After making "Henry IV", Marco returned to the seminars (of collective analysis held by Massimo Fagioli in Rome since 1975) and began work on the screenplay of what was to be the remake of Autant-Lara's "Devil in the flesh" (Il diavolo in corpo) - and it was here that the whole thing began. He had me read the scree nplay and, at that point, I couldn't keep quiet. Marco was writing a sentimental little story of childish falling in love in the style of Peynet, whereas the man/woman relationship, which was the basis not only for the film but also of the research that was going on in the seminars, was quite something else - a matter of encounter and clashes. Love is not "I like you, I love you, let's go walking hand in hand in the park!". This is all a falsehood - the truth lies in the clashes - for the boy with his analyst father and for her with her official fiancè and mother-in-law, as well as those within their own relationship - which then implies the realisation of both. Reworking the screenplay was not enough: in 1985 Marco called me to intervene directly on the s ëet where I created something of a scandal among the "decent people" as a result of the relationship between Marco and me. It was an irrational phenomenon which I have not yet been able to bring well into focus. It would be something to study given that Marco is not the only film director to have a close relationship with his analyst - just think of Woody Allen. But nobody says anything about him, while the case of Marco provoked this access of rage against the relationship between the two of us [...] I believe that what was bothersome was the research that both of us were carrying out- a complete refusal of traditional psychoanalysis in my case - and it could be that Marco was implicated in the hostility surrounding my professional stance [...].

After working together on the corrections on the screenplay for "Devil in the flesh", the principle problem concerned the relationship with the actress. Asi qde from the difficulty in finding her, when Marushka finally arrived Marco had enormous problems getting her to deliver her part correctly for the film. In my intervention I did not take her acting into account - I had never seen her act before and had no idea about how she was. What I did know was that what had to emerge from her was a feminine identity made of vitality, beauty, movement, profundity, and an intelligence - not rational but sensitive - which relies on intentions, responses and relationship [...] Marushka could not represent this character through an intellectual approach, she had to count on her capacity to be in a certain way. It is difficult to explain how I intervened since there is an enormous work of theoretical research behind it which investigates the irrational, internal fantasies and interior images; and, in my opinion, all this is found much ìmore in women than in men - it is the women who know how to put reason in parentheses and let irrationality emerge, something which is difficult even for the best of men.

In "Devil in the flesh" (Diavolo in corpo) and in "The conviction" (La condanna), beyond the official quality, there was also a hidden collaboration between Marco and me, in the sense that I went both onto the set and into the editing room. In both cases my intervention regarded especially the relationship with the actor, since it is this relationship that determines the outcome of the film. This is a matter of a very interesting theoretical challenge: does the actor create the film or does he do what the director wants? I tend towards the second hypothesis; for me the actor must represent the director's image, not his own bravura. The personal identity of the actor, with all due respect, is his own private business; when the scene å opens there is only the character and the actor at that point must only represent. I remember how, during a break, when I proposed my theory, there was a resounding clash between me and the actors in "The conviction" who took my words as a personal offence.

The profound motif in "Devil in the flesh" - a woman destined to become a lady but who has the capacity to let herself go in a new encounter - is found again in the "The vision of the sabbat" (La visione del sabba) and in "The conviction", but in a different way. I would say that the male figures in these films can be divided into two camps: the "old"men who, even in the best sense of the word, honest, good, just, etc., remain bound to the model of good father of the family whose origins are Greek in so far as the cultural side is concerned and Latin for the aspect of laws; and the "provocateurs" who, in their own way, are searching for the irrational and who, therefore, necessarily carry out research linked to the femine; they cannot exist without women because, in contrast with the good family men, who are structured precisely on the unconscious negation of irrationality, and thus on madness, they have not completely lost the interior irrational dimension. They can search for it in women and they can also push the women in whom this dimension is dormant to come out of the inert resignation that envelops them although perhaps hidden in the apparent happiness afforded by social success. These provocateurs - like the architect in "The conviction", a solitary character, lover of art who lives in his castle/museum - are not crazy, nor they are destructive or selfish, they are even intelligent - the studen ®t in "Devil in the flesh", for example, is very good in school - but they know that this intelligence is not enough and that being irrational certainly does not mean not respecting the rules, tossing everything to the wind, as was thought in 1968.

Marco, in contrast with many artists who emerged in an extraordinary way in the 1960's and then got stuck, had the courage to put everything back into play, to call into question each time everything he had done previously, with a tension for search and discovery that is truly alive and incessant. This is his greatness, and I am convinced that the profound reason for our relationship lies in the fact that I provoke him, I continuously challenge him. I am an analyst that does not console but who, on the contrary, places the patient in difficulty. We are, personally, very good friends, but the challenge is continuous, on the level of representation.

My research is focused not on ° vision, not on conscious memory, but on interior images. Interior images are not the reproduction of reality but the creation of new images linked with reality. They have to do with the oneiric but do not coincide with it. The point is that it is necessary to improve, at the conscious level, on that which emerges in the unconscious. It is not enough to represent the dream as such on the screen, as one might remember it the next morning - this would be a material description and not imagination. Imagination is creating an unconscious and non-oneiric image, an interior image to be precise.

Since the cornerstone of my study is this, the fact that Marco happened into the seminars and then stayed on, proposing his own personal study and provoking me with his images, added a fundamental element to twenty-five years of collective analysis and contributed to constructing a concrete discourse on images. It is, after all Å, one thing to speak theoretically and another to experiment in practice.

When he began coming to the seminars I vaguely remembered "Fists in the pocket" which, instead, I have now studied with great care. There the level of representation was already quite evident through Marco's capacity to construct images beyond the story, the telling and the photography of reality, even though he took off from reality.

The secret of cinema is to invent, keeping in mind the difference between imagination and reverie - true creativity is the construction of images that are possible even though they don't exist [...] "Devil in the flesh" is imagination because one does not find a woman like that every day, however it would be possible, it is not an abstract idea out of this world. This was the originality in the proposal of the character of Marushka, and it is this study that Marco and I share.

I am very grateful to Marco for his contribution to our collective analysis , but it must not be thought that his presence at the seminars did not create some problemsÝ. Just as he was attacked in the outside world for his relationship with me, also within the seminars the success or lack of it of one of his films could put the validity of my work into question in the eyes of some patients. "Marco has been recognised, so the seminars work, Marco has failed, so the seminars are a waste" [...] It was a double challenge, tricky, difficult and demanding for me as well. I had no intention of losing Marco; I could not let the opportunity for a deepening of my study pass me by; but I could not allow his presence to destroy my research and the analytic work of all the others.

Passing from the real collaboration of "Devil in the flesh" É and "The Conviction", we went on to a more complete, organic but, as ever, challenging situation with "The Butterfly's Dream" (Il sogno della farfalla), which I started writing in 1990, during "The Conviction". Massimo (the lead character in "The butterfly's dream"), dismissing the banalities of daily life, could be the boy that the architect once was; his "muteness" is not autism, it is a refusal of normal banality, something which all of us should aspire to). I wrote the screenplay alone as if to say to Marco: now let's see what you are going to do ...", and Marco took up the challenge. After that we took different paths. I saw "The prince of Homburg" (Il principe di Homburg) in the cinema like an ordinary spectator, and a little while later, with the help not of Marco but of Giampaolo Conti, I began work on my film, "The sky of the moon" (Il cielo della luna). A further challenge.