The House of the Magician

"You know how he is”. This is mantra Emanuele Trevi's mother uses to talk about her husband. A renowned and reserved Jungian psychoanalyst by profession, he is a distracted, distant and reserved parent. On his death he leaves a flat, which was his office where he received and treated patients. However, no one seems to want to buy it. Perhaps because it is still inhabited by the spirits? Perhaps of the ghosts of lives resolved on the couch? Emanuele decides to make it into his own home. Thus begins a journey through Mario Trevi's objects, memories and passions, interwoven with funny anecdotes and incidents involving the studio's new tenant. Dedicated to Mario Trevi, the author's father and a Jungian psychoanalyst, The House of the Magician is a memoir, ironic and moving, centred on the post-mortem relationship between father and son, and inspired by Emanuele's desire to feel closer to the missing parental figure and, perhaps at the same time, perhaps to make him more real, to grasp something more of the man he was. To do this, he begins with memories, places and objects that have preserved his traces and serve not only as avenues to take, but also as real psychic gateways through which to seek answers. The first, and most “cumbersome”, is certainly the house-clinic where the father received patients. It stands at the centre of the narrative, simultaneously taking on the value of a real place and a symbolic space, in which the Emanuel-character and the Emanuel-son meet and intertwine. The house, in fact, in Jungian theories is nothing more than the representation of consciousness. It is indeed the place where the memory of Mario Trevi “the man”, not the father, is preserved, but it is also the place where Emanuele will learn that in order to put the pieces together and put things in order, it is not necessary to look for clues and solve puzzles, but more simply to accept the mystery of which the world and life are made.  

La casa del mago
Di Emanuele Trevi
Ponte alle Grazie, 2023