<< Eight Legs >>.

In his painting "Sunny Morning- Eight legs" (1997) the reason for the extension is already at work, already in the work. The painter Lucian Freud is portrayed lying on a bed and hugged to a dog, under the bed two legs emerge and seem to be those of a dead man.

Lucian Freud, Sigmund's nephew, is the last Freud. "He still bears his name and extends his theories. This Freud that extends Freud, and his legacy, seems to resume, and develop, without knowing it, the famous father of psychoanalysis that in his last writings enunciates the sublime and enigmatic thesis" The psyche is extended, nothing is known ". The phrase was taken in an original way by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (Corpus, tr.it of A. Moscati, Cronopio, Naples, 2004, page 21). Starting from it, it has placed the problem of extension in antimetaphysical terms. The latter loses, in fact, any negative value attributed to it by Descartes on, and becomes the principle of a plurality, of a contact. The famous thesis "the psyche is extended, nothing is known" calls above all, a multiplicity of senses: there is more than an extension. First of all, the extension of the soul would violate the human / animal contrast, since even the dog, which the painter lying on the bed embraces, would be endowed with it. The soul is said to be possessed by both man and dog, its property would be extended to both, both sleep exhausted, and, in this respect, they should not even be distinguished. Freud's painting also has a disturbing detail: two legs sprout from under the bed and probably [...] are the legs of a dead man. The color, the rigidity are the clues. The painting seems to extend from the bottom upwards, from the dead to the living, or vice versa. All bodies, as if the notion of body extended, and any body was revealed. Everything is body, everything is extended >>

www.filosofia.unimi.it/itinera/mat/saggi/?ssectitle=Saggi&authorid...freud..

 Point 1. "The extension of the field of practices and of the clinic of psychoanalysis is a constant in its history. It turns out to be upset each time and must recompose the knowledge of the Unconscious defined on the basis of its inaugural method. When psychoanalysts take on the task of thinking about the emergency and the consequences, the extension becomes a work of creation. This work focuses on a relatively circumscribed problem. Some psychoanalysts, for some decades now, have explored new territories of the Unconscious and, with them, other spaces of psychic reality, other forms of subjectivity and means of treatment of psychic suffering different from those that propose individual care.

Point 2. The extension is unpublished; it is based on devices that bring together multiple subjects in an experience of the inapproachable otherwise : one or more psychoanalysts guarantee the conditions of a psychoanalytic work in a group, with couples and families. The implications and consequences of these devices affect, through their challenges, the method, metapsychology and the epistemological foundation of psychoanalysis. Discovering a plurality of places, economies and dynamics of the Unconscious imposes another metapsychology. I explore what might be, not so much a third topic, but a third type metapsychology that would describe the consistency of these spaces of unconscious psychic reality and the complexity of their interferences "(René Kaes, from Overview).

August 9th 2018, on the reading page of the Italian national newspaper "Corriere della sera", the author's book is published, which I mentioned in my previous comment, entitled: " The extension of psychoanalysis. For a third type metapsychology. "I think that the argument" extension of the psyche "and therefore of psychoanalysis is an evolutionary topic, present, past and especially the future.

Reading with greed the splendid article by G. Bataille, from "Documents 8,1930, page 144, on the sacrificial mutilation and the severed ear of Vincent van Gogh", I represented the picture of Lucian Freud, "Eight legs", in optics of mutilation and sacrifice, thinking of the mutilated legs under the bed. In the picture, in my opinion, there is an antagonism between the man, Lucian, who embraces his dog Greyhound Pluto in a scene that represents the ideal, and the fierce gesture of Lucian himself that under the bed depicts a man mutilated and humiliated. ghost that refers to the castration complex. In George Bataille's mode, sacrifice consists in << the need to throw or throw something out of oneself >> that culminates in << a psychological or physiological mechanism that can, in some cases, have no other terms than death >> ( G.Bataille, o. c)

Note: To make the whole picture appear I had to rotate the image horizontally. In reality Lucian Freud painted the painting vertically.