ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic adventure is an expedition in which the aim is to discover mental space, to imagine a locus that will give substance to long-lost thoughts and enable them to reassemble—to acquire a thinker, in Wilfred Bion's words; the thinker is the psychic ego that has once more found place in the body ego. Every child is to some degree narcissistic and egocentric; he feels that his parents have no right to disappear, and his hatred is such that he cannot work though the process of mourning. Ancient Greek tragedy ritualized this aspect of mourning in the infantile ego of the spectators. Mr Tavel could henceforth recover some potential for experiencing absence, nostalgia, pain: he could take back into himself his feeling-ego. Accepting the pain of mourning enabled him to breathe life into devitalized aspects of his body and of his mental space, aspects he had hitherto not felt involved in.
