Elvio Fachinelli was one of the most original and, in many respects, most controversial Italian psychoanalysts of the twentieth century. A perceptive critic, acute connoisseur, and translator of some of Freud’s important works,1 he immersed psychoanalysis into political contestation in a way few others have managed to do. It is no coincidence that in her Storia della psicoanalisi (History of psychoanalysis) Silvia Vegetti Finzi describes Fachinelli as one of the thinkers who were most “sensitive and responsive” to the social changes of the late twentieth century,2 or that the French scholar Michel David considers him an unclassifiable figure, one capable of proposing a form of antiauthoritarianism of rare “sharpness and seriousness.”3
Born in the small Alpine village of Luserna in 1928, Fachinelli spent his childhood in both Italy and France before studying medicine at the University of Pavia. He graduated with full marks and, after some hesitation, specialized in psychiatry, completed an internship at the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan, and wrote a thesis on the use of the Rorschach test in the diagnosis of obsessional neuroses. In 1962 he began his training analysis with the eminent Italian psychoanalyst Cesare Musatti,4 at the end of which he became a member of the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana (Italian Psychoanalytic Society). In 1965, together with some leftist intellectuals,5 Fachinelli launched the journal Il Corpo (The body), in which he commented on and translated such crucial psychoanalytic works as Freud’s “Negation” and Wilhelm Reich’s “Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis.” From the outset, Fachinelli regarded psychoanalytic theory and the concrete experience of everyday reality as being inextricably linked. For him, psychoanalysis was a crucial compass for understanding the social ferment of his time and, for this reason, its knowledge had to be put to the test in the context of political affiliations and tendencies. In 1967, with the rise of the student movement, he abandoned Il Corpo and joined the periodical Quaderni Piacentini, for which he penned his most important contributions on the so-called Sessantotto Italiano. In 1969, during the XXVI International Congress of Psychoanalysis, he organized with the Swiss psychoanalyst Berthold Rothschild a “counter-congress” to protest against the conservative drift of institutional psychoanalysis and its narrow conception of training analysis, an initiative that drew the interest of Jacques Lacan. The following year, together with leading feminists Lea Melandri and Luisa Muraro, he became a staff member of the self-managed kindergarten of Porta Ticinese in Milan, presenting the outcome of this experience first in the conference “Esperienze non autoritarie nella scuola” (Nonauthoritarian Experiences in School) and then in the book L’erba voglio (The grass I want).6 With the aim of giving voice to the works and proposals of the extraparliamentary Left, L’erba voglio also became a journal—which Fachinelli founded and directed together with Muraro and Melandri for several years—before establishing itself as an independent publisher. In 1974, after undertaking initiatives against the authoritarianism of psychoanalysis and of the educational system, as well as attending numerous conferences on these matters, Fachinelli took part in a meeting with Lacan in Milan,7 during which he famously refused to be appointed president of the Italian Section of the latter’s school, the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP). In that same year, he collected some of his most important writings in the book Il bambino dalle uova d’oro (The boy with the golden eggs)8 while continuing his work as a translator and political activist. In 1975, he recorded his political impressions of the Portuguese revolution, expressing his growing distrust of mass movements,9 a distrust which in the following years would come to be increasingly characterized by resignation and pessimism. At the end of the 1970s, Fachinelli published La freccia ferma (The Still Arrow, 1979)10 and engaged in the issue of drug addiction, famously polemicizing with Umberto Eco.11 In 1983, he published what remains his most ambiguous book, Claustrofilia.12 Growing increasingly distant from the revolutionary militancy of leftist politics, in 1987 he participated in the TV show Fuori Orario as a regular contributor on society and psychoanalysis. At that stage, he was already suffering from cancer. However, the disease did not prevent him from further lecturing at several psychoanalytic conferences, where he introduced some of the crucial themes of his last book, La mente estatica (The ecstatic mind, 1989).13 Fachinelli died in Milan on December 21, 1989, and was buried in Luserna, to which he donated his rich and extensive library.
More than thirty years after his death, Fachinelli’s legacy appears shrouded in an aura of perplexity. It is no exaggeration to say that, today, his thought seems sadly relegated to the margins of the history of psychoanalysis, reappearing only sporadically in the distorted form of the memorial or intellectual tribute. With some noteworthy exceptions,14 Fachinelli has been preyed upon by what he himself scornfully defined as the “necrophagic apparatus” of the culture industry: a commemorative system based on the cyclical time of anniversaries in which knowledge is recalled as already “dead,” or mourned with petty nostalgia.15 What today seem to survive of Fachinellian psychoanalysis are mostly shreds of fragmentary concepts (ecstasy, claustrophilia, the dissidence of desire), cautiously purified of their intrinsic discomfort. Fully endorsing Fachinelli’s harsh criticism of psychoanalysis would instead entail questioning the very meaning of psychoanalytic practice tout court. Becoming full-fledged “Fachinellians” would twist psychoanalysis (its peculiar rationalism, its epistemology of suspicion, and its adamant disproving of facts) against what it has itself become. As Fachinelli constantly reiterated over the years, psychoanalytic reason is marred by an “original sin” with which it has to perpetually reckon. Born as a practice that reveals the subject of the unconscious, psychoanalysis soon locked up its disturbing disclosure in a “sharp forest of defenses,”16 turning into a paranoid reaction to the “threat” of the unknown. Yet, according to Fachinelli, psychoanalysis can still make a difference, as long as one continues to challenge its tendency to close in on itself, to “reabsorb and neutralize the meaning of its work.”17 Among all of the modern fields of knowledge, psychoanalysis seems to remain one of the few that still provides us with an inestimable “democratic promise,”18 a call for equality founded not on a rigid conception of identity, but on the contingent incommensurability of each and every unconscious: a genuine politics of singularity whose unconditional unfolding can bring about profound transformations both in subjects and in late-capitalist society. Returning to Fachinelli today means putting into play this vocation to keep the unconscious “open,” and thus countering the very concrete possibility that the Freudian discovery will fully be reduced to either a flat fundamentalism19 or a trivial hedonist rant for libidinal emancipation.20
Fachinelli’s early writings appear to be distant from psychoanalytic theory and mainly dwell on psychiatry and psychopathology. However, they already present some discernible traits of his later thought. Each of these works aims to expand the scope of clinical knowledge and open it to a dialogue with a diverse range of theories and domains. Fachinelli’s main concern as a psychiatrist specifically addresses the rejection of that parochial monism which haunts psychopathology as much as post-Freudian psychoanalysis. In this sense, what his earliest contributions set out to do was already typically Fachinellian: no statistical or scientific model can exhaust the sheer exuberance of subjectivity; clinical practice should not be expected to passively convert the patient’s inner condition into the jargon of mental health, but instead translate the clinician’s knowledge into concrete lived experience, into a kind of praxis which characterizes each subject’s psychological vicissitudes as unique. For Fachinelli, both the psychiatrist and the psychoanalyst must share the same ethical motto: instead of closing themselves up in the “fortresses of knowledge,” clinicians must actively militate in the world.
This aim is pivotal in Fachinelli’s thesis in psychiatry.21 Starting with a reassessment of the Rorschach test, he claims that obsessional neurosis is not a consistent condition, but a set of diversified and irreducible “manifestations”22 whose components (that is, symptoms) are all equally relevant. Even if ambiguous and decidedly outdated, the Rorschach test enables the analysis of neurosis to be tied to the “fundamental structuring dimensions” of culture23 and highlights the way that clinics and society are not merely watertight compartments, but inextricably intertwined poles. Deeming psychiatric methodology to be a mere “dictionary,” a “kabbala of the human person,”24 Fachinelli proposes to reconceptualize the Rorschach test through the lens of a phenomenological-existential perspective, so as to shift the emphasis from symptoms to the subject’s diverse ways of being in the world.
The same intention runs through “New Meaning of Magical Design and Recovery of the Past in the Work of a Psychotic Artist,”25 a work still indebted to psychopathology but which at the same time puts forward more far-sighted perspectives. Here, the phenomenological take on the patient’s lived experience, the way in which one makes sense of one’s world, remains crucial. However, the importance of psychoanalysis turns out to be more and more evident, with the unconscious acting as a fundamental speculative and theoretical referent: the “other scene” of the human psyche that endows each patient with a strong notion of subjectivity—i.e., the subject as an ineffable singularity. But it is only in 1965, with the completion of his training analysis, that Fachinelli begins to deal more thematically with psychoanalysis. That year he launches the leftist cultural journal Il Corpo, one of the first lay (nontechnical) journals devoted to psychoanalysis.26 With Il Corpo, Fachinelli seeks to give psychoanalytic theory an overtly political dimension, scrutinizing some of the key Freudian concepts through anthropology, dialectics, and mass culture.
In his very first contribution, Fachinelli offers a translation of the hermetic Freudian text “Negation” (1925), accompanying it with an extensive critical commentary (“The Hypothesis of Destruction in Sigmund Freud”)27 in which he sharply opposes ego psychology. For Fachinelli, “Negation” constitutes a highly strategic piece of writing. Published in 1925, it would work as a watershed between the great thanatropic turning point of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and his more resigned Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), namely, between the dislodging of the Ego from its sovereign position in the psyche and the reconceptualization of the death drive as a cosmological principle.28 According to Fachinelli, the supposed polarization between Eros and Thanatos is nothing but a false dualism; we are instead dealing with an asymmetrical relation in which life latches onto death as an ephemeral deviation, so that existence would figure merely as a “set of forces that resist death.” In Civilization and Its Discontents, however, Freud took a step back, trivializing the productive tension between Eros and Thanatos into a gloomy “cosmology in which man is acted out, played by an internal Other”:29 destruction is downsized to an alien, impersonal force to be domesticated and imprisoned. It is in “Negation” that the sheer ambiguity between creation and destruction would become paramount for the structuring of the psyche. The defense mechanism of negation—that is, the emergence of an unconscious content linguistically denied—is what preserves humanity from the hoax of a “linearly continuous and optimistic” reason, that is to say, from a naïve narrative of the psyche as a smooth and seamless flow of thoughts. In other words, for Fachinelli negation reinstates the work of the negative as the most crucial component of psychoanalytic theory and practice. This is why post-Freudians have completely ignored this text: it establishes destruction and instability as the very foundation of the human psyche, endowing the psyche with the shadow of an unemployed negativity which can neither be tamed nor homologated in any way. On the other hand, negation also discloses how the most peremptory revelations of the unconscious always spring from the margins, from the most volatile and singular nuances of conscious life. Far from being coherently uniform, the psyche is always “ambiguous,” “polyvalent,” a machination whose functions must be deciphered not according to causal interpretations, but via “symbolic-descriptive” speculations.30 The subject’s task is to assume the negated truth of the unconscious as the seemingly peripheral part of discourse. Seen from the perspective of negation, psychoanalysis turns out to be an intrinsically dialectic knowledge, but with a caveat: linking psychoanalysis to dialectics does not mean reducing its basic assumptions to those of a seemingly stronger (more accurate) knowledge, but acknowledging how both these domains struggle with the theoretical ambiguity of the negative. Both psychoanalysis and dialectics are committed to the work of a logical sublation in which negation does not destroy but produces, does not eradicate but creates. If we dismiss negation, we not only neglect the death drive, but even psychoanalysis itself: “It now seems clear that the elimination of the concept of the death instinct . . . was one of the essential logical premises for the dislocation of psychoanalysis in the direction of a good socio-affective adjustment. By eliminating the negative . . . which always disputes desire and life, by eliminating death, it is easy to arrive at a concept of the ‘ordered’ and ‘harmonious’ progress of the personality.”31
Fachinelli’s critique of post-Freudian psychoanalysis continues in his second contribution to Il Corpo, “On Anal Time-Money” (1965),32 a fierce attack on the idea that the individual develops through a rigid and prearranged “biological automatism.”33 Fachinelli rejects the term “stage,” deeming it to function as a mere stopgap, an all-encompassing notion that claims to mirror human complexity as the output of a series of algorithms. Once again, it is by resorting to dialectics that Fachinelli manages to overcome post-Freudian psychoanalysis and its pitfalls: far from following an idealistic, homogeneous sequence, each psychosexual stage is a patchwork of material vicissitudes which unfold through “antithetical determinations.” Since the unconscious knows no (evolutionary) linearity nor consistency, the most suitable term to describe such a twisted development is “situations”:34 specific and diverse moments in which one’s libido takes on a hyperpersonal configuration and symbolism, incommensurable with that of other subjects. For Fachinelli, what he called the “anal situation” deserves particular attention, as its dynamics reflect not only the way in which the unconscious shapes and organizes its contents into symbolic representations, but also the primordial structuring of temporality itself. In the anal situation, we can see how time stems from a material integration of imaginary formations and symbols, affecting the mind with its composite and nested architecture. Subjective time is nothing but a “broken history,” a nonlinear network of “antithesis” and “antagonistic elements.”35
In his third contribution to Il Corpo, Fachinelli translates and comments on Wilhelm Reich’s “Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis,” repudiating Reich’s materialistic approach to the unconscious and instead emphasizing the importance of a multidisciplinary framework for psychoanalysis. The text also anticipates in some ways Fachinelli’s dissatisfaction with communism’s inability to account for abrupt political changes as well as his own need to venture into new initiatives. In 1967, he joins Quaderni Piacentini, published by a left-wing group strongly opposed to both mass ideology and neocapitalist optimism.36 During these months, Fachinelli publishes some of his most important texts and brings together many of his previous arguments from what he himself defines as a “bio-psycho-sociological” perspective. In “Dissident Desire” (1968), probably his best-known yet controversial essay, Fachinelli welcomes the rise of the youth movement as a veritable political event—an absolute novelty alien both to orthodox Italian Marxism and to psychoanalysis.37 While the movement did not give voice to the needs of any particular social class—if anything, its unusual militancy aimed to overcome social class itself and gathered together people from each and every strata of society—its nonconceptual dissidence broke with the model of Oedipal transgression postulated by Freudian psychoanalysis. According to Fachinelli, the desire which enlivened the movement was a matter of neither class consciousness nor the satisfaction of needs, but a newborn utopian-maniacal drive fundamentally incompatible with modern industrial societies.
As Fachinelli puts it, for a long time the “politics of needs” guaranteed the preservation of the status quo by providing a veritable “area of collusion” between the conservative and revolutionary sides of politics. In other words, parliamentary parties worked together to create the need for a new “reality principle,” passing off a sneaky “call to order” as an “absolute” claim about “reality.”38 This covert complicity led to an inability to conceptualize the excess of desire and its absolute dissipative force. Moreover, even psychoanalysis proved to be thoroughly deaf to the movement’s demands, stubbornly taking the 1968 events as yet another form of opposition to paternal authority. But dissent from the father, Fachinelli counters, has nothing to do with the young revolutionaries’ requests. Quite the contrary, the figure of the father at stake here is “faded,” utterly indifferent to “the situations of conflict . . . classically described by Freud.” Paternal authoritarianism gives way to an “unconditional” and “total” relationship, to a more subtle and basic type of power which Freudian analysis itself “had barely glimpsed.”39 In other words, what these young revolutionaries rebelled against was the suffocating constraints of the new industrial society, a new form of control embodied in a deadly relationship with a mother who is at the same time both satiating (i.e., placing no limits on the satisfaction of needs) and devouring (i.e., strangling subjectivity at its roots). In this regard, Fachinelli identifies two key aspects that distinguish the youth movement from ordinary forms of insubordination: a request for the “impossible,” for something that is outside the repressive code of needs; and the “anonymity” of the insurgents, that is, their foreignness to class structure, their fluid, immanent “equal[ity].”40 The merging of these two aspects underlines that what is crucial is not so much the “object” of desire but its “state”: the utter immanence of desire as an obstinate and “perennial NOT ENOUGH”:41 an objectless absolute thrust which plays against any conceivable form of compromise.
While Fachinelli was initially fascinated by the youth protests, the publication of “Closed Group or Open Group?”42 (1968) marks a drastic reduction of his revolutionary enthusiasm. Less than a year after the events of 1968, dissidence has come to a standstill and its praised novelty seems already integrated into the social fabric. Instead of dismantling society and institutions, the vibrant logic of desire did nothing but bring to light “a general lack of meaning,” “a great void” that the “old organizational forms” soon managed to compensate for.43 The nomadic spreading of desire was captured by leaders and members of parliament, precipitating the movement into the same (reactionary) deadlocks of mainstream politics and reformist principles.
Despite the deliberate step back from “Dissident Desire,” “Closed Group or Open Group?” remains crucial to understanding Fachinelli’s political militancy in those years. Instead of imparting a theoretical lesson, Fachinelli prefers to set up a concrete group analysis in which the repression, authoritarianism, and exclusion glimpsed in the revolutionary movement could be experienced directly. Relying on a broad notion of “otherness” (in which the Other represents the new, the different, but also the stranger), Fachinelli addresses the students’ intrinsic tendency to transform the Other into an enemy, namely, into a threat which has to be kept at bay or even abruptly excluded: “The extraneous, the concrete, and tangible (all too tangible) that is dissimilar had to be eliminated . . . to make room for an ever more perfect sameness.”44 To grasp the purging processes inherent to the group, Fachinelli proposes a logical scheme that Massimo Recalcati has appropriately defined as the “antinomian pair of opening-closing,” a device that in his subsequent works Fachinelli develops in different guises, and that according to Recalcati would have “the same dignity [that] the categories of Eros and Thanatos have in Freud, those of desire and enjoyment in Lacan, and those of molar and molecular in Deleuze and Guattari.”45 In “Closed Group or Open Group?,” polarization unfolds through the processes of what Fachinelli calls “communalization [accomunamento]” and “sectarianization [settarizzazione].” As Fachinelli remarks, we should resist the temptation to see them as a mere dichotomy. On the contrary, communalization and sectarianization are entangled in a complex intersection, in which they continuously merge with one another. Whereas communalization prompts an unhesitant acceptance of otherness, enhancing the human tendency to aggregate and communicate with the Other, sectarianization marks a reaction that tightens the group’s borders, closing them against a threatening and hostile outside. Yet, instead of preserving the group identity, this paranoid closure ends up exposing it to the risk of its own implosion and collapse. Therefore, when sectarianization seems to prevail and the group begins to crumble, there may be a return to communalization, a desperate reopening to the outside. The failure of the revolutionary movement consisted precisely in its having succumbed to closure, ossifying its exuberance in the figure of the leader, who absorbed the heterogeneity of the group’s desires. In order to establish a solid identity among its members, sectarianization fosters the homogenization of the group and enables the leader to control its members in a unitary and authoritative way. The weaker the group is, the more it will tend to lock onto itself, and therefore to become “persecutory,” “fragmented,” and unstable. At this point, there are two possible outcomes: either a renewed communalization, or devitalization. Nonetheless, Fachinelli is forced to conclude that, most of the time, sectarianization prevails over communalization, thus dooming the group to its self-annihilation: every revolution that struggles for equality and freedom inevitably fails, crushed under its own tendency to closure and the need to expel what resists it.
Post-1968 disillusionment allows Fachinelli to intensify his reflection on the sectarian nature of groups. In July 1969, this leads to his organization, with Berthold Rothschild, of a “counter-congress” to protest against the 26th IPA Congress in Rome. The purpose of the initiative is once again to challenge the psychoanalytic establishment, an objective that Fachinelli subsequently pursues in his pivotal intervention “What Does Oedipus Ask the Sphinx?” (1969),46 in which he introduces his famous dichotomy between a “psychoanalysis of questions” and a “psychoanalysis of answers.” Today, Fachinelli writes, psychoanalysis is no longer a practice of questions, a knowledge which interrogates the subject about his or her symptoms, but an authority which merely prescribes answers: “Psychoanalysis . . . has increasingly deteriorated into . . . the task of giving reasons to what exists, that is, to rationalize its irrationalities, prevent its difficulties, buffer its conflicts.”47
In sharp contrast to Freud’s teaching, Oedipus’s encounter with the Sphinx has lost its initiatory value as a challenge through which man assumes his destiny—that is, the truth of his symptom. Completely misunderstanding its original vocation, psychoanalysis has taken the position of a despotic Sphinx, “the stranger who waits for the traveler to come along” in order to impose on him answers of unquestionable and universal value.48 The subversive singularity of the symptom is thus reduced to procedures of “serial indoctrination,” employed by what Fachinelli calls “the official fortresses of knowledge”—and psychoanalysis itself, suffocated by a massive bureaucracy, becomes in every respect an accomplice in the “control of deviance.”
However, such an institutional fortification does not seal the triumph of psychoanalytic knowledge, its ultimate universalization, but instead ends up revealing its “serious conceptual crisis.”49 Once again, sectarianization as a closing reflex reveals the group’s inherent weakness, its desperate attempt to resist dissolution by closing onto itself. Faced with the novelty of the youth movement and its “impossible” demands, psychoanalysis was unable to renew its conceptual apparatus, to offer people a new language to grasp the world’s dynamic changes: what does the old oedipal paternalism still have to say to the new “children” of late capitalism? Fachinelli’s diagnosis is equally ruthless and clear: psychoanalysis has failed, but this does not mean that we should also reject the psychoanalytic method as such. Instead, psychoanalysis needs to be reconstructed in “other places,” outside the logic of ego psychology and its institutional borders. What we desperately need is a psychoanalysis of the “irregular,” of the “arrhythmic,” a “labor with no fixed abode” which, instead of trying to rationalize what already exists, is committed to the enhancement of human contingency.50
During the 1970s, Fachinelli’s urge to formulate a new psychoanalytic language from the lower steps of the social ladder takes shape through a close dialogue with the discontent to be found on the fringes of society—working-class and inner-city districts, public schools. Nonetheless, such a political impetus is also ceaselessly accompanied by an animated commitment to theoretical reelaboration. Although he was disheartened by the failed revolution, the Fachinelli of the 1970s does not hesitate to engage in the most controversial and delicate issues of late-capitalist society, such as the problems of education, drug addiction, and social exclusion.
At the very beginning of the decade, together with Melandri (who would later also become his partner) and Muraro, Fachinelli joins the staff of the self-managed kindergarten of Porta Ticinese in Milan. Fachinelli’s militancy about school and education reforms began as early as 1967, with his clear opposition to the primitiveness of the mainstream educational model. In a late interview, he admits that it was Don Lorenzo Milani’s Lettera a una professoressa (Letter to a teacher), a book that exposed the impact of social class dynamics on the school system, that triggered his interest in the events of 1968. In his review of the volume, Fachinelli emphasizes the selective and exclusionary nature of Italian education, identifying it with the very “root of our impotent segregation.”51 According to Fachinelli and Milani, culture in the school system functions as a highly separatist and disguised “moral screen,” which needs to be replaced by a new system “that does not fail [pupils], which lasts three hundred and sixty-five days a year,” and which is based on an idea of “endless training.”52 Two years later, Fachinelli revisits the topic of education in his translation of and commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater” (1969),53 highlighting the importance of a proletarian (democratic, noncoercive, and egalitarian) education and opposing it to the bourgeois (classist) one. Written before his participation in the Porta Ticinese kindergarten experience, this contribution already argues for a type of education based not on such bourgeois values as meritocracy and coercion, but on improvisation and representation, an education that guarantees children “the fulfilment of their childhood.” In line with Benjamin’s thesis, Fachinelli views children’s expressive freedom to be purely “revolutionary”54 insofar as it is impervious to subtle class ideologies. Broadly speaking, there are two main reasons why education is such a crucial issue for Fachinelli. First, given that education addresses a personality which is still developing (and thus not yet alienated by the standardizing logic of consumerism), it is part and parcel of our responsibility for the future.55 Second, Fachinelli’s take on education also enables him to rework his postrevolutionary viewpoint on psychoanalysis. In that same year, in the programmatic paper “The Psychoanalyst Must Define His Position in Society” (1970), he proposes that psychoanalysis is amenable to “more social” tasks, but only under one fundamental condition: to offer psychoanalysis to anyone who needs it requires the fabrication of new explanatory models, the elaboration of new concepts to cope with “different requests.”56 Since human concerns are closely intertwined with those of the community, psychoanalysis must overcome its obsolete bourgeois segregation and become comprehensible to everyone. In this sense, the self-managed kindergarten experience is not an impromptu initiative, but the practical application of diverse ideas about the importance of acting within and in favor of school education. Although short-lived, this experiment continued in the conference Non-Authoritarian Experiences in School, whose proceedings were published as L’erba voglio (The grass I want).
And it is precisely in the homonymous journal L’erba voglio that Fachinelli pens one of his most famous theoretical texts, “The Paradox of Repetition,”57 a long article published in three parts between 1971 and 1973. The basic objective of the paper is to criticize the Freudian compulsion to repeat, splitting its univocal model into three different modes of repetition. Fachinelli’s return to an eminently theoretical discussion of psychoanalysis is anything but random: after the kindergarten initiative, he acknowledges that psychoanalysis alone is capable of providing society with a truly emancipatory anthropological basis for the individual, a unique knowledge that enhances subjectivity without dissipating it in the capitalist tide of consumerism or in the collectivization of the Marxist theory of class struggle.
Fachinelli argues that Freud limited himself to showing only the “bad side” of repetition, conceiving it as a forced, rigidly deterministic, and unilateral mechanism. Freudian repetition freezes time in an eternal and unchangeable reiteration of the past, which leaves no room for the subject to be responsible for and act upon his own future. Moreover, Fachinelli notes that if there is no possibility to change the future, if one is inexorably consigned to repetition, then the present itself also turns into yet another past: “For Freud . . . the past becomes the present: it is transference, acting out. . . . But in this way, the present almost does not exist for itself, it does not have an effect; and since past experience turns out to be, in large part, ‘beyond the pleasure principle,’ its repetition tends to be a repetition of the negative.”58 Such a vision of the present is problematic not only in that it simplifies the concrete complexity of human experience, but also because of its (narrow) political outcomes: to say that man’s future will inexorably be a copy of the past is to deprive the subject of any ability to choose and foster (social) change. Fachinelli instead proposes an account of repetition built on three different variants. The first mode of repetition is the replica, “an almost precise reedition of the already given,” which passively superimposes the past onto the present. The second type is reduction, an impoverished and “more schematic” repetition. Finally, there is resumption (ripresa), a repetition that, while catalyzing the reappearance of the past, puts life back into action, opening it to confirmation or modification. Fachinelli remarks that “repetition is only a general term,” which indicates “various possibilities” and “distinct modalities.”59 Unlike the monotony or simplification that go with repetition in the first two senses of the term, resumption allows us to reactualize the past, opening it to change and transformation. Moreover, since reality is complex, asymmetrical, riddled with unbridgeable disparities, the past is always irreversible: we will never be able to flawlessly reproduce it. Fachinelli opposes the idea of an unethical subject, chained to the inertia of the past that repeats itself indefinitely and inexorably, and instead offers a notion of nonnegative repetition, which exacerbates the urgency to take a stand for our own unconscious subjectivity, and therefore revitalize our choices. Most importantly, such a discourse not only concerns the clinic but can also be extended to the very structure of the psychoanalytic establishment. As Fachinelli argues in a polemic with Giovanni Jervis, it will not be the reactionary repetition of the affiliation mechanisms of power (that is, training analysis) that rescues psychoanalysis from its decline, but psychoanalysis’s resumption: in a world in constant transformation, psychoanalysis will survive not by resisting sociopolitical mutations, but by placing itself in the position of those who know how to ask the right questions. Relinquishing its status as a restricted institution of repetition, psychoanalysis must instead present itself as the voice of resumption.60
The question of time at stake in the notion of resumption becomes even more crucial in Fachinelli’s subsequent works. We could even say that his reflections on temporality mark his most original contribution to psychoanalysis. What is time? And what is its relationship with the unconscious? Is it enough to claim, as Freud did, that the unconscious is timeless? All of these questions converge in The Still Arrow: Three Attempts to Annul Time (1979), a book in which Fachinelli aims to integrate Freud’s legacy with some of his own personal accounts of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. While Fachinelli previously tried to update and enhance Freud’s hypotheses, in The Still Arrow he reverses his approach: it no longer remains faithful to Freud, but instead emphasizes and works through the very conditions that make psychoanalysis equally prominent and problematic. For this to be possible, however, we must undertake new modes of expression and fabricate a new language external to that of ordinary metapsychology. As Fachinelli puts it in the opening of the book, The Still Arrow is “almost entirely devoid of psychoanalytic terminology”: “Not only because the latter has become entrenched in hypostatised formulas—in both specialised and common use—that often hinder, instead of facilitating, the understanding of concrete situations; but especially because, following the thread of discovery, I was obliged to go beyond the psychoanalytic field and deal also with other problems, which are formulated differently.”61
The key notion Fachinelli introduces here, which links the three studies proposed by the book into one substantial argument, is that of the chronotype: the singular way in which the subject, a society, or any other group shapes their own personal experience with time. The chronotype is an “element that orders . . . events” and “situations . . . [which are] completely disconnected”;62 it is a theoretical device that, rather than claiming to solve the problem of time, exacerbates it. Time is a concern that haunted Fachinelli’s thought since his youth, but it is only in The Still Arrow that it emerges as a central matter for “the future of psychoanalysis and its interventions.”63 As the book’s subtitle states, this study aims to analyze the way in which certain clinical, anthropological, and sociohistorical structures deal with time, attempt to dominate it, and therefore annul it. Obsessive-compulsive rituals, archaic societies, and Fascism would equally be captured by the same chronotype, in which time is manipulated and subsequently denied. With regard to the obsessive, this kind of subject carries out a molecular “segmentation of concrete time” into a “series of timelets (tempuscoli),”64 each separated from the other. By annulling time, that is, by splitting it into infinite micro-times, the obsessive can indefinitely postpone the completion of the action that distresses him most. This “‘stationary’ condition” of “permanent restlessness”65 would then unfold in a network of interpersonal relationships and desires, giving way to a veritable “archaic micro-society.”66 Accordingly, for Fachinelli, Fascism emerges from the “denial of the death of the fatherland”—from the unacceptable collapse of nationalist ideals following World War I. This is why Fascism opposed the idea of a “trampled,” “damaged” nation with a “total,” statuesque, and immobile but also “exclusive and intolerant” fatherland, which punished in its “opponents . . . [its] own fantasies about killing the [fatherland].”67 To disguise the “irremediable disappearance” of a lost national unity, Fascism had to endlessly reenact its phantom of a total communion, encapsulating it in an infinite “time of return.”68 Fascism and obsessional neurosis in turn significantly resonate with the rites of archaic societies. According to the basic assumption of such societies that “the dead man is not dead” but “keeps on living” through his celebration in rites, the fear of the corpse as something dragged out of time leads their members to the denial of “death itself.”69 The archaic chronotype is one of sheer plenitude, in which the negativity of death is constantly reinstated as a living social and spiritual entity.
The gist of the chronotype is therefore clear: the anguish of time is a primordial phenomenon which has always accompanied human affairs, and its understanding does not rely on some particular or even scientific objectification. Rather, time can be approached only through an inquiry into how each subject or social institution acts on (and is acted upon by) it.
In the early 1980s, Fachinelli positions temporality at the heart of psychoanalytic practice itself. His book Claustrofilia (1983) explores the nature of analytic time, a terra incognita that not even Freud was able to explore. Psychoanalytic knowledge was never questioned in terms of its own uncertainty and moments of bewilderment. Both the chronotype and the claustrophilic space pinpoint the same heterogeneous compression of several temporal phenomena and situations, but unlike the chronotype, claustrophilia addresses an even more intimate, unfathomable time, which comprises dreams, “birth-childbirth fantasies,” “pregnancy-uterine states,” and the “primal scene.”70 What all of these situations have in common is a basic “search for closure,” a propensity for “locking oneself in.”71 Even though Fachinelli’s attempt to track down this primordial tendency in a range of other experiences (such as Doppelgänger phenomena or certain unconscious coincidences) is not always convincing, the importance of claustrophilia to psychoanalysis is paramount in that it brings to light one of its most controversial issues: the length of the psychoanalytic treatment. As Fachinelli argues, the claustrophilic area plays a “hidden” but nonetheless “active” role in the analytic relationship, to such an extent that without this notion psychoanalysis would not even be conceivable. Criticizing Freud, Fachinelli claims that between the (patently experimental) Studies on Hysteria and the subsequent (and methodologically defined) Technical Papers the notion of analytic time underwent a significant reworking: while in its first formulation, temporality was still “semifeudal,” “discontinuous,” and punctuated by the emergence of unconscious symptoms, its subsequent conception became “chronometric” and “monotonous.” Once the analytical method was standardized, “the implicit values of regularity and continuity . . . come to occupy first place in opposition to those of transformation and change,” bringing about a paradoxical result: while the length of individual psychoanalytic sessions is reduced to a mere social convention (a defined time, purged of its wasted and empty moments), the total duration of the treatment becomes “indefinite,” immersed in an interminable time without visible limits.72 The transition of psychoanalysis from an exploratory practice of the unconscious to a normalizing institution follows exactly the development of this relationship, and the analyst is no longer devoted to the search for unexpected variations, but now seeks the preservation of a regularity. Like a “maternal omnivorous figure,”73 the analyst exploits the analysand’s claustrophilic space (his primordial desire to “lock himself in”) to turn analysis into an endless treatment. This is why Fachinelli sardonically concludes that the psychoanalytic apparatus has come to a “standstill,” that it itself has become yet another attempt to annul time.
Fachinelli’s speculation on temporality reaches its apex in his final book, La mente estatica (The ecstatic mind, 1989), which sets forth a new reading of the concept of ecstasy. Fachinelli’s notion of the ecstatic is remarkably broad, in that he repudiates the use of a unitary conception of ecstasy and denies its immediate traceability to a specific cognitive or emotional state. Rather than something clearly delimited, the ecstatic is “a border area,” the extreme and at the same time most intimate margin of human experience.74 In this sense, Fachinelli’s ecstasy has nothing to do with the possession states famously described by anthropologists, or with the clinical stigma of dissociation, and for one fundamental reason: Fachinelli completely rejects the idea that subjectivity might be falsified or somehow “squeezed” out of the body. In ecstasy, the subject does not dissolve, but expands, while on the contrary it is the Ego that is abolished: by suspending the “vigilance-defense system,” subjectivity is invested with an “unusual . . . excessive . . . joy,” which leads it beyond itself.75 And it is precisely the relationship between ecstasy and temporality that allows for such a joyful expansion: rather than putting time out of joint, ecstasy takes the individual out of time, creating a fissure in the temporal frame whereby subjectivity detaches itself from identity and thrives in an unlimited multiplicity: “At certain points, something, anything, is timeless, and I watch it exist. But I am only a gaze of the thing that is, its way of being in the light.”76
Although apparently foreign to psychoanalysis, ecstatic subjectivity turns out to be its most critical reversal, a fundamental reference to undermine from within what Fachinelli defines as the “apologies of defense,” namely, those discourses that propose an account of the individual as perennially vulnerable, constantly besieged by a need to defend himself or herself. Since its destiny runs parallel to the mass popularization of psychoanalysis, ecstasy is not only a fascinating theoretical notion, but first and foremost something genuinely political. The apology of defense as the discourse which represses the ecstatic in fact emerged together with psychoanalysis, as its side effect, and silently spread with its institutionalization, to the point of triggering a total medicalization of Western society. According to Fachinelli, Freud himself noted the danger of the ecstatic (which is its ability to disintegrate reason), and consequently he confined it to a domain of paroxysmal but unpleasant experience. Menaced by a “boundless joy,” psychoanalysis walled off the ecstatic and progressively slipped into a discourse that, instead of giving voice to the unconscious, reduced it to “the size of the barriers built against it.”77 When joy manifests itself uncontrollably, the defense “snaps like a trap,” entangling the subject in a state of paranoid vigilance.78 The logical primacy of defenses ends up producing a deadly short circuit within psychoanalytic knowledge, extending the defensive attitude of the unconscious to the sphere of the ordinary, and therefore of the nonpathological. Psychoanalytic defensive mechanisms (and this is even more valid for current psychotherapy)79 acquire a normative value with respect to the individual’s entire psychic life, establishing a problematic continuity between the state of alteration (so-called pathology) and that of nonalteration, which makes civilization as a whole something intrinsically pathological. Fachinelli’s conclusion is clear and resigned: instead of setting subjectivity free from the constraints of capitalist reason, psychoanalysis has renewed and reinforced these constraints, thus completely disregarding its original vocation.
What position does On Freud—a short posthumous book—occupy in Elvio Fachinelli’s thought? And what could it tell us about the puzzling conclusions of The Ecstatic Mind? In a sense, we might say that it is transversal to the whole of Fachinelli’s work. The essays in this collection are a very precious thread for clarifying, singling out, and even reelaborating some of the most delicate aspects of Fachinelli’s critique of consumer society and, above all, of psychoanalysis itself. The volume collects six texts, of which the first, “Freud,” dates back to 1966, at the beginning of Fachinelli’s psychoanalytic militancy, while the last, “The Unexpected and Surprise in Analysis,” was written in 1989, just prior to his death. Despite its brevity, the collection is extremely heterogeneous and faithfully mirrors the intense activity carried out on several fronts by its author. “Freud,” for example—an entry originally written for one of the volumes of the series The Protagonists of Universal History—is striking for its ability to weave the theoretical foundations of psychoanalysis together with a surprising number of personal observations and findings about Freud the person. Rather than proceeding through an aseptic introduction to the father of psychoanalysis, Fachinelli adopts instead a series of parallax perspectives: Freud the conquistador, who leads psychoanalysis to the exploration of new fields of knowledge; Freud the archaeologist, who discovers antithetical and incongruous elements in the territory of the unconscious; but also Freud the Victorian, whose bourgeois values clashed with the revolutionary character of his discovery. Fachinelli’s line of thought is unambiguous. If the truth of psychoanalysis is a truth of “labor,” that is, of the active confrontation with contradiction, then this concerns not only the unconscious, but the very stability of the analytical method itself—what Fachinelli describes as “the core of the psychoanalytic method”: the tendency of the Freudian discovery to constantly navigate between the confirmation/repetition and the refutation/falsification of its own foundations, between the preservation of the past and the inscrutability of the future.
This is why On Freud’s main thesis is as strong as it is problematic: psychoanalysis can only be the most ambiguous and fragile form of knowledge, a sensational discovery that oscillates all too easily between a “disturbing grandeur” and a reactionary “flatness,” between an epistemologically uncertain and alien body of research and a discipline “‘preyed upon’ culturally” by power and modern forms of control. Freud’s uncertainties over how to transmit his discovery are the same uncertainties psychoanalysis must confront today, and they can be summarized in what, in his last intervention, Fachinelli considers to be “the analytic epoché”: by barricading itself within its own knowledge, by adjusting its main concepts to a mechanical administration of the unconscious, psychoanalysis has lost its “lightness.” In the analytic experience, there seems to be no more room for the unexpected, the wager, and surprise. Indeed, the entire device proceeds by repetition of the “already known,” constantly marred by the fear of those moments in which it enters into a crisis and is threatened by the breaking-in of the “unexpected.”
Fachinelli’s remarkable critical ability consists of extending this psychoanalytic securitarian tendency to a set of surprisingly variable situations. In the last period of his work, he detects this reflex to close in on itself not only in the transmission of analytic knowledge (namely, training analysis and its conceptual apparatus) but also at the heart of the analytic relationship. It is no coincidence, Fachinelli writes, that the most compromising of these situations has historically been embodied in the capitalist symptom of the “phobia of the gift,” that is, in psychoanalysis’s inability (from Freud to today) to disregard its “money economy”: “Every historical moment, individual or collective, in which the money relationship, the mercenary relationship, reveals its limits and is exceeded, even fleetingly, is also a moment when the institutional analytic relationship enters into crisis.”
Curiously, while the analysand is expected to tell “the most secret details of his perversions,” the analyst is silent about “his” money,80 treating it as an unquestionable aspect of the psychoanalytic setting. Therefore, while The Ecstatic Mind seemed to evoke a vague nostalgia for a sort of lost analytical purity, for an inquiry into the unconscious prior to closure and self-defense discourses, the writings of On Freud produce a formidable change of perspective, speculating that although post-Freudian psychoanalysis degenerated into a gigantic misunderstanding, the most sinful of these moments is to be found in Freud himself. In other words, the medicalizing degeneration of the unconscious—the “sharp forest of defenses” that psychoanalysis has erected against it—is no longer to be read against the background of Freud’s heirs, but as the other side of the birth of psychoanalysis tout court. Freud’s inability to accept the “gift”—namely, to experience the “vital, free, liberating” joy of gratitude without resorting to a “disturbing central instance of authority”—would constitute for Fachinelli the inchoate destiny of analytic decay. And it is precisely in this interstice between Freud’s original sin and capitalist society that Fachinelli outlines what is probably his most audacious reflection, namely, the distinction between a mass psychoanalysis and a democratic psychoanalysis, between psychoanalysis as a practice of standardization and social control and a psychoanalysis of singularity. For Fachinelli, as long as psychoanalysis remains caught in the “straitjacket of exchange,” it will not be able to evade its bourgeois trap, its structural exclusion of the poorest sections of the population. But opening psychoanalysis to everyone (i.e., to the masses), spreading it throughout the world without compromising it, would still mean standardizing its knowledge, transforming it into yet another instrument of homologation or, as Fachinelli has it, a “huge zombie.”81 Psychoanalysis cannot become a universal praxis for everyone if it does not elaborate its bond to money as a choice that is no longer (and never has been) “obligatory.”
Although Fachinelli does not unfold this point any further, his proposal is more urgent than ever if the future scope and responsibilities of the psychoanalytic intervention are to be established. In a world in which psychotherapeutic culture has now colonized much of the Western imaginary and terminology, Fachinelli’s work remains extremely topical and allows us to engage with the possibility of a new and less authoritarian path to the disturbing knowledge of the unconscious—a democratic practice in which the free “encounter” with the singularity of the Sphinx becomes close to “what the Greeks called good or bad fortune, tyche,” while preserving a constant dialogue with ananke, that is, with “the inevitability of the destiny of all of us.”
Gioele P. Cima