Leaving the stage

Not only analysis but life itself can be seen as a ‘multiple-entry scenario’: the question is how to enter and leave the stage. Hilflosigkeit: we enter the scene of life too early. ‘Originary’ impotence is the permanent irresolvable condition of existence, but at the same time a potential source of greatness; the inclination to omnipotence and the complementary sensibility to the limit which exposes us to impotence and annihilation.1 Because of this condition we always need an other: another ‘object’; another ‘environment’ (Winnicott); another psychic agency (super-ego and ego ideal). The other, often not recognised as such, must be there at the right moment. There is always a gap, a ‘difference’, a dissymmetry, which varies in size, between the subject and the other, between the child and the adult, between the patient and the analyst, between the expectation of the object and its fulfilment.