The PANY Bulletin

Psychoanalytic Association of New York
Volume 43, #1 Spring 2005

Free Association
Analysts Abroad

By: Luba Kessler

Italian Alps, August 29, 2004
My husband Richard and I take a brief hiking vacation before the Neuro-Psychoanalysis Conference in Rome. We stay at a small hotel where I do not dare to breathe my long forgotten Italian to a distinguished looking proprietor who in turn does not speak English, thus requiring repeated interventions by other, more globally integrated staff. The bookcase in our room turns up two unexpected finds: a book in Russian, my native language, about the Russian religious icons, and Damasio's "Looking for Spinoza". I am a little overwhelmed by these finds that so uncannily echo my personal experiences. They trigger memories from 35 years before, when as a stateless refugee I found glorious shelter in Italy while waiting for 10 months for an American visa.

Before departing the hotel, I cobble together my courage and my Italian linguistic remnants, and speak to the same, always impeccably mannered gentleman at the front desk. He is not a little taken aback, not only because of this apparent evidence of my regained capacity for speech, but also at the excited account of the uncovered treasures, left by some other ghosts from some other lives unbeknown to him, in one of his rooms. He is incredulous: "Lei parla Italiano!". I try to explain that I had learned it so many years ago when taking refuge in his country, fresh from Poland.

We check out, and as I shake hands with him, I say "Good-bye". In Polish!!!, the language of my adolescence all but erased by all these years of speaking, reading, writing and analyzing English. Once, years back, waking from anesthesia I had spoken Russian, the language currency of my early childhood. But Polish?! And yet there it was, the language in which I at first encountered Italy, irrevocably etched into my experience of that incredibly frightening and exciting time there.

We leave the Alps, the perplexed hotelier and Spinoza chuckling between the pages. Onward to Rome, in greater need for the neuropsychoanalysis to explain the mysteries of mind than ever!

Rome, September 3, 2004
Marty Blum, Richard and I strike up a conversation with a Roman taxi driver on our way to the first day of the Neuro-Psychoanalysis Conference. He asks about our destination, and, upon learning that we are psychoanalysts, wants to know whether we are disciples of Jung or Freud. Amused, we pledge our allegiance, to which he offers a hearty rejoinder: all Romans are Freudians since they love women and food! No wonder all roads lead here.