To
get to know Pichon through his writings is difficult
because
he was someone who communicated
primarily
through his presence... and with little patience for writing.
And
he was hardly a speaker for the great masses—
but
rather the one who tells stories to those
who
“sit gathered around a fire—
with
the night as a backdrop...”.
What
is presented there
are
comments, anecdotes, stories,
but,
above all, memories.
He
invited people to feel... to reflect...
to
exchange ideas among themselves.
Under
such circumstances
the
imagination begins to slip free
and
no one asks about reality
or
about the truth of what is being told.
One
is there to listen,
to
speak, should an opportunity arise...
to
“let oneself be carried away” to places
that
are difficult to define...
And
—it is this tradition of the “gathering around the fire”
that
the operative groups take up!
In
the work that takes place, one can sense an “operative resonance”...
a
conception of “group work” and of the perception of reality...
of
a way of learning something about the reality of others
through
identification—projective and introjective...
of
being, in part, in the other in order to understand them,
without
at the same time becoming
that different “other”.
Pichon’s
all-encompassing emergent
can
perhaps be understood mythically
as
something born out of an “ancient” unconscious...
made
up of a knowledge of psychosis
as
something present... as something born
from
that all-encompassing “ancient” dimension that each person carries
within themselves...
and
whose manifestation is the psychotic crisis.
The
magical and metaphorical dimensions of psychotic thought
fascinated
Pichon...
he
sought to penetrate this unexplored world of confusion...
and
to come into contact with its purely unconscious
and
fundamental driving forces.
His
contact with the other world... l’autre monde...
in
search of the secret behind life and death, does not take place
through
opening “old, solitary coffins”,
but
through the unknown rooms
that
revealed themselves in the world of madness...
in
Freud’s “uncanny”... in the eerie.
It
is possible that the often unsettling image one has
of
Pichon’s final years—and which he himself liked to display—
does not correspond to his true character.
And
the inverted cone
brings
to mind Dante’s Divine Comedy,
where
there is talk of a descent into hell
as
a series of concentric circles
which
end in a point of ice.
“What
the city or society has repressed
reappears
in psychiatry!”
Pichon
linked the idea of a basic depression...
to
Freud’s idea of regression... and from this developed
the
Theory of the Single Disease.
If
basic depression
is
a kind of “birth certificate”...
...
then the presence of “the third”
as
a separating element between mother and child
is
also a “bridge”, in which the bond
becomes
a structuring element.
The
Theory of the Single Disease is not merely a theoretical contribution
but
also a powerful working tool...
one
that connects the single disease
with
its varying clinical expressions
within
a complex phenomenology of “models of bonding”
and
thus complements Mrs. Klein’s theory of object relations.
When
Pichon speaks of the “emergent element” that is born
in
the bond between analyst and analysand,
this
also evokes the idea
of
a closed, circular discourse...
the
result of the chaos that opens
like the essential spiral of a labyrinth.
In
Pichon there is a collision between different cultures
that
creates a complex mode of being.
And
as earlier in Madrid and Paris,
it
is in the café streets
that
people of different cultures and races
meet
one another...
Pichon
loved tango... the nightlife... and
the many encounters... in cafés. “My real universities were
those exciting encounters
in
the cafés of Buenos Aires...”
That
psychoanalysis had such a powerful impact in Argentina
and
Buenos Aires
has
to do with the philosophy of tango.
Immigrants...
emigrants... refugees...
restless
souls... expressing ideas and thoughts in
the
nostalgic rhythm of tango.
And
Calle Corrientes
was a condensation of different places in Europe—
but
with an entirely distinctive connection of its own...
where
the bookshops remained open until two in the morning.