She is a young and simple woman; this is happening to her for the first time, she gets very scared:

No, I am not like you. I do not feel the same as you do. I am nurse Alma. I am here only to help you. I am not Elizabeth Vogler. You are Elizabeth Vogler. I would like to have...I love...

To put it straightforward: I have the impression that what we saw in this video is not a special incident but it describes nevertheless the human co-being. That is, we don’t have one face, one-way. The face, if we take a good look, is more like a hospice that accommodates different shapes from time to time, which come and go. It is like water, which takes every time the shape of the wind and its surroundings. And I would also add that here we are not presented with a process of identification between one subject and another, occasional one, that is, we are not talking about a psychic act, a process and a mechanism, but, as we saw in the video, we are talking about a happening that takes place, somehow, without us, in our absence.

If that was the case, then the division between an I and a You, as we heard it in Alma’s scared “No!”, would have referred rather to an existence shrinking down to a tiny “I” that separates itself from a “You” and guards itself from the Other. Likewise, Alma’s mood would be shared with that of a therapist, though without the passion, who would indescribably say e.g. “No. I am not like you. I am the healthy one. You are the patient. It is you that DSM is referring to, your psychopathology, your neurochemistry, your defence mechanisms; all these are yours not mine. I am not like you...”

An old Chinese story speaks of a similar situation. So as not to perplex you with difficult names, I will name the speakers A and B:

A asked B: So, what is your name then? Then B applied: A. Then A replied: but I am A! B replied to that: Then my name is B. A laughed wholeheartedly: Hahahaha!

B calls himself with the name of the other. In this way he places himself in a space where there is no difference between the “I” and others. Now, the second part of the dialogue is based on the fact that each of the speakers returns to his own name, his own self.

Here the game of face exchange is free, without fear and anxiety and safeguarding of ownership. These kinds of words we don’t only hear them from exotic writers. The German writer Peter Handke writes in: "Versuch über die Müdigkeit" [“Treatise on tiredness”]:

At the time of ultimate tiredness...the other becomes simultaneously I. The two children down there, under my tired gaze, is now I, myself. And the way in which the older sister drags her brother through the shop has a meaning after all, and it also has a value...and it is nice and beautiful, and that is how it is supposed to be, and above all else is true. Like the sister, I, who grabs the brother from the back, me, it is true. And in the tired gaze the relevant appears to be absolute, and the part as the whole...

The first time I realised something like that is happening, was while I was reading Plato’s dialogue “Phaedrus”. Phaedrus is a young man who is meeting with Socrates and reports to him with great excitement a speech of the sophist Lysias on Eros. Socrates delivers a similar speech on the same subject. He is already about to leave when he becomes rooted to the spot and returns to Phaedrus. In the dialogue that follows says Socrates:

SOCRATES: So then what? You do not consider Eros to be the son of Aphrodite and a god?

PHAEDRUS: That’s what has been said.

SOCRATES: But Lysias is not saying this, neither is your speech that was spoken through my mouth enchanted by you.

Later on I came across the same thing in a verse of the greek poet Seferis: “They are children of many men, our words”. And so in a speech of mine while in Vienna, I refer to a colleague and old friend of mine Dieter Förster:

Mr Förster. I see him. The phrase “I see him” means at the same time “He sees me”, regardless of whether his gaze is actually turned towards me, or not. (cf. Nietzsche: ‘When you look in the abyss for a long time, then the abyss looks back at you.’) He sees me and his shape, like a magic wand, it touches me and immediately it empties me and rhythmisizes me to Förster. I am like a tree in whose figure the predominant winds of the area are present, or like, by driving a car, I become one of its accessories ... On one hand I know Mr Förster for thirty five years now and I am a driver for at least fifty years, nevertheless, familiarity doesn’t mean anything. The same goes for everything and everyone, likewise for the unknown woman seating opposite me.

And now an example from psychotherapy: A woman adopts a different tone now and again - speaks harsh, tough, her body I sense it to be tense and stiff. When I am able to notice the difference clearly, I share it with her and ask her if she is experiencing this indeed. She says yes. Then, I ask her if that kind of tone is somehow known to her. All surprised, she replies that it is her mother’s tone. It is her mother speaking through her mouth! It is the mother, who speaks through the daughter’s “enchanted mouth”! If at that point I was to ask her what her name is, and she was free to say the truth and only the truth, she wouldn’t refer to hers, A, but her mother’s, B.

Soon it became clear to me that in times like that it would be a mistake to refer to her as Mrs A, since here my co-speaker was not Mrs A but a woman called B. At the same time I did not have to wonder any more, why it was that during the past, in similar circumstances we didn’t seem to be able to understand each other: I was referring to Mrs A, but the woman who was receiving my words was B.

What is the subject of the psychiatric-psychotherapeutic session? Is it the collection of criteria that answer to the interest of DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? Is it the figure rising in front of the psychopathologic eye? Is it the psychic organ? Is it the black box between stimulus and response? Is it the brain activity? Is it the patient? Is it the existence?

What is the subject of the psychiatric-psychotherapeutic session? Based on what has been said above, a unique and constant subject is out of question here, and the question would be a tricky one, as we used to say at school, a trap-question. Now one can avoid such traps if he has got the relative knowledge and some smartness. Given our mentality and our education though, we have been trapped allready. We have a prompt answer regarding the subject of the psychiatric-psychotherapeutic session. Moreove, by no means do we regard our answer as a falling into the trap, but quite the contrary the answer relieves us from the question, in case we even put the question and do not regard the issue as so self-evident that we shouldn’t even been talking about it.

However, sometimes things are different. The question could become torturing, with no answer to be found, with no solace in any kind of answer whatsoever. Then the trap, of which we are talking here, would be the one to fall into. One would fall into doubt, indeed, as it’s been said in zen tradition, in a “Big Doubt”. What is for example the subject that hears? I quote from an 18^th century predict:

You need to allow doubts to enter in you about the subject that hears all voices. All voices are heard just now because there is surely a subject inside you that listens to them. Although you are hearing the voices through your ears, the auricle is not the actual subject that listens to the voices. If it was, then even the dead would be hearing voices ... Again and again you should doubt deeply of and ask yourself about that which could be the subject of hearing. Don't pay attention to deceptive thoughts and images that might come to your mind. Just doubt, with all the more passion, with all the power of yourself ... Alas no matter how much you keep doubting, it will be impossible to know the subject that hears ... And later, when ... you have become a mash of doubts yourself, then all of a sudden ...

And here comes the echo of a word by the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin: "but where there is danger / there grows salvation as well”,

... then all of a sudden there will be a moment ... as if you were waking from a long dream, or as if ... you became alive again.

Perhaps it would be meaningful the explicit, but also the implicit letting go off the alluring orientation towards a unique and constant subject. Perhaps many of man’s torments might be due to his confinement in the small world of such an “I”. Perhaps the world of psychotherapy is referring more to what Elias Canetti is describing as “a country where when someone says “I” he sinks deep into the earth.” A letting go such as this would allow for communication to breath, with a unique freedom. And this is exactly what the therapeutic would consist of.

Persona Script

But the suffering was not over

The boy was seized by a massive

and unfathomable love for his mother.

You resisted desperately

because you felt

that you could not return it.

You try and try...

... but the meetings with him

are cruel and awkward.

You can't do it.

You're cold and indifferent.

And he looks at you.

He loves you, and he's soft,

and you want to hit him

for not leaving you alone.

You think he's repulsive,

with his thick lips and ugly body

and his moist and pleading eyes.

You think he's repulsive,

and you're afraid.

No.

I'm not like you.

I don't feel the same as you.

I'm Sister Alma.

I'm only here to help you.

I'm not Elisabet Vogler.

You're Elisabet Vogler.

I would like to have...

I love...

I haven't...