Rome Journal: Psychoanalysis

It would be fascinating to undergo a psychoanalysis in Rome. Freud was interested in archeology and he regarded the discipline as having much in common with the fledgling science he created. The famous Roman ruins, the Colosseum, the Caracalla Baths, the Theater of Marcellus are all constantly on display creating the often disconcerting feeling that one is on some kind of Hollywood set. In fact if you take a guided tour of Cinecitta the famed Roman film studio, you'll have trouble differentiating some of the fiberglass sets from the Rome citadel outside. And underneath the city excavations are always coming upon new layers of history. So you have reality and illusion and then an underground, a nether world of past civilizations that’s very much like those parts of the unconscious which are unearthed in treatment and which play a role in determining the present. It’s like one of those script writing programs which provide you with all the cues and the layout for an imaginative act. Frederico Fellini, a long time resident of Rome, also underwent psychoanalysis there and when you look at films like Roma and especially 8½ you can see the influence of the couch in his work—which is so inured in both individual and collective memory. There is actually an International Institute for Psychoanalyic Research and Training for Health Professionals on the Viale Tito Livio and also an Italian Psychoanalytic Association on the Via di Priscilla, neither which will probably be on the itinerary of most tourist buses.The Interpretation of Dreams contains five instances in which Freud recounts the longing to visit Rome, though he apparently had some inhibitions about going (due to his identification with Hannibal and his fear of the Catholic Church, according to the Rome the Second Time blog) since he didn't travel there until l901. And in Civilization and Its Discontents Freud makes the following proposition: "Let us suppose that Rome is not a place where people live, but a psychical entity with a similarly long and rich past." "Freud famously likened Rome to a palimpsest," remarks Nigel Spivey in The New Criterion ("Eternally Ours," November 2018), "a text overwritten and annotated time and again. This may have suited as an analogy for the multiple layers of the human psyche when subject to psychoanalysis." What Rome and psychoanalysis have in common is an immersion in the past. The German compound word Vegangenheitsbewaltigung means, according to Collins, the  "process of coming to terms with the past," but despite all the pain of what goes on during a session, Rome is probably one of the few places on earth where treatment could be regarded as a vacation.