Elisa Rosa Quarta

It was a late spring afternoon. I was playing badminton with a friend when, almost as a joke, I blurted out my desire. After I said that I wanted to be a psychoanalyst, I was forced to reconsider many things in my life, including abandoning the research and academic career prospects that were beginning to open up at the end of my Master’s degree in Literary Theory. Further suppressing my desire was no longer a possibility. I knew it was too precious, the result of years of working on myself in psychoanalysis. I instinctively felt that the time had come to lose something I had considered foundational to myself and my personality. The driving force behind my work as a counselor and psychologist is rooted in the memory of that afternoon. In line with the psychoanalytic slant of my approach, I seek to question the reasons for suffering and to understand what it is trying to tell us about our desires, even when it can be difficult to see. I finished my Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology with an experimental thesis in Dynamic Psychology on the similarities and discrepancies between LSD-assisted psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. For this work, I received praise and special mention from the thesis committee. Prior to that, I completed a Master’s degree in Literary Theory with a thesis on Semiotics in an Italian avant-garde novel of the 1960s. The transition from the analysis of texts to the analysis of people retains a continuity throughout my life.  I recently completed a 1 year research project in a university laboratory of interdisciplinary language studies, with focus in the areas of clinical and general psychology. I am at the second year of my post-graduate training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a Lacanian approach at the Istituto Freudiano in Rome.