uneasiness pervading the international psychoanalytic movement faced with the undefined range of theoretical models in which the identity of psychoanalysis is fragmented today. Up until about the 1970s, this identity in metapsychological terms was, in substance, universally accepted, however wide the range of theoretical models based on it. But today, widespread and explicit signs of a strong break can be perceived between those who remain fundamentally attached to the scientist ideal informing the metapsychological construction, and those who are more sensitive to a current of thought which mainly refers to aesthetics, narratology and hermeneutics. In this splitting of psychoanalytic culture a reflection of the profound epistemological crisis involving all areas of modern knowledge can be seen. The same confrontation between a rigid scientist ideal and a deep humanistic vocation present in Freud's entire work can be viewed as an anticipation of this crisis. Perhaps my confronting an ideal with a vocation has the same meaning as Whitebook's confronting the Enlightenment with Romanticism in Freud's thought.
In this paper I wish to show how my re-thinking of Freud, my re-traversing Freud's thought, has led me to single out some important contradictory structures which cannot be ignored, inasmuch as they are the basis of an unresolved epistemological conflict imbuing his entire work. The fact that I have recognized this conflictuality and have given it a subjective sense, in a historical, relativistic perspective, has prevented me from simply becoming its unconscious transmitter or repeater. Furthermore, I have no longer allowed myself to be seduced by the idealizing assumption that psychoanalysis consists of a pragmatic-cognitive order in its own right which cannot be compared with, or criticized by, any other area of knowledge. Finally this has prevented me from being swept up by the ancient but still vital querelle on the scientificity of psychoanalysis according to the traditional arguments of an empirical-deductive science, like the one recently re-proposed by Grünbaum (1984, 1986) and by those who have become involved in that debate. When I compare Freud' scientist ideal to his humanistic vocation, I do not mean that the Freudian contradiction consists in a conflict between science and philosophy, but that he ends up by maintaining, with at times dramatic insistence, the same metaphysical thought--positivistic scientism in its metahistorical and reductionist perspective--from which he had originally started, but which had been deeply questioned by his discovery of the relational historicity of neuroses. The relativistic, phenomenological, eventualistic germs that had appeared in the course of his early clinical experiences reappeared, more or less explicitly, throughout his entire work in an obvious contradiction which, though, was never sufficiently worked through as a consequence of his fundamentally scientist orientation.
Giving sense to a conflict pervading the cultural or familial origins of our identity does not mean expecting that the sense we give it is definitive. Nor does it mean to reach an optimal distance from that conflict so that one proves to be immunized; and even less does it mean to be guaranteed that one's future production does not contain contradictory elements, new conflicting sequences, and new aporias. But re-conceiving our own cultural origins (as we shall see) implies bringing them back into the vital circle of our subjective configurations of the world, circle of exchanges and symbolic responses from which every creative contingency emerges.
To illustrate Freud's complex contradiction, I can use the following metaphor: It is as if a father deeply rooted in his cultural and familial tradition, but also endowed with a free and creative nonconformist spirit (in a letter to Fliess, Freud defined himself as an "adventurer"), saw his own child—the product of his creative thought, his own intellectual "son"--grow and interact with the world around him according to this spirit, up until a certain point when the father himself becomes frightened and reverts to entrusting the child to a religious institution or a military school to give him a strict, disciplined upbringing. (The Church and the Army, as relevant social metaphors, recur, in fact, in the work in which Freud founded the concept of the Ego Ideal or Super-Ego.) But this child, while conforming to the Order to which the father has entrusted him, will always maintain an intimate disordering, poetical disposition, and the encounters with his father will always be characterized by moments of authenticity mixed ambiguously with strong calls to the most Prussian discipline.
Freud began his scientific research in medicine, neurology and psychiatry following the positivistic view shared by the academic culture of his time; he summarized this orientation in the "Project for a Scientific Psychology". But, as we know, he found himself progressively plunged into an experiential dimension in which he faced "truths" appearing to him radically different from those produced by positivistic science. Whereas positivistic "truths" were characterized by experimental verifications, by explanations in terms of causality related to the belief in an ontological objectivity of things, by the exclusion of any kind of irrationality as being outside the realm of scientific knowledge, the "truths", into which Freud found himself unexpectedly and intimately involved, arose instead only from subjective, partial, maimed, contradictory narrations, which forced him to face four fundamental questions:
1) the relational basis of every mental event, contrasting the monadistic representation of the anatomo-physiologic individual;
2) the casualness, which shocked him and which he defined as a "scandal" in the essay on Leonardo Da Vinci,: "the scandal of the results of an investigation leaving to the casualness of the parental constellation such a decisive influence on the destiny of man";
3) the inapplicability of experimental verifications within this investigation, so that every statement was necessarily weighed down by the systematic doubt inherent in the arbitrariness of its construction (1937);
4) irrationality as the other face of rationality, both equally important in every process of communication and knowledge, as we see, for instance, in the transferential components of every relationship.
We can question ourselves today about Freud's escaping the enormous issue which his experiences suggested to him. Why did he abandon (though never completely and definitively) the phenomenological and hermeneutic route?
We now have to touch upon a very difficult question, about a subject which seems to be an indisputable taboo for psychoanalysts. To what extent can we consider Freud's self-analysis, both in its procedure and results, the model on which we can base our clinical practice, and on which the didactic practice of psychoanalytical institutions can be founded?

2. IS METAPSYCHOLOGY THE OUTCOME OF THE 'FAILURE' OF FREUD'S SELF-ANALYSIS?
In 1897, over the course of only a few months (in coincidence with his father's death) in a letter to Fliess (Sept. 1897), he stated that he had given up his "neurotica", and though this represented "a general catastrophe" for him, he confessed to be not at all depressed, as he felt "a sense of triumph rather than defeat". From this turning point in his orientation, he began his self-analysis, on which he was to construct The Interpretation of Dreams. His father's death and the decisive influence that this exercised on his "triumphant" epistemological turning point, and therefore on his entire self-analysis, are poignantly recalled by Freud himself in the preface to the second edition of that book:
[This book] appeared to me as a passage from my own autobiography, as my reaction to the death of my father, therefore to the most important event, to the most painful loss in a man's life. (the italics are mine)
The "reactive" character of his enterprise consists precisely in the fact that Freud oriented his self-analysis, and the constructions that were to ensue from it, toward a representation of the conflictual condition of human existence from which any responsibility or guilt on the parents' part in relation to the child was excluded. In this representation the father's auctoritas is fully restored in form of academic knowledge as well, which at the time was strictly anchored to scientist postulates. If therefore Freud's turning point contains strong elements which can be referred to a Reaktionbildung, that is a reaction formation to an inadequately worked through experience of mourning, we could consider Freud's self-analysis as the prototype of an unsuccessful analysis which, as such, heavily affected the ulterior development of his thought and, more generally, the entire psychoanalytical culture.
But if we do not want to use the word "failure" with respect to Freud's analytical commitment on the basis of these scanty biographical hints, we can likewise speak of its having being "successful". We have only to adopt the same assessment parameters used by the training institutes of psychoanalysis: an analysis is considered "successful" if the analyzand shows he has reached a "psychoanalytical conscience", that is if he assumes as his own the "discoveries" of his unconscious and the method for reaching them which his analyst has suggested throughout the course of his analysis. The results of this particular way of intending the so-called psychoanalytical conscience can easily be seen in the multiplication of schools and sub-schools with their loyalty bonds and strong conflictuality. This is one of the problems which arose right from the start of the psychoanalytical movement and which has been deeply discussed by M. Balint (1947,1953) and frequently resumed up until the recent paper of J. Cremerius (1989), but has never found an adequate and therefore transformative response from psychoanalytical institutions. The analytical "success" in this perspective, does not simply consist of the analyzand's generic acceptance of his analyst's ideology, but rather that the analyzand is assuming as elements structuring his new "conscience" those strong, objective, universal, and therefore presumably scientific, categorizations produced by the metapsychological "common ground" that all psychoanalytic institutions place at their foundation.
The "success" of Freud's self-analysis consists then in his re-conversion to the scientist ideal of his time, and Fliess played a very important role in this process as the most bizarre and literally deadly (Masson, 1986) personification of that scientist ideal. I have stressed the word "conversion" (with its obvious references to hysteria), recalling Kuhn's statement as quoted by Wallerstein: «What each takes to be facts depends in part on the theory he espouses, and (...) an individual's transfer of allegiance from theory to theory is often better described as conversion than as choice.» Freud himself gives us in The Constructions in Analysis (1937) a particularly suggestive exemplification of the nature of his metapsychological construction, characterized by an invasive and hegemonizing thought, inhibiting his creative freedom, as happens to those who are subject to their own paranoical constructions. In the following passage he states that when facing certain difficulties (those which could lead to unbearable confusion and uncertainty):
We must say to ourselves: and so there is only the witch [citing a line from Goethe's Faust]. Well, this witch is metapsychology. We cannot advance even one step without speculating, theorizing—I was going to say, fantasizing—in metapsychological terms.

3. A MEANINGFUL EXAMPLE OF FREUD'S OVERCOMING HIS POSITIVISTIC IDEAL.
Let us now see how Freud in certain cases did overcome his positivistic ideal and how he approached the problem of the de-centered Ego in a relational, non mechanistic, view. One of the most intense and comprehensive contacts with the world of the contingency and eventuality which he had "triumphantly" abandoned, appears in the essay Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (l921), which opens with a proposal for overcoming the ontological dichotomy between social psychology and individual psychology. In this essay the individual is no longer seen as reducible to his sets of drives and to an Ego, understood as that callousness which is produced on them in their friction with the world, but he is presented first as a "subject"—in the sense of "subjugated"—to the indefinite complexity of his historical experiences, traditions, the culture which has been established in his language, and second as "subject" of his own original doings, of his own personal poiesis.
Each individual is a constituent element of many masses, is--through identification--subject to multilateral links and has built his own Ego Ideal on the basis of the most varied models. Each individual is then participant of many collective souls (...) and he can rise, above these, to a minimum of autonomy and originality.
To this identificatory complexity, that is transpersonal, transgenerational, and consequently relational, complexity, Freud attributes a suggestively inductive power, similar to that of a hypnotist in respect to the hypnotized subject, or to that of a charismatic leader in respect to a subjugated crowd. The power of this identificatory complexity is normally exercised in terms of the formulations of judgments or reality testing without the individual Ego being aware that he voices what his intimate, overpowering prompter is suggesting to him. This perspective (which could enter into the gnoseological issue summarized in Heidegger's question "Was heisst Denken?" (1954)—What does thinking mean, but also, what stimulates and orients our thinking?) warps the physiocratic (Napolitani, 1986) and metaphysical assumptions of metapsychology and, at the same time, throws an oblique light on the "triumphant" turning point of Freud's thought. But if Freud in some way defines the imaginary universe and its power of replicating the identical parts of the Self—the Ego Ideal or Super-Ego—he does not at all define his intuition about the dimension of the contingency and casualness—"autonomy and originality".
In my opinion, when Freud later wrote on autonomy in terms of maturation, he inscribed the process within the positivistic view of the Enlightenment; "autonomy and originality", as they arise in this essay, are not intended as the final outcome of a linearly evolutionistic process but as a significant moment of re-organization (see below) of mental life, in terms of "catastrophe", using Bion's concept.
Freud not only was never to resume this theme, which was so insidious for the congruence of his metapsychological rationality, but was to minimize the transpersonal and historical relevance of the Super-Ego, connotating it as a derivative of drives, in fact as one of the "inner objects" (as M. Klein was later to explain) produced by fantasy vicissitudes. These vicissitudes are all inscribed in that universal anthropological core that was to take the name, and only the name (if you read the myth in its entirety), from the tragedy of Oedipus. Freud precociously shows his uneasiness about having "raised himself above his collective souls" when he later was to dedicate only two notes to this colossal issue. The first note was added to a l923 re-edition of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in which he states:
With regard to the validity of such an attribution [of reality testing to the Ego Ideal] it seems however permitted to raise a doubt which requires deeper discussion.
Not only was this discussion never to be raised again, but in the second note in The Ego and the Id (l922) he promptly and definitively dismisses the subject stating:
The attribution I made of reality testing to this Super-Ego is simply wrong and requires correction. The fact that reality testing remains a peculiar task of the Ego itself should without a doubt correspond to the relationships of the Ego to the world of perception.
Freud's entire work can therefore be read in terms of the above-mentioned suggestive exemplification: an endless drama between the overwhelming power of an implicit ideal "ordered" by its social, cultural, familial tradition and his early uncertain "vocation". From this vocation there arose a prospect that the evils of the soul, and more generally, the human condition, were inevitably marked by the crushing power of the environment, which was necessarily intentioning, manipulative, seductive, so that dramatic conflicts may contingently arise between this environment, once it has been internalized, and an obscure "autonomy and originality". Once more, I would like to recall what I mean by the intentioning, manipulative, seductive environment: it does not consist in traumatic events which actually took place in childhood, but rather in the historical necessity of an individual's cultural growth.
Metapsychology, inasmuch as it was the outcome of the false success of Freud's self-analysis, has therefore obscured, though never eradicated it for good, its original, historicist-relational vision which today can once more be resumed and developed going back to his early, even if rough, formulations. If we resume Freud's concept of "collective souls" in this perspective, as a transpersonal structure of the mind, we can recognize him as a forerunner of some developments of psychoanalytical thought by authors who have diversely re-launched the intrinsically relational quality of psychic events. I am referring, for instance, to psychoanalysts such as Ferenczi, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Balint, Winnicott, Bion, Foulkes and many others. Though having different theoretical constructions, they have all stressed the relational foundation of individual identity and the problem of its possible transformations through a creative attitude which can today be defined by the phrase auto-poietic cognition, to use the concept proposed by Maturana and Varela (1980). Without entering into the details of these developments, I will try to illustrate some of the conclusions I have reached (Napolitani, 1988), finding in the group-analytical area—S.H. Foulkes being its founder (1975)—some of the most meaningful and pregnant stimuli.

4. THE EXPERIENCE OF SELF IN ITS TWO COMPONENTS.
When I use the term "Self" I mean that complex representation arising from the intimate experience of one's own psychobiological organization—according to the paradigm of complexity—of which two sides can roughly be distinguished.
a) The "idem" and the experience of continuity
I call the identificatory complexity, to which Freud refers with his "collective souls", the imaginary universe. This universe is made up of images, not intended as pure mnestic traces of sensitive impressions, but as configurations of relational complexities in which the subject has been a constituent element since the very beginning of his existence. These configurations are built in the course of successive encounters of the originary, psychobiological self-organization with the intentional and affective environment in which he is born and raised. Each configuration therefore maintains the traits characterizing each of these successive and meaningful encounters. Maintaining these traits means that each of these imaginary configurations persists as a prime element of personal identity, which is as a vital presence, intentioning the subject, the world and the relationships between the Self and the world, according to the affective, ideological and value patterns that the cultural environment has taught him. (I would like to point out that in Italian the word for teaching is particularly meaningful in this context. In-segnare in fact comes from late Latin in-signare, meaning engraving one's own signs onto the other's mind). Every subsequent contact with the world causes the imaginary devices, thus far acquired, to resound, expressing themselves through the most varied logical, affective and behavioral formalizations, such as, for example, ethical apriori imperatives, or structures of the cosmologies of "common sense" (T. Reid, 1764, mentioned by D. Napolitani, 1982) or particular behavioral or affective attitudes, and even including the so-called "free associations" in a transference relationship. However different these formalizations may be, we are anyway confronted with ordinative suggestions of the world and of the subject's relationships to it. The set of these imaginary, intentioning presences makes up a relational network which is the group-matrix of personal identity, that identical component of the Self which I call the idem. The idem is fundamentally inert, apparently unitary, and through its presumed innatism—to which I will return—the transgenerational continuity of culture is secured.
b) The "Autòs" and the experience of dis-continuity.
We can trace a second component of the complexive Self experience. It is something inducing the individual to re-construct in gnoseological terms the perceptive data of both the outer and the inner world. This experience consists in the fact that any "natural" phenomenon enters into the typical human landscape only by virtue of its culturalization, which is of its being placed in a map of genetic meanings, which is either already well established in one's own culture, or is partly recreated by the subject who specifically reviews that order of phenomena. I am referring to the anthropological view of Arnold Gehlen (1978) when he says that "the natural environment of man is his culture", and that therefore no datum is ever directly perceived or assumed as matter of transformation, but it is always assumed through, and only through, the mediation of significations by which that datum is invested and made present as an event in the human universe. When this "making present" is not an accomplished process, the perceptive appearance of an opaque datum causes opaque responses, in the sense of astonishment or anxiety, with all their specific outcomes. I have called "autòs" this auto-re-organizational—as E. Morin's says (1982)—component of the Self, that is a sort of "author" of the human world's eventualization, who could be referred to that mysterious subject of "autonomy and originality" which Freud contrasted with the subject subordinated to his "collective souls". But for Freud autonomy manifests itself by the subject arising "above" his matrices—which seems to be related in some way to the concept of "sublimation"—whereas I think I can maintain that this indefinable "author" is what transforms the subject as sub-jectus—that is subjugated to the intentioning power of the idem—into pro-jectus, the subject-in-process—that is the subject of his own original symbolical narrations, in a word, into an aesthetic subject. The autòs must re-organize the configurations of sense that the imaginary device stores in its living archive in order to allow this existential transformation to come about. Authenticity as a way of existing governed by the autòs is therefore the result of the dis-ordering/re-ordering traversing of identity.

5. THE "INNATISM" OF IMAGES AND THEIR RE-BIRTH: CONCEIVING WHAT IS ALREADY CONCEIVED
I have alluded to the apparent innatism of the images inherent to the idem, what Freud himself refers to when speaking of the mythical, complex configurations (such as the "primitive horde", for example) inscribed in the philogenetic mnestic patrimony. I do not intend to refer to a bio-genetic problem, but in speaking of innate images I want to confer this attribute a certain semantic ambiguity. The prefix in means both "in" and "not". For example, in the word in-trude it has a locative meaning, while in the word in-valid it has a negative meaning. If for the word innate we use both meanings of this prefix, we can understand that these intentioning presences have been stirring and growing within ourselves, and we can also understand that they did not originate from us, from our foundational or re-foundational attitude toward reality. If we consider the autòs as the unrelenting and unpredictable author of the eventualization of the world, we must think that it can confront the data emerging from the inner environment in the same way as it can confront the data from the outer environment. If the objects of the inner world appear with the same opaque immediacy with which natural objects not yet adequately symbolized may appear, they summon up responses of astonishment or of anxiety. An anxious response leads to escape or to other mechanisms that guarantee survival within continuity and identity, while astonishment is that "perturbed and moved feeling"—as G.B. Vico says—that lights up curiosity, interest and causes an approach to the events emerging from one's own—inner or outer—landscape. A. Gargani has recently written a book about the close relation between astonishment and casualness (1985): his working through the phenomenology of creative thought is a relevant reference point not only for philosophy, but even for the analytical practice placing itself in a coherently hermeneutic perspective.
Rethinking one's "innate" images, replacing them in a historical perspective, questioning the exceeding sense by which they appear "obvious" to us or through which they tend to rigidly hegemonize our subjective circuits of meanings, signifies bringing them to light, conceiving them. To conceive something that already exists in its completeness, means giving birth for ourselves to what has already objectively been born, through that extraordinary logical paradox on which Winnicott (1971) built his own vision of a "transitional area". "Conceiving what is perceived" implies that intimate transitional experience from sub-jectus to pro-jectus—at which I have hinted above—which may become a historically relevant "fact", or which, on the contrary, may be denied, cancelled inasmuch as this experience throws open an intolerably catastrophic horizon of freedom and solitude.

6. THE PSYCHOANALYTIC PRAXIS
a) Facing the imaginary game of transference'.
The imaginary universe reactivates, as I have mentioned above, at every successive encounter of the subject with the world, willing to grow through successive steps of learning according to the guidelines of the intentioning power of its originary core. (I wish to emphasize here that in Italian the word for learning is apprendere, which literally is the complementary term to insegnare (teaching, as we noted above), because it means taking the intentional signs of the Other into one's own mind). The translation of elements pertaining to one's transpersonal matrix into any new relationship implies transferring in it their inductive or suggestive power: in the transferential situation the relationship tends to assume the characters of the imaginary relationship which prevails at the moment, so that certain imaginary structures of one interlocutor are confronted with those of the other, either in an antagonistically symmetrical or in a complementary way.
The request of an analytical treatment would be set off, in this perspective, from a crisis of a subject who, pressured by a need for authenticity, finds difficulty in accomplishing a re-conceptive itinerary through his idem, at least through those parts of it which compel him into a horizon of opaque necessities, as if they were pieces of a crude naturality. Ambiguously the analytical relationship becomes the setting for the most intense dramatization of the idem, and that is exactly why it becomes the privileged place where an original signification of this dramatization can be built, whatever symmetric or complementary game analyst and analysand may play. This proves the Freudian assumption that analysis is substantially the analysis of transference, and any breach in its thick curtain shows the prevalence of conceiving, transforming attitudes of autòs in its dis-continuity, on the conservative attitudes of idem in its continuity. This conflict is emotionally modulated by alternating moments of astonishment and anxiety either before the raw "naturality" of the images or before the possible break of the compactness of one's identity.
b) The double circle of symbolic responses
The analytical praxis does not consist therefore of rationalizing the crisis experience, following causal connections hypostatically attributed to some mechanics of the unconscious; nor does it consist of drawing up a unitary and quasi-realistic map of a realm whose boundaries and topologies are supposed to be defined, starting from some of its archaeological finds (see Spence's criticism [1984] of historical truth in an archaeological sense); but it consists of the construction of original symbolic sensifications of one's imaginary patrimony, which arises from a dialogical relationship facilitating the auto-poietic or auto-re-organizational mental processes. Still it should be noted that analysis in its entirety is not the summation of single acts of signification, but it consists of inserting all such acts into a circle of responses running among the most varied configurations of sense existing in one's diachronic and synchronic horizon. This intimate circularity of symbolic responses is being established as much as the circularity of interpretative responses between the analyst and the analysand is establishing itself. I do not mean that one symbolic circle determines the other, but that they reciprocally condition one another. Therefore when the analytical space is not the one which Winnicott calls the "area of transitional playing", or when the analyst, in pursuit of a scientist and objectivating model, shirks a relationship founded on an asymmetrical reciprocity—to use O. Apel's original concept (1973)—the establishing of an intimate circularity of the symbolic significations also ends up by being inhibited. Moreover, the joint relation between analyst and analyzand—even though functionally asymmetrical—should reproduce, at the level of the interpersonal relationship, an analogous joint relation among all the configurations of sense in their circular responses.
The concept of inner or outer joint relation can be related to the "pact of brothers", as discussed in Whitebook's paper, where the author quotes Freud's "Totem and Taboo". But in my opinion this "pact" must not be intended as an outcome of renouncement—or repression—of infantile wishes (incest and parricide), but it is the only way by which the symbolizing need of the human re-organizational core can express itself. In the analytic praxis this egalitarian dimension, --though asymmetrical-- is therefore the final challenge to the attempt of both the analyst and the patient to remain in a transferential parent/child relationship.
c) The re-organizer principles: concepts and pre-concepts
Although the circularity of symbolic returns constitutes an experience which may be exciting because of its creative potential and the richness of the symbolic exchanges with the Other, it is undoubtedly disorienting in its trans-formative fluidity, and therefore cannot but be episodical. Between two subsequent episodes there arise moments re-organizing, re-ordering—in conformity to any kind of legality( ) one's intimate complexity and even the interpersonal relationship in which the circularity of symbolic responses has taken place. The re-organizing principle can stem from the very product of the conceptions which occurred in the circular process of signification. If a new idea—a project, a theory or whatever—is born, this "fact" will tend to consolidate, to verify itself in its confrontation with the world, and in some way to submit to it all the relative configurations of sense. Being the outcome of one's own conceiving, this conception will always conserve the memory of birth and will thus be open to any possible transformation, to its being jointly re-inserted in the circle of symbolic responses and even to its own dissipation, its own death.
It is different if it is not one's original conception or concept to re-order the disorderly flow of responses, that is when it is an innate ordinative image—perhaps only superficially touched by the process of symbolic subjectivation—to carry out such function. We would then speak, rather then of a concept, of a pre-concept, of a configuration of sense which installed itself in the idem at its origins and which, confusing itself with them, remains outside memory, outside time, outside any transformative dimension, outside any possible decadence, and outside death. Because of its intrinsic ordinative power, the pre-concept is not liable to jointly enter the circuit of symbolic responses, but tends to hegemonize them, subordinating to itself any other configuration of sense presenting the weakness of having been born, of having once been conceived by the subject. ("Weak thought"—to use the felicitous phrase proposed by G. Vattimo (1983)—could refer not only to the placing of this thought in an area deprived of "strong" ontological, objectivistic or metaphysical supports, but also to its creatural quality, that is the knowledge it possesses of its being conceived and therefore being exposed to its passing away.) In this perspective we can speak of paranoia (not necessarily in strictly clinical terms) as the outcome of the hegemonizing process of a single imaginary segment over any other configuration of sense. This hegemony develops through a hyper-rational argumentative procedure, in the everlasting research for clues and proofs which can objectively certify the priority of that imaginary assumption over any other form of thought. The inflexible paranoiac objectualism is in fact the most direct manifestation of the "naturality" of the imaginary segments which were not born to one's subjectivity. The rational certainty correlated to this objectualism contrasts with that sentiment of truth—whose peculiarly subjective character there is no reason to hide—accompanying all authentically conceptive constructions, as happens for any fundamentally aesthetic experience.

7. WHY DOES A POSITIVISTIC VIEW PERSIST IN CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY?
Let us now try to utilize the itinerary resulting from the interpersonal experience of analysis, to see if we can give a sense to the tenacious and surprising persistence of a pre-conceptual thought—scientistic positivism—in most of psychoanalytical culture. Introducing elements exonerated from the order of necessity, such as those referable to auto-poietic casualness, into this strictly deterministic culture, which might as well be strictly finalistic in terms of adaptability and biological survival, means to radically subvert the entire cosmological vision to which psychoanalysis has always largely aspired to belong.
But why is it precisely psychology and particularly psychoanalysis that resist the "revolution" (Kuhn, 1962) which modern thought has promoted or with which it has in any case come to terms? E. Morin (l982) maintains that it can often be observed that the younger a science is, the more slowly and reluctantly it assimilates the epistemological changes which in the meantime have taken place in the scientific areas of its derivation. Thus, Morin says, psychology still seems anchored to those strictly empirical-positivistic paradigms that the sciences of nature have by now abandoned for some time. I think that we can adopt the psychoanalytic method itself to give a sense to this bizarre phenomenon.
Perhaps psychology, including psychoanalysis, has a special reason, in contrast to other pragmatic disciplines, in showing a certain reluctance to conceive its own origins, to allow the ordinative images of its own progressing to emerge within the dialogical circles of its own scientific community. In reality a "psychology" or a "psychoanalysis" does not exist, but only "psychologists" or "psychoanalysts" who are systematically exposed to the interpretative action of colleagues and above all of analysands within their institutions and professional practices. In this is basically summarized the difference between the practices and methods relating to the knowledge—in an hermeneutic perspective—of inert objects—like literary texts-- and those relating to objects which are interactive interlocutors on a level of reciprocity. We also know that the reciprocity characterizing any human relationship tends to be simply ignored in a "naturalistic" psychoanalysis which calls "interpretation" the product of the analyst's thought with respect to the analysand, and "free associations", "resistance", "narcissistic omnipotence" and the like any formulation of the analysand's thought about the analyst, including his naive attempts at self-occultation through which the analyst pretends not to interfere with the free (?) fantasies of the patient. Still, however formulated, the analysand's thought also is always and in any case an interpreting thought. This means that in the analytical setting there always and in any case arises an invitation to establish that circularity of responses of which the indefinitely open playing of transitional conceptions consists. The fact that this playing re-proposes itself several times a day, with so many patients, and then with colleagues, and then perhaps even with specialists of other disciplines—as is more and more the case—means that analysts are exposed to a flow of conceptive experiences whose disordering quality can even destabilize the necessary, though relative, constancy, continuity, invariance of one's logical-operative Ego, of one's professional idem.
This implies then that these professionals need a particularly efficient re-organizer of the elements which inordinately germinate in the vital stream of their interpretative relationships, and this re-organizer is easily traced to the imaginary patrimony available to every one of us. This is so much easier if one's didactic analysis has been "successful" in the terms I have already mentioned, if therefore one can rely on a "psychoanalytical conscience", which offers certainty by the objectualistic universalism on which it is based and by the medical ethic on which it (unduly) rests.
But, as we have seen, the re-organizer of one's conceptive dis-order can also be a particular product of this dis-order itself, an original conception which, though maintaining its "weak" character, has a sufficient orientative power capable of preventing unbearable disorientation or bewilderment. This guide-conception can be more or less ample, more or less explicit and endowed with its own legality (norms and codes relating to technical-methodological aspects of the analytical practice), but anyway the analyst producing it becomes, though partially, a unique author, and as such he will avoid the totalizing hegemony of his "conscience", which, as we know, is always a false conscience.
But the decline of a meta-psychological era in psychoanalysis seems to imply a phenomenon similar to that observed by Richard Rorty (1982) about the decline of the meta-physical era in philosophy. He says:
In 1951, a graduate student who (like myself) was in the process of learning about, or being converted to, analytic philosophy, could still believe that there were a finite number of distinct, specifiable philosophical problems to be resolved—problems which any serious analytic philosopher would agree to be the outstanding problems. [...] These were problems which fitted nicely into the vocabulary of the positivists. [...] To recite this list of problems and paradigms is to evoke memories of a simple, brighter, vanished world. [...] [Today] most philosophers are more or less "analytic", but there is no agreed-upon interuniversity paradigm of philosophical work, nor any agreed-upon list of "central problems". The best hope for an American philosopher is Andy Warhol's promise that we shall all be superstars, for approximately fifteen minutes apiece.
And a few pages later he adds:
We should let a hundred flowers bloom, admire them while they last, and leave botanizing to the intellectual historians of the next century.
This invitation, virtuous for the profound respect of any emerging Otherness, for the suspension of any judgment on the eventuality of our common future, and for the substantially aesthetic-narrative dimension which it recalls, allows me to return to the lines from Montale's poem with which I opened. Questioning the existence of a meta-psychological or meta-physical "common ground" means putting the octopus in his own place in the historical-ecological complexity we all share. It also means (recalling Goethe-Freud's witch) breaking the spell, under which we end up by entrusting ourselves to the octopus, while believing it is we who are using his "inky tentacles". Perhaps the "approximately fifteen minutes" of fame to which each of us, as authors, legitimately aspire are enough to say to ourselves: «Now you know you don't belong to him. Being yourself you become his beyondness.».

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Notes:
(1) "...Il polipo che insinua / tentacoli d'inchiostro tra gli scogli / può servirsi di te. Tu gli appartieni / e non lo sai. Sei lui, ti credi te."

"[...] when and only when legality exists, creativity exists (in other words, it makes sense to speak of creativity when and only when we can speak of legality) and vice versa, of course. A 'creativity' unrelated to a 'legality' is little more than a flatus vocis [...]" (E. Garroni, 1978)