Giuseppe Civitarese - Closing Your Eyes to See

Now, “You are requested to close the eyes (or an eye)”, from being the inaugural moment of Freud's self-analysis and of psychoanalysis, becomes the moment that marks the start of each analysis. We ask patients to free associate, to dream, to set aside external reality and to focus on psychic reality. The analyst too turns a blind eye because he forgoes any judgmental attitude. And he closes his eyes. Analysis consists in an exchange of states of reverie, in the creation of a shared dream space in which the communication between one unconscious and another takes place in ideal conditions.

Through the intuition of the unconscious movements of the relationship, the analyst builds new symbolic forms to help the analysand express hitherto unthinkable emotions, to make the superego less ruthless, and thus to be more fully human. The assumption behind this approach is that when a patient enters analysis, he loses his mind (Ogden, 2009 ) or, in other words, enters an intermediate psychological area, or one shared with the analyst. The way in which each generates the meanings of his or her own experience is affected by the presence of the other. What is created is an unconscious emotional field that the couple share. In short, for a mind to develop, when it is born, or to resume psychic growth that in some areas may have been arrested, there have to be at least two people.

The very device of analysis (an unprecedented form of relationship, a new way of being human that was invented by Freud) is therefore an example of voluntary blindness, like turning off the lights to focus on the theatre of the inner life or the phantasmagoria of the cinema of dreams.

Civitarese, Giuseppe (2014). The Necessary Dream: New Theories and Techniques of Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (Kindle Locations 249-261). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.