Pavese, Calvino and primal mourning. ‘Primitive’ and ‘marriage’ as discursive transpositions of mental states and processes

Abstract

Focusing on the different ways in which Pavese and Calvino address themes that interested them both – the motif of the primitive, narrations of origins, the ways in which the merger/distance dialectics can be handled affectively in human relations – this article shows how both writers intuitively engaged with issues concerning mental functioning and development - issues that in the context of psychoanalysis were to be conceptualised only long after Freud, and by analysts neither Pavese nor Calvino were familiar with (Racamier, Bion, and Klein in particular). Through a series of textual comparisons, I will also show how Calvino kept reflecting about Pavese's suicide for decades after the event. In this connection, I will also show that Calvino implicitly associated Pavese's suicide with problems involving a key function of the mind: the dispositif that Racamier was to call subsequently «primal mourning».