He is parodying Freudian-style psychoanalysis in the service of institutional power. It should be noted that in the Banca di Roma commercials, Fellini is not applauding the kind of Jungian psychoanalysis practiced by his mentor in the 1960s, Ernst Bernhard. In the second of Fellini’s three Banca di Roma commercials, La cantina**, the substitutional process occurs both within the dream and between the dream and its postscript: the dreamer’s visit to his psychoanalyst and then his relocation to the Banca di Roma. This principle of substitution is, of course, fundamental to our dreams, as situations suddenly transform themselves into others in a way that may seem irrational but is often driven by a powerful logic and a profound examination of issues not initially obvious to the conscious mind. By narrative substitution I mean the way in which characters and events replace one another along a symbolic path that charts either an enhancement or a diminishment of promise and/or of self-awareness for the protagonist. Eventually, I hope to find ways to celebrate its uniqueness, but as a point of departure, I would like to address a strategy of narrative “substitution” that one can find in certain of Fellini’s films and television commercials - as well as in some of the more extensive dreams or dream-cycles in Il libro dei sogni*. Given the brevity of this intervention, I will disregard his films and limit myself to one of his Banca di Roma “dream” commercials and to two of his entries from Il libro dei sogni. In conjunction with the centenary of Fellini’s birth and a new Mondadori edition of Il libro dei sogni, I am turning my attention to Fellini’s wonderful and challenging dream book. La cantina (Banca di Roma) and Il libro dei sogni by Federico Fellini.
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