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Two chapters from “Coming out of panic” by Nicola Ghezzani
(Pay attention, please! If you can
or want to publish this book in your country, and if you have a good
translater, send a e-mail message to my italian publisher at this address:
Now, read the abstract and two chapters from my book. Thank
you.)
Nicola Ghezzani
Coming Out of PanicAnxiety,
Phobias, Panic Attacks
New
Strategies for Handling and Curing
Italian Editor: Franco AngeliYear of
publication: 2000
Pages
126 Euro 14,50
PAD
(Panic Attack Disorder) is a rapidly ever-increasing
psychopathological syndrome: from
15% to 20% of the population suffers from it. The estimate is by default, because if it were considered along
with other related syndromes (such as GAD, “generalized
anxiety disorder”, specific phobias, social phobias or other
forms of spatial phobias – agoraphobia and claustrophobia), in reality it
would reach 30% of the world population.
Anxiety syndrome, divided between a frenetic “hunger for life” and a pathological need for restrictions and control, PAD is a sign of the intimate division of the contemporary conscience between opposing and competing universal values. Often banalized or even damaging when faced only by classification and repression instruments used by biological psychiatry, it is likewise greatly misunderstood by orthodox psychoanalysis. Ghezzani’s
book – based upon a new clinical method, Structural – Dialectic
Psychopathology – gives back the syndrome’s intimate
meaning of “illness of freedom”, an illness which is at the core of society and
a world which seems to offer infinite keys “to be free”, but no “instructions
for use”.
In
the book, anxiety and panic are observed from a point of view which by-passes
the restrictive ambit of psychopathology to open a discussion on the compatibility
of individual human wealth with the poverty of collective mental structures.
The
success of the book – which has reached its third edition – depends
both on its style, immediate and evocative, and its new psychological theory
– dialectic psychopathology -, clear and incisive in demonstrating the
genesis of and the solution for the disorder.
This
book which I am proposing is set in a cultural tradition way , which
individualizes in the crises and the disfunctions of the social and
anthropological structure the causes for the individual psychological
disorders. It firmly opposes,
along with precise cultural arguments, biologically based psychiatry, in which
the psychic disorder depends on organic factors without taking into
consideration the social complexity.
Subsequently,
this book is directly inspired by the works of Ronald David Laing and Michel
Foucault (also by classic authors such as Carl Gustav Jung and Karl Jaspers),
and aims to promote a new psychotherapy: dialectical psychotherapy, where Nicola Ghezzani is co-author along with
Luigi Anepeta. The dialectical
theory studies the relation between internalized cultural structures,
individualized motivated conflicts and psychopathological crises.
This
book “Coming Out of Panic” treats in a refined revealing manner the problem of
anxiety and panic attack (PAD), interpreting it as a alarm and a psychological
arrest when one already has a motivated unconscious conflict. It accomplishes this by means of
refined ample literary clinical histories, and by a precise theoretical
comment. Therefore, it is suitable
both for a public of professionals, to whom the new theory is proposed, and
also for a public of common persons interested in the genesis of the disorders
and in personal reflection to promote the processes of healing and
self-healing.
Nicola
Ghezzani, psychologist and psychotherapist, lives and
practices in Rome, where he has contributed to the formulation of the
principals of Dialectical Psychotherapy. He is a scientific consultant for
mutual aid and patient associations; he is President of one of these. He has published many books.
Example
Chapters 2 – 3
2. The
Story of Marina
Anxiety
about closed spaces: claustrophobia
She
said: “I’m sick, sky and earth are too
Tight for me” Meister
Eckart, from the Treatise “Sister
Katrei”.
Marina eventually decided to start a psychotherapy only when she was touched by the tongue of flame of the psychopathologic fire. If she had not had a series of violent crises ending into strong panic attacks, she would remain closed in her mental prison cleverly and superbly disguised in an ideological choice. As a matter of fact Marina was a young educated and very proud woman and therefore she felt humiliated to be forced to consult someone to solve her psychological problem that suddenly had become unbearable. Some people, in fact, if they are not deeply hurt by a symptom in their rigid identity, if they are not hurt in their “psychic body”, i.e. in their soul, would never realise of their need for a change. They need that suffering strike deeply in their personal “Achille’s heel”, because only in this way they are obliged to examine obligations and duties in respect of nature which is in them.
1.
The critical episode
That day, late afternoon of a feast day, Marina was in a car with her boyfriend and a couple of her friends. It was a fine day and the four of them had had a very ordinary trip “out of town”. Marina had not enjoyed herself: she had been deeply bored for the whole day with flashes of restlessness. At the motorway toll station, a first grip of anguish: a long queue of cars were stuck waiting. The compact line of cars snaked their way with implacable slowness. She then felt to be trapped; and it was then that she started to feel the first symptoms of her uneasiness. She knew well, as she had experienced it other times – what it was going to happen; she was not aware yet, with which powerful strength she would be grasped in its implacable grip to throw her subsequently in the mud of a unrestrainable terror. She had, with violence, shivers, tremors,
palpitations, blinding anguish to go mad and die. The person who came to see me
few days later was the shade of the brave girl of the past, although some frail
traces were kept: it was a frightened-to-death tiny little girl, and
nevertheless hurt and humiliated in her pride, almost “offended” to be forced
to stop and reflect on her life, confessing doubts and fears to a perfect
stranger.
2. First meetings
The person I saw in front of me was a 30
years old beautiful girl in her whole physical and mental vigour. Very
frightened and also very angry to be in front of a stranger, forced by her
psychic condition to stake her
identity entirely. The reason why she was so angry was soon clear to me: she
had assumed until shortly before to have a strong and autonomous identity,
based on stable and objective choices; on the other end she was now forced to
admit that that belief rested on
fragile and unreliable foundations. Now she should admit the numerous doubts
which had been always harbouring in her mind, hidden behind her mask of
intellectual pride and independence.
The tiger, forced to take note of the cage in which she actually
lived, for a very long time had
been trying to use her teeth and nails against me. She strongly contested the
logic coherence and the efficacy of any sort of psychotherapy; she also affirmed
– not without foundation – that a patient could be made passive and
dependent for the whole of his/her life. I used to answer that the logic
coherence of psychotherapy was due to the fact that it utilised the same
instruments that had cause din her the pathology (words, affections, human
relations…), and that therefore the pertinence dominion was the same; Regarding
the passivity and the risk to become dependent I said that now, under the
burden of the symptoms, she felt certainly worse than how I could drive
her. Furthermore that the
therapeutic dependence is a dependence consciously induced, which would therefore cease as soon as she would
consider it right.
Actually Marina with her last panic
attack had had a crisis which was a true and proper cry for help. A cry for
help launched to herself: to that part of herself which had remained in the
years insensitive and deaf as
regards needs which try to emerge from her conscience.
To understand how she had arrived to have
those striking anguish crises I put her questions on the current situation. I
got to know that after many years of engagement Marina was approaching her
wedding with Mario the fiancé, and that secretly she was terrified. She feared
that her imprisoning and enclosuring feeling which pervaded her existence, rather that solving itself would at that stage
continue for ever.
A couple of dreams, told me during the
first therapy meetings, clarified the terms of this anguish.
In the first dream while proceeding with
her fiancé towards a theatre, she could get again away from him to secretly
betray him with a young and ambitious militant of a wing side party. The dream
had a clear significance of protest: it declared explicitly that the theatre
staging of the “nice couple” shown to relatives and friends did not hold any
more and was collapsing under the furious transgressing impulses.
The second dream was even more explicit.
In the dream she had been living with her
fiancé in his parents’ house. At a point the boy’s father comes into the scene
as a boss and sits in front of the tv set. Looking at him from behind Marina
notices his old-man nape and feels repulsion. Now Marina’s mother appears in
the scene and she is wearing a kitchen overall……Marina informs her of her
father-in-law’s presence, but her mother nods with indifference as if
everything were normal.
It is from this dream that Marina started
to make flow to her memory and in our meetings her lived experiences of
“oppression” and “enclosuring” relevant to her family and its history.
In general phenomenological terms it is interesting to note how in the
oneiric sequence described by Marina the already known concept mentioned in the
first chapter regarding Eveline’s history comes back to memory: anguish is
strictly connected to a forecast of annulment of one’s identity.
Eveline does not reach the panic stage
but when her soul turns to the house’s objects and the family duties delegated
to her from her dead mother and while she is living dependent on the escape
with Frank, she is moved by a complex state of claustrophobic anguish . Indeed
she lives the anguish of being in-closed, i.e. closed inside the order of death
of her family “inheritance” and simultaneously she lives the anguish of being ex-cluded, closed outside, the vital
relationship with the world (the world “outside”, the world she wants to reach
together with Frank) just due to her inclusion (captivity) in the family world.
Nevertheless as soon as she is ready to escape with Frank to reach the external
world, there the agoraphobic anguish springs up: the fear to be ex-cluded for
ever from the relationship with the world to which she belongs, the oxygen of
her most intimate identity.
In Eveline’s case, then, as in the case
of Marina, the annulment of the identity depends upon the logic of the actual
interactive system and of the affective and ideological systems integrating the
ego. The profound logic of these systems implies that inside a certain system
balancing, either family or social, individuals, taken in themselves, have no bearing,
strictly speaking they are in effect individuals, not persons (ie subjects provided of social personality and rights).
Therefore, individuals similar among themselves can replace one another leaving
the system order unaltered. This logic-affective order can be interiorized by the subject in as much as to make it
the central element of the identity. Eveline could go and take her mother’s
place with no substantial modification (except for her) being registered in the
family connections. Her need to split up from the assigned role was lived by
herself as a mark of moral indignity, as such to make her even more agreeable
to her slavery. In Marina’s dream the father-in-law had gone to replace her
father and yet the family life was continuing according to the scheme just the
same. Marina was aware of this but her refusal did not find any confirmation,
as her own sense of duty, represented in the dream by the mother, was imposing
to her to carry on in any case.
It is evident, therefore, that for
certain systems what counts is not the individual’s life taken in its
singularity but the general balancing of the system. We could say of these
families that they cannot welcome in themselves a “principle of deconstruction”
allowing them to be modified, “moved” on their axis, by the need of the baby or
the adult meant as “persons”.
Equally one could say that the
ideological structure of these families (or social systems) has suffered a
jamming in the mechanism of its reproduction as it comes with no recombination,
with no variation, i.e. badly. Therefore these families not only result as identical to the others, but
even identical to themselves in the course of generations, for this reason even
if one of their element were
replaced by another similar to the structure of the whole it would not change
(cfr. p.<es.<Laing 1971, Ghezzani 1999).
In Marina’s dream, as already mentioned,
the father-in-law has taken her father’s place, indeed everything had remained
unaltered. Marina’s intuition she had expressed through the oneiric image was
then that the two family units(Marina’s and Mario’s) could overlap one on top of the other
(starting from a common element: the father) without entering in contradiction
between themselves.
In terms of mathematics theory of sets we
could say that the two systems were “equivalent”, i.e. identical in their
constitutive elements. Marina’s anxiety sprang from this intuition and from the
presage that even the new couple under formation, the one formed by her and
Mario, would be included soon, with no contradiction, in this homogeneous,
cannibalic, “identity”. The sense of anguish felt by the firl consisted in an
upsetting feeling that the distinct personality and the same feeling of
existence of each of them counted absolutely nothing and could be cancelled
“cannibalised” any moment. In substance, what could be discriminated and given
value in terms of individuality – to promote a varied reproduction of the
existent – was on the other hand dispersed, “devoured” in a mechanic,
insensitive, abnormal identity, in an absurd repetition of the same. In this
profound intuition (not even clear to her conscience) the nucleus of Marina’s
claustrophobic experience was contained.
This was the general feeling of the dream
and this was confirmed to me by the clear and punctual data which were later
referred to me. Marina started to confess the psychological and economic
difficulties which she and her fiancé had as a couple. With the dream when
meant to let me know of her secret anguish for the marriage and the consequent
life together, considered by her as a change which would be only apparent which
would not modify things in any way, which indeed would get worse.
The father-in-law was a practical and
rough man who had gained money with the sale of cars and who had kept his son
and his two daughters in a knuckleduster. Owner of numerous flats he did not
give any to his children. He denied them any economic availability and had
totally cancelled their personal willingness. He had been hard particularly
with his son: made ridiculous for his scanty practical attitude (he was more of
an intellectual), Mario was not able to express his opinion in his father’s
presence and, although he had been working for a long time, his bank account
was jointly run with his father who kept entirely his personal accounts. The
boy, furthermore, made weak in his will and in his initiative, could only find
temporary jobs and of little reliability. Consequently Marina had to hold the
couple entirely on her shoulders: she had to bear the father-in-law who was
greedy and bossy, support her fiancé’s fragility, hidden by “proud intellectual
superiority”, meet the economic requirements of both making sure that her
modest “job” at the Ministry was always secured. Marina, then, was on the edge
of handing to this man her future and the hope to get rid of the existential
oppression lived with her own parents. But the first step estimated as a
consequence of the marriage was already full of unpropitious signs: after the
wedding the couple would go and
live with Marina’s parents, taking advantage of the fact that being retired her
parents would spend the summer period in the Marche, in her father’s ancestral
house. So Mario and Marina would live, she feared, as the copies, the clones of
the two ageing parents, in an early senility with no escape and exit way.
3. Family micro history. How a trap is
built
Marina’s parents were a couple from
Marche of country origin and culture. When young, soon after their wedding,
they had tried to emigrate, working as manual workers in an industrial area in
France. Unfortunately it gave no good fruits. The economic conditions were
unstable and did not compensate the lived cultural and social isolation. A bit
sad they came back to Italy and eventually accepted a job as concierge in Rome.
They were responsible for maintaining a smart building in the historic town
centre . The palace was one of the numerous properties of an ageing noble man,
a prince, in whose respect they always kept a humble and formal behaviour. The
prince had let them in the palace (at a favourable rent) a small but
prestigious flat at the top floor, this made them feel in some way promoted as
for God’s grace to the rank of the rich owners and tenants whom they used to
meet on the stairs. They spent the whole of their life enchained to this
illusion. In spite of the nice house, they were indeed frustrated and angry.
The father, when young, had not been able to study and had adapted himself
badly to the humble jobs which life had proposed to him: he had grudge for his
past and present, he developed a maniac-depressive neurosis and when at its
tops he was exuberant and unfaithful with his wife with very young women. When
at its bottom, he used to lock himself in the house frightened by any human
contact and often trembling at the idea of having caught illnesses and of being
next to death. The mother, an obstinate and ascetic woman, had not tolerated at
all her husband’s excesses and had closed herself in a dumb and obstinate
conviction. Marina was their only daughter. When a little girl, her mother was
very careful about her manners and decency: it was a conquest for her when, a
bit older, was allowed to go out wearing trousers. With her large and curious
eyes she watched her mother’s fussy and quarrelsome obsession and her father’s
dark and alternate depressions. She attended the best schools and, once she had
got her diploma, she entered the
Philosophy faculty.
What did her mother expect from her? And
her father? Her mother used to get angry for her rebel femininity, her father
enjoyed it: he hoped in a male daughter able to bear with strength life’s
difficulties. Marina sprouted at her maturity as a strange flower: rigid in
relation to her impulses, icy rational regarding life’s prospects. Some secret
sexual adventures, a public examination, passed, for a job at the Ministry,
then the engagement. Everything, at this stage, rested upon her: her parents’
tranquillity, who saw her as being settled with a good boy; the boy’s
tranquillity who saw himself as being settled with her and her parents; and the
whole building of her feminine morality passed to her by the tradition,
cemented in her identity. In the ideological cell in which she lived, Marina
had no windows from which she could grasp the light. She did not want to
disappoint anybody, and used to do her best to ignore the existence of
spontaneity and happiness. She pretended she was free as she used to read a lot
and carried on with her studies for the “formation” of her thoughts. A thought
rich and alienated. She had found the perfect way to entrap herself.
4. Claustrum The identity as a prison.
Is there a way out?
During these long meetings, meetings of
open conflict first, then of open “confession”, it followed a foreseeable
period of atony and of stasis. Having said “everything”, having “dropped the
mask” made Marina feel totally lacking of resources and as emptied. Perhaps she
felt as the lady from the novel by Oscar Wilde The sphinx with no secrets. In this novel, a mysterious
and attractive young lady is followed by a young man in love with her who wants
to discover her secret. It happens that every day at the same time the woman
dresses herself up in a refined way and covers her face to go out (a smart
house in a London rich district), therefore, every day at the same time, she
reaches a small rented flat situated in a remote area of the same town. The
truth of this lady, eventually discovered by the young man – and
described with malicious skill by Wilde – is that unfortunately there is
no secret and no adventure waiting for her there: she ends up by finding
herself on her own and is there for the only purpose to pretend there is some
sort of secret to hide, a bud of individuality. This fantasy of individuality
– which is a germ of individual freedom – reveals itself in the novel as a mere “aspiration” a
wishful thinking beyond which there is the revelation of the pathetic
powerlessness of the feminine character.
Beyond the explicit intention of the
author, however, this mysterious feminine archetype could reveal to us even
another and deeper meaning: that the void, i.e. the absolute lacking of any
meaning, is the intimate plot of existence and therefore even the seed from
which every thing springs, then even the new meaning to give to life. Finding with
a naked face with ourselves, in the complete atony, depersonalized , i.e. undressed of the usual
identity, can reveal the absolute relativity of each thing, then of the same
identity, thus losing any claim of certainty and steadiness. In my view the fundamental
problem of the woman represented in the novel by Wilde is that she did know how
to lose herself therefore she could not meet herself again. Until she had not
accepted to lose herself to the bottom – and to lose with herself even
her social image – she could not find inside herself the source for new
meanings and then for a new and more authentic personality.
Marina felt humiliated for having
confessed (to me and to herself) the substantial impotence of her life. The
trap in which her parents had lived and in which she had fallen was the lack of
couratge (and hope) to live her life personally i.e. not as copy of an abstract pattern,
with an effect of incessant repetition of the same along the chain of
generations, but as the only and unrepeatable expressions of an existence and of a meaning. At this stage Marina
should initiate a research inside herself to identify and give new life to her
actual needs, removed from life and therefore reduced to the state of “interior
dead bodies” (a research to be understood as Eraclito says that “souls sniff
towards Hades” (fr.110). This research would lead her to getting rid of death’s
charm produced by the duplication of the identical, to discover beyond it a
truer life). But as she still thought she would be unable to do it and
therefore considering herself condemned to live for ever in the slavery of her
lunatic identity, she tried to darken in me this awareness humiliating for her.
She put then in front of my eyes the screen of sexual fancies. She had a dream and
the day after she described it to me maliciously. In the dream I welcomed her
in my studio and she, inadvertently fell upon me. Caused by our fall, a door
leading to the bedroom opened. In that room, astonished and breathless, we
ended up by having a sexual intercourse. She stated, commenting her dream, that
she felt she had no more to say, that the analysis had reached a standstill and
that she could not imagine how our meetings could still be of help to her. Was
that the moment when she had to be dropped towards something more concrete and
involving?
I told her that transgressing sexuality
(as the one obtainable from an ethic-professional relation which has totally
different finalities) is just a way to turn over temporarily in its contrary
the feeling of impotence and death in respect of one’s own life, however,
without resolving it. It is, in other words, a parallel way (a false way out)
in which tensions produced by needs are unloaded and annulled, not channelled
with all their changeable power in the every-day’s life. I told her that as a
man I felt alive and flattered, but as a therapist it would be for me civil
death.
5. Needs and the new identity
At this stage of our therapeutic history,
when I refused any form of pessimistic collusion, Marina started to produce
fantasies, thoughts and projects for life.
Before starting on this new direction she had initially
another crisis of anguish followed by an “unusual” episode, then a couple of
new crises followed by panic attacks. The first of these crises and the
“unusual” episode happened as follows:
Marina, still entangled in her sexual
fantasies, had realised she had a strong attraction for a work colleague, one
who used to play tennis, handsome and in conjugal crisis. Neither one nor the other took the opportunity to
declare their reciprocal interest and make each other available. As if she
could compensate repressed wishes, Marina accepted to rent from the man a house
near the sea to spend a week’s holiday with a friend of hers. When on holiday,
however, this friend resulted to be a very depressed woman, taken by a dark and
obsessive recalling of her dead father. Furthermore, unable to establish
sentimental bonds with men and closed to an emotional life, she resulted to be
atonic and ineffective even in respect of Marina: a true scourge. Marina bore
her for few days, then she was invaded by anguish up to top levels.
Claustrophobic anguish, I commented at her return. The anguish to be closed
with this woman (or as this woman) in a destiny of immobility and death (as a foetus restrained in an
icy marble uterus).
But the anguish episode could be further
clarified thanks to the understanding of detailed facts, not less distressing
and revealing. Marina in that same period was nearly going to live with Mario
in his parents’ house, who had just retired. The two fiancés, this was the
agreement, would live together at first, then they would get married. The true
anguish was indeed due to this; the claustrophobic episode had done no more
than “bringing” Marina’s conscience near this stronger and more dramatic truth.
As an answer, one morning when she felt lonely and sad, Marina in her office,
on her own in the room, she masturbated! In the low spirits of those seconds
she thought of her tennis player colleague and used his image to cancel with
anger any worry. She would never think of being able to do something so
imprudent: it had happened indeed! Would she, perhaps, be able to carry out other “dissoluteness” of that
kind?
Yes, indeed, she was. But at last it was
constructive dissoluteness.
First of all she started looking for
other jobs, first an internal public exam, then an external one, then –
on Mario’s presentation – a first contact with a newspaper. Eventually,
after outbursts and disputes, miasma and poison, she asked her sluggish fiancé
to demand his father the donation of a house. Criticism and blame fell from
every part as hail. The father-in-law said that she was an “interested” woman
and that in any case his son was an idiot. Mario said that she was not able to
understand the “complex and deep” relation his had with his father and that in
any case I was
a feel as I had understood nothing both of her and him. All of them at the end
said that Marina was mad (or idiot) as only a mad (or idiot) person could send
to hell the security of a permanent job.
After hail many timid buds of enthusiasm
and protest were broken into pieces. Marina was again depressed and, naturally,
under the risk of new crises. She resisted for nearly a year, alternating her
work at the Ministry and her new job (temporary) at the newspaper, wearing
herself out for the fatigue. Then she mentioned the possibility to give up and
abandon the job as a journalist. In any case she did not obtain any house from
her father-in-law and cold criticism continued to fall upon her from all
directions.
The summer of that year she accepted to
have a holiday on her own with Mario, on the Amalfi coast. She was not anxious:
she had imagined something more lively and more sociable, but he was adamant. At
Amalfi, punctually, suffocated by small spaces, by the little desolate boarding
house but mainly by his hostile silence (barricaded in the reading of St.
Thomas), she had another (the last) anguish crisis with consequent panic
attach.
Even on this occasion she could tell me
in detail the prior events which, looking at them afterwards, made the episode
of an algebraic transparency.
First of all she told me of one of her
dreams. In the dream she saw herself in a church, at the ceremony of her
wedding. Her father was holding her arm, lost in as much as she was, in front
of them a dark, narrow, oppressive, unending corridor of the nave, at the end
of which they would find the altar. The prospect was so distressing that Marina
woke up with a moan!
After the dream description, Marina
informed me of the events which had caused it. The two fiancés – as
agreed – had decided to get married; Mario, however, although declared
himself as a laic, (as well as Marina) was not happy with a normal ceremony in
a normal catholic church; they
young man had had the bright idea to get married with the Byzantine rite in an
Orthodox church, with suitable clothes and proper ceremonial vestments,
professional photographer and a crown of relatives and friends to charm!
Marina, at the idea, was literally upset. But she had had no courage to protest
and thus she had agreed. In herself she felt bewildered and perplex as a milk
lamb during at Eater time. It was in this context that the inevitable panic
episode arrived. And it was only after having interpreted it with me that she
found the courage to disappoint everybody and subtract herself from the
horrible situation. There was another fall of criticism: orthodox or not it was
indeed a rite! Friends and relatives said. But she was hard. At last, for her
own volition, the wedding took place in a laic form in the Commune, and in full
intimacy.
Since then Marina had been firmer in her
propositions, even because she was at last aware of the mathematical
coincidence between claustrophobia and claustrophobic crises. Any doubt
regarding a “genetic of mental diseases” was put to flight: a paroxysmal crisis
coincided with “scientific” synchrony to any of her “solutions” based on
masochism. She got down to work: she threatened her new husband to leave him as
a dog if he would not take serious steps. At last she obtained few things: her
father-in-law undertook to give them a house as a gift; Mario got in touch with
a psychotherapist in order to be helped himself.
Marina did not leave the newspaper, but
she took a long period of unpaid leave from her Ministry so that she could
verify the possibility of working as a journalist full time. A year later after
this drastic decision she had become fixed co-operator and editorial manager.
6. Theoretical considerations.
Sensibility: a genetic differential character
Nothing in psychological life is stupid
and casual. But when the organicist psychiatrist argues that an anxiety peak,
an anguish crisis, a panic attack are mental phenomena determined by a mere genetic
disorders he is indeed affirming that these phenomena – and therefore psychic life of some (subjects – are stupid and
casual. The “best” that organicist psychiatric culture has been able to
elaborate to date is that the cause of psychic problems is multifactorial. Multifactoral cause means that the
symptom is indeed caused by factors external to the subject (the so called stress
factors: i.e.
the “ordeal by fire”, the “battles” of that “war” which is life), but these
external factors produce so striking effects just because they impact with
another factor, more determining, which is a weak, vulnerable mental base, i.e.
genetically predisposed to emotional reactions which are dysfunctional. In
substance they affirm that the real rising event in the case of
psychopathological crises is always, more or less, in life practice (practice
which is common to everybody, even if at times harder), on the other hand, the
mental base of the subject is not in the practice, because it is weaker, more
vulnerable than what it is in the average population, i.e. genetically
corrupted. Therefore in these cases the abnormal psychic reaction is aspecific,
i.e. it has no meaning: it is mere and simple fear. Thus – quod erat
demostrandum – according to this “scientific” mentality phobic symptoms are no more
that stupid and casual reactions of cowardice! This is the bast that the
organicist psychiatric tradition could produce regarding panic phenomena! At
least fifty per cent of the population suffering from disturbances of personality
trust in this type of “cultural tradition”!
The doubt whether the mental pathology is
genetic or not is a question always very embarrassing for our patients; truly
it should be rather for the organistic psychiatrists and neuropharmacologists who
induce this sort of doubt in the collective awareness. As if it would be “made
known” that psychopathology has
indeed genetic causes and these causes consist of a mental deficit, i.e. in
an inferiority (and
this even for the most common type of anxieties), then who could stop that
an “enlightened” political regime
could decide to practise mass sterilization for the individuals “genetically
inferior”, or the use of genetic engineering in order to alter their hereditary
estate? But if we didn’t reach that much, who could avoid that the subjects
considered inferior are so upset from the shame of themselves and the anguish
to transmit a hereditary defect to their children to establish spontaneously
themselves a regime of “internal police” with the desperate aim to check,
through the extensive use of neurotechnics, their own mental life, and to avoid
the coupling and the reproduction
with other subjects similarly defective?
I (as well as many others) hold a very
critical position and diametrically opposite to that of the oraganicist
psychiatrist. I think that the symptom always has a specific meaning and that
the “disturbed “ personality is in its whole (i.e. with its symptoms) a
confused and contradictory answer, although totally relevant, to a social interiorized ambit which has produced predomination and abuse of
identity.
However the datum of a peculiar and not
homogeneous distribution of mental troubles in the majority of the whole
population resists to this position of mine: no doubt some feel ill, others
don’t. This happens also in the within the family, or even in the same social
surrounding. Starting from similar conditions, some develop anguish, phobias,
tendency to the panic, alimentary disorders, obsessive ideas and so on, others
seem to be exempt. This morbidity, this tendency to fall sick is casual and
therefore void of any scientific comprehension or is it understandable at the
light of genetic laws? Well, I think there is nothing contradictory in
admitting that there is indeed a
genetic difference between those who live these disorders and those who don’t.
This difference however is not a genetic deficit but a genetic character. I consider that this
different genetic character is the sensitivity.
During an interview R.D. Laing says:
I have received from (some men of science) letters in which they state that they are totally in agreement with me: that ….there is not any true reason authorising the psychiatrists to support a genetic relation for schizophrenia (and, consequently, for all the other less important psychic problems). Be careful, even if it existed, this would mean no more than that it exists a certain psychological style which is hated and hindered by our society (1995, p. 374).
This
“psychological style” to which Laing refers, this different genetic character
is, in my opinion, sensitivity. In fact it is sensitivity which binds a
determined subject to be a way rather than another, i.e. to define itself
inside a specific identity. It is its need to belong to a determined affective
and social or even just cultural context which gives clear patterns of desire,
of thought and behaviour to that subject, to which the subject must conform to
avoid the activation of the sense of guilt and shame. It is, therefore,
sensitivity (i.e. the intuition of others’ affective condition and harmonious
potentiality of systems) which generates the need to conform in his heart, and
with it, the possible intimate contradictions among the personalities sections
remaining prisoner of a value system with its behaviour scheme, and sections of
the personality that want to escape subject to the need to live more
autonomously. The sensitivity, therefore, it that thinking style expressing itself in the ability
to adhere to the surrounding human
world through the intuition of others’ interests and welfare; but in addition
to feel with intensity anguish for one’s disregarded and denied needs: this makes the sensitive person (if he/she
develops harmoniously) a subject generically able to doubt and have critical
thought.
7.
Theory considerations. The
inter-psychological conflict
The panic attack is the psychosomatic
alarm that springs when the individual’s conscience gets in touch with a
situation by which it is going to be altered (i.e. estranged to itself, subtracted
to its certainties). This individual’s conscience, that we call conscience number 1, gets at a certain
point in contact with strange and disturbing own feelings or thoughts (but
before removed). These feelings and thoughts signal discomfort condition in
regards to conscience number 1. We call these inter-psychological signals
conscience number 2.
Eveline is going to leave her house: the
dissatisfaction for her life (the discomfort condition called conscience number
2) has caused the imminent event of leaving. But Eveline’s usual identity (her
conscience number 1) is anguished by the betrayal that is going to happen, it
feels altered and threatened by rebellion and escape thoughts. At this stage
the conflict between conscience number 1, demanding loyalty to the role, and
conscience number 2, pressing for rebellion, grows making the anguish
excessively increase till the acme generator of panic is reached: the “alarm
signal” springs then for the existing danger, the risk of destruction of
conscience number 1.
The conscience number 2, therefore, is a
psychic condition signalling how conscience number 1 is insufficient to contain
and represent all the generic needs to which that individual should give full
expression. The criticism from the condition of conscience number 2 in respect
of condition of the conscience number 1 is a destructuring criticism, thus a criticism generating crises,
dissolving of the ego and therefore anguish.
Panic rises as defence “psychosomatic
reaction”, and it activates on the border between ordinary conscience (n. 1)
and a second conscience (n. 2) opposite to the first and destructuring in
respect of that. The panic emergency signals the imminence of a sliding from
one identity to another, identity that is going to deny the first, with guilt
and/or shame effects. The anguish or panic reaction comes, in its quality of
alarm, to avoid the conflict to mature and that the conscience of the subject
feels the guilt or the shame for the criticism and the present crisis, which is
a refusal, reject crisis, in respect of one’s identity and of social and/or
psychological relations integrating it.
Eveline avoids to fall in an anguish or
panic crisis because, in the topic moment of her history, her sense of guilt
prevents her from forcing her hand and put in a crisis her life system. In the
moment when she is going to realise that she is not free but conditioned by
affections and values of her tradition she also realises that the freedom she
has planned with Frank her man is a betrayal of her affections and values, then
guilt: at this stage she stops she prefers to betray her personal needs rather
then those of the system; she doesn’t force her hand and thus avoids to enter a
crisis. The renounce however flows into a life with no solutions, a life dejà vue, dejà veçu, an already seen and lived
life, the life of a dead person.
Marina has carried further then Eveline
the criticism in respect of her ordinary identity: she felt discomfort and
anguish for her father’s depression, she has had betrayal fantasies in respect
of her partner, she planned escape projects from the Ministry where she carried
out a job which she didn’t like. The panic attack in her case, signals that her
conscience number 2 has already elaborated a radical criticism and is going to
dissolve conscience number 1. But as soon as it is appearing to her ordinary
conscience (n. 1) that she is little and entrapped and that she is not free as
she pretends she is, Marina is blocked in her reflection by the panic burst.
The surfacing of her critical thoughts is felt by her ordinary conscience (n.
1) as an absolute, total and annihilating threat: threat to her whole
psychosomatic identity, that feels to be at risk of death or madness. Only in
the moment when she admits (and makes of it a subject of conscientious
reflection with a whole series of practical consequences) that truly one part
of her personality risks to die or to become mad if the right to live and to
get mentally organised is not recognised to her, only then Marina is free from
anguish. But to make it feasible, Marina must also recognise that the criticism
to the ego system, to her ordinary conscience can’t betray her sensitive
nature, it can’t deny her need of affective and moral coherence. I.e. she had
to understand not only that she is a prisoner of her affective and ideological realities, but that she is
also of her own redeeming fantasies, because being sensitive, she can’t
legitimate some fantasies centralised on betrayal and not on right. The
solution is then, for her, a personalization of her life that allows her not so
much to betray but on the contrary to demand her rights, right to the
acceptance of her intelligence, of her autonomy, of the possibility that
marriage and reproduction are not reached if there is no regime of full dignity
of the person. In general terms, a crisis evolves positively when the chosen
selection allows not to be anymore in the mere transgression, i.e. in the
rebellion and crime but in the change, i.e. in her right and coherent
revolution of the identity.
8. Theoretical Considerations. Close
examination of the conflict and the new personality
The philosophy of each period (at least the best, the one not subordinate to flat dogmatisms) has underlined that the ethic position of a subject always springs from the resolution of the doubt, i.e. it springs from the choice. The same is applicable in the most common psychological life and in the psychopathology. Each psychopathic structuring of
personality is based on an affective doubt, of the behaviour and ideology (an
ethic doubt) not only unresolved but indeed transformed by the ignorance of
same in a conflict becoming more and more serious because confused and
crystallised in an antinomy either alternating or tending to immobility. To
resolve a doubt of this kind (and the intrapsychic conflict based on it) one
must above all know with the maximum depth which are the alternatives
represented by the doubt. Therefore on the base of this knowledge make a
choice.
The word doubt originates from the same
root from which it derives the numerical term two. The doubt is what in our
thought is expressed in a “two”, in a duplicity, a scission, a dissociation:
therefore in a potential “double identity”. Usually one avoids to face the
structured doubt inside the identity as it reveals the polarities under
conflict, which both, in their extreme ends, generate moral anguish and
symptomatic developments. Furthermore the idea that resolving the doubt could
imply the sacrifice of one of the parties under in conflict causes an anguish
of lessening non less paralysing.
Actually the resolution of the structural
doubt never amputate the richness of the phenomena: on the contrary it brings
the personality from the typical paralysis of the intrapsychic conflict
structured to the dynamic and changeable dialectic of the opposites.
Being the human conscience fundamentally
and unavoidably dual i.e. dialectic (as it is based on the Other’s thought
objectivated in one’s own), it cannot de facto give up the doubt; the
resolution of a conflict limits itself to move it to a level of more complex integration and composition, thus
culturally, socially, humanly richer.
The resolution of the intrapsychic
conflict is a process which goes through a complex series of passages. These
passages allow the transformation of the basic alienation, for which one
adheres unconsciously to an identity drawn/received from the Other, in a more
subjective condition of personalisation/individuation. In this new condition an
wider conscience of one’s own allows to operate selections among the various
existential possibilities, therefore to live according to a wider autonomy. These passages are:
1)
the
definition of the polarities in conflict, definition through which the subject
realises of his intimate duality, of his radical doubt unresolved regarding
peculiar ethic selections;
2)
the
deepening of the knowledge of the polarities in conflict, deepening through
which the subject picks up the connections between his internal contradiction
and his memories, affections, relations, idelogical interiorised positions;
3)
the
choice to place himself in tune with one polarity rather than the other, choice
through which the subject pushes the conflict towards the direction of need to
a greater extent sacrificed for the purpose of “making it grow”;
4)
the
reassembling of the identity and personality at a more complex and integrated
level of conscience.
Eveline had a doubt: remain in her place
of origin, continuing to live in the same house as her family, or leave with
her lover for Argentina. It is clear that Eveline’s doubt is a structural
doubt, as it refers to non purely practical choices but also affective and
ideological (in the most deep meaning of the word). At last she “resolved” the
structural conflict giving up its living in the whole of its dramatic power. It
is a possibility. We don’t know, in the concrete reality, if this brought to
her a benefit rather than a damage.
Marina had another sort of doubts, but
when she called on me, she was still unaware as she was too much upset by the
impelling motives given to her by the symptoms. She had to select between two
opposite existential positions. In an existential position she copied her
mother’s feminine role – integrated in the essential conniving with her
father – and adjusted to found her couple and family life entirely on her
sacrifice. At this level she would have to censure the impelling critical
requests in respect of her parents’ numerous sufferings, of her fiancé’s
uncertainties, of the social world’s indifference in respect of her personal
destine as an intelligent woman
sacrificed to the anonymous routine of a modest job in the public service. In
the other existential position she saw herself proudly free from her roots as a
daughter of humble concierge and free from any obligation in respect of her
boyfriend (and any other boy who would relegate her in a subordinate role), as
well as from any religion: she was indeed an atheistic, a communist and full of
a complex and refined culture. The one personality was in conflict with the
other.
Truly speaking, when closely analysed,
the fight between the two parties was not equal. Marina was emancipated only at
a level of verbal conscience, i.e. “verbally”; “when acting”, i.e. in her
material praxis, she lived in the first existential position, in substance
subjected to the feminine roles typical of the traditional order. The party to
favour, with which become allied to promote a structural change, and with it
the coming of an identified conscience was therefore the other one, i.e. that one
setting the emancipation, which had to lead to the real effects of real life.
This is what happened: Marina cured herself from the symptoms of
agophorabic panic when she could
impose herself and leave the job as a clerk for another one more active and
complicated (journalism), in the moment when she refused the wedding with a
religious rite and got married at the Commune, in the moment when she could
express her blame in respect of her fiancé’s family (defended by him) which
deprived the boy and herself of the necessary support to live as a couple. But
she stopped, full of doubts and feeling guilty, when facing the prospect of a
separation. In lieu of the agophorabic symptoms she suffered from a slight but
insistent depression, fruit of the awareness to be responsible of the
matrimonial crisis. Awareness which gave her a painful sense of guilt, of which
the depression was indeed a tangible sign and which nailed her to a doubt which
apparently had no way of development or escape.
Just recently – when approaching
the end of the analysis – this doubt has started to be handled and
resolved. Up to then there had been an ideological value which had prevented
Marina from separating from her husband: it was the religious value of
sacrificing for others. Rather than hurting (and disappointing others), Marina
was prepared to sacrifice her life. It was hard indeed for a laic intellectual
personal to admit to be guided by a religious value; but this had been to that
moment the truth of facts. The decisive opportunity arose when Mario fell into
an even deeper crisis, appearing to her more and more as a martyr of her
history. The young man’s mother was operated for a cancer to her genital
apparatus, which was removed. The whole family gathered around her and Mario, visibly
prostrated, asked Marina to help. Marina asked herself if she was obliged once
again to save her partner, subjecting herself to the sacrifice for a woman for
whom she had no feeling and for a family which had always treated her badly.
Should she immolate to the devotion for her man up to her personal degradation?
The choice was dramatic, but it made her
grow. Marina subtracted herself: she faced the sense of fault bound to the
distance she had taken from Mario, and became conscious that a “right” action
is never, it cannot be, selfish. From this to the decision of the definitive
separation the step would be shorter.
9. Theoretical considerations. The
contract on the identity
Our conscience cannot be determined by social will (and therefore reveal to be its prisoner) and intimate and invisible ways. We can be subjected to ideologies outside our most authentic nature in the way one conceives and lives both unselfishness and selfishness. We are therefore subdued by identities alienating to ourselves, taking away from ourselves, robbing of our best and most authentic existential possibilities. We are divided between parts of ourselves forcing us to be functional to an ideological system expropriating of ourselves and other parts arisen from our rebellion, which estrange us no less than the others from our truer nature. This phenomenon of discomfort due to the
expropriation of our possibilities is called alienation. I have already
defined as basic alienation (or
ontological) that which is more constitutive; I would define now as antithetic alienation that arisen from rebellion.
We are split, in conflict with ourselves, doubtful with no real identity.
It is necessary at this stage to solve
our general alienation having full conscience of it and thus obtaining a
contract on the identity.
Having a contract on the identity is a
formula, a slogan, which has a meaning and a target in the dialectic: to obtain
a contract on the identity means realising that the identity – which we
erroneously consider as our natural property – is indeed the product of
two dimensions in reciprocal tensional connection: our fundamental needs (of which we have an intuitive
perception, always indirect and therefore “obscure”) and the social world
(which is not reduced to the mere “society” but is rather the system of
material relations and cultural
values modelling our personality). Having a contract on the identity means that
the ego, which is in the middle between these two terms, must become aware of
the radical needs on one part and of social pressure, and on the other part of
affective and ideological “conditioning”.
In order to be fully aware of this dual
essence of personality we must understand that the social ideologies can deeply
obscure the need perception; and the need pressure, on its part – if they
are repressed or removed – can utilise the ideologies in their extreme
sides, up to formulations (which are personal ideologies) which cannot morally
b appropriated for the ego.
A person living a strong psychological
conflict between belonging and independence can arrive at the radical doubt up
to the intimate contradiction with himself: becoming on one side too docile and
obedient and too insensible and infringing on the other, thus drawing away to
be simply himself. It is therefore necessary that the conscience knows how to
show up personal ideologies (always of social origin) both in the most extreme
order solutions and in the not
less extreme of disorder: there are in effect collective ways of thought
(ideologies and mentalities) promoting transgression so that everything changes
without that anything changes.
The deep understanding that the external
and the internal worlds interlace inside ourselves up to form those entities
which we call ego, character, identity, personality and more, psyche, mind,
soul etc. can
help us not only to make us free from that capital vice of thought which is organicism (thinking
that each of our production of thought – mainly is pathological –
is the reflex of a certain organic determination); but also of the other not
less serious ideological vice which is psychologism (i.e. the thinking that there
could be a mind avulse from social reality, or even a mind which could have had
a day – obviously in the mythic childhood – a contact with reality,
but after then never again).
In questions of psychology we must always
think that there exists a body – ours – which is a sensible body
supplied with intrinsic needs, which goes through history and it is deeply
marked by it. The brain is no more than the central station connecting this
body and that social-historical world, and that as such not only become soaked
– with knowledge – of that world, but also reacts to it: shaping on
it, developing functions in antithesis, producing molecules which will enter
the blood system, selecting in their own genetic list the most suitable
biotypes for a reply which should
be as adequate as possible. There is no abstract body which is not animated by
this dialectic game; similarly there is no psyche which is not intrinsically determined
by this mediation between body and mind. Why does it exist a medicine which knows nothing of neuropsychic reality
and a psychology which creates abstract theories describing a mind avulse both
from the biologic body (genetic) and the social body and history?
In order to give a practical and handy
shape to this complex series of theoretical statements, I propose a personal
redefinition of some concepts taken from psychodinamic metapsychology.
A)
The
social historic world expresses itself in the subject as an instance of the superego; it produces objects, it
produces furthermore the ideals of the superego, which are indeed the behaviour
objective models proposed to the individuals.
B)
The
interpersonal world coincides both with the instance of the superego and that of the ideals of the
ego. It is in the interpersonal world that fixes its roots its persuasion power
of the superego and of the ideals of the ego, because it introduces these
objective instances (social-historic) inside the single personalities through
the vehicle of the affective relations and of social interest.
C)
The
personal world is the world both for the superego and the ideal of the ego, but
it is also the world of the ego. The ego, not withstanding its subjection to
the social ideals, can in fact dissociate from them then from the superego. The
subjective conscience springs from the ego, from the personal world, and its
founding characteristic is indeed that of existing in as much activity of
objectifying, i.e. of subjective reflection of the objective world, thus of the
super-ego and of the ideals of the ego. The conscience, springing from the
inside of the ego, is the instance which allows us to be free.
Therefore in psycho-dynamic terms, having
a contract of the identity means that the ego (my conscience) must be made able
to freely select the ideals of the ego without being dominated by the super-ego
will: i.e. the ego must be able to
contract with the super-ego and select for itself ideals and value conforming
to its intimate nature.
3. De-realisation
and depersonalisation
Fears of
psychiatry
You will
never reach the soul limits, as much as you can walk, not even if you go
through all the ways; so deeply they develop. (Eraclito, Dell’origine, fr. 108)
The distinction which I have just made between ordinary conscience status and antithetic conscience status presupposes, on one side, that the conscience number 1 is a coherent and integrated conscience and that satisfies the function to give a sense of coherence and integrity to the ego itself; on the other that the conscience number 2 is the psychic subject of a part dis-integral, distinguishable, of the same personality. Thus, in the same personality two antithetical structures can co-exist, opposite one to the other, each with its egos, super-egos and ideal of the ego. It is evident that some biological,
neuro-biological and psycho-biological systems must be present in the psyche
(beyond psychic instances described in the psycodinamic psychology) determining
both the personality tendencies and their conflicts. I would call needs these psycho-biological
tendencies: needs rather than instincts and pulses because, although of organic
origin, they are socially codified; needs and not simply codes because, although being
knowledgeably organised in the relations with the social world, they stand on a biological base which
expresses itself in the psyche as emotion and affection.
1. Dialectic of needs and related
affective forms
I would call need to belong/social
integration with the correlated systematic affective form (or super-egoic) that psycho-biological
tendency to feel and live one’s life not as a single life but as one
unavoidably cast in a systematic unit with the Other. To feel and live through
the need to belong and the systematic affective form brings in a basic feeling
of empathic harmony, dissolving it is automatically (philogenetically)
associated to a sense of void, inadequacy, loss, which can lead to a sense of
guilt where the ego feels responsible of the scission of the unity.
I would call need of
opposition/individuation with the consequent individual affective form (or egoic)
that psycho-biological tendency to feel and live one’s individuality in terms
of an existing identity absolutely in itself and for itself, dissociated from
any link of any kind. To feel and live through the need of individuation and
the affective individual form brings in a feeling of an unavoidable autonomy,
threatening it produces social shame and subjection anguish when at its minimum
and anguish/panic for the dissolution of the ego when at its top.
At their extreme limit these two
psycho-biologic tendencies can coexist synergically and become one single
thing: then mental status are produced (with a strong psycho-somatic
connotation) in which are lost the distinctions in/out, I/another, me/not me,
here/there, now/not now, mind/body etc. (these distinctions are required in the
articulation of the two needs) and – if the conscience is able to accept
it – one carries out the pleasant feeling of an harmonious union
accompanied by a full and self-sufficient freedom.
It is curious to note that many of these
intuitions are already contained in the notes of the diary of an original
Hungarian psycho-analyst of Budapest: Sàndor Ferenczi since 1932. I quote few
passages. Here it is a theoretical and clean petitioning and with no
misunderstanding.
The splitting of two personalities, which want to know nothing one of the other and which are not grouped around different tendencies, obtains the economy of the subjective conflict (Ferenczi, 1932, p.94).
Notwithstanding everything, it is not
entirely unreasonable to sustain the viewpoint of the dualism; the numerous
examples of dual polarity, ambivalence and ambitendency traceable everywhere
seem to justify considering the whole of the nature not only from the viewpoint
of the principle of selfishness, but also from that of altruism coming from an
opposite pulsing direction . The unilateral prevalence of the principle of
selfishness is sadism; that of wanting to suffer is masochism (ibid. pp.
98-99).
The concept of a dialectic human nature,
i.e. both individual and social, a human unidual nature,
has been taken from many other theorists (not only in the psycho-analytic
sphere). I quote the most current
and complex of these: Ignatio Matte Blanco. For Matte Blanco there are in the
human mind and culture two forms of thoughts, one called symmetric, for which it exists only the
undivided unity lacking in distinct individualities, and the other called asymmetric, for which on the other hand
exist only distinct individualities, in autonomous relations among them, for
which the feeling and the idea of unity are inconceivable at all.
The way to be symmetric is the fundamental root of sociability because what, at an asymmetric level, is felt as a co-operation among individuals, or taking part together or being together, is, on the other hand, at a symmetric level, a true unity in which individuals are not separated and distinguishable one from the other.
In as much as we are symmetric individuals we are not independent from the others in that we are a unity with the others. For the asymmetric being, this lacking of individual limits is inconceivable…..This contrast between two ways of being would constitute the deepest source of conflict (Matte Blanco, 1975).
The most complete and exhaustive elaboration of these two aspects of the psyche and thought in the exact terms of psycho-biological tensions, i.e. needs, is by Luigi Anepeta who wrote:
The need of social
integration (is)….need to belong, even though formally, to a human group and to
have confirmation of this.
…..One can logically assume that the educational plasticity of human nature, due to the need to socially get integrated, recognises an intrinsic limit, biologically described itself, suitable to avert that that need promotes a homogeneous cultural pheno-typification…..This limit, genetically intrinsic in the human nature, can be defined as a need, the need to oppose, the purpose of which is to promote a differentiation of the personal identity and the progressive acquisition of a critical power in relation to reality (Anepeta, 1992, pp. 35-37).
Along this last theoretical approach, I
have already expressed my point of view in the book Psychotic passions (1998), the first chapter of
which outlines the theoretic foundations on which my practice moves. The two
fundamental needs are described there, indeed, as a need to belong/to socially
integrate and as a need to oppose/to individualise. To be precise, I state, inter
alia:
a)
The need to
socially integrate is the most archaic and basic need, as is involved in the
processes of primary identification and of cultural belonging….The man’s
dependence to the bonds with the other human being……supplies to the human
societies and to the individuals themselves a potential of cancellation and
auto-cancellation for the perpetuation of the social system and the
participation.
b)
The need to oppose/individualise is “anaclitic” as to the
first; in other words it needs the relative satisfaction of the first in order
to manifest itself, due to its smaller relevance for the survival. However it
is, during the psycho-biologic (and I would add historic-social) development
destined to assume an importance at least equal to the complementary
need……If dramatised in the various
social interactions, starting from those of the child with the adults, the need
to oppose/individualise loses in part or in toto its functional character until
it degrades in various
types of
pathology (Ghezzani, 1998, pp. 40-41).
The need to individualise, i.e. that
neuro-psychological push for which the generic individual gradually transforms
himself in a person distinct from others and supplied with moral autonomy,
gains in the course of the individual psycho-biological development and of the
philo-genesis, ie of the evolutional history of humanity, a prominent
character. Why? Simply because many persons distinct the one from the others
offer a variety of types of behaviour higher than those of an anonymous and non-diferrentiated
crowd. And the human species is interested to have availability of many
different behaviours to strengthen its adaptive and surviging capacities.
The species, however, is neither
far-sighted nor illuminated. It varies the individualities in the same way as
it changes the genetic equipment, i.e. casually, blindly. And it produces
indeed casually, sensible and insensible individuals. The variability of
individual brains (the difference among the individuals) can therefore push the
species and the cultures either in the direction of higher selfishness and
higher interpersonal and global destructivity, or in the direction of a higher
moral conscience, potentially socialisable, but still and in any case critical. Societies generally, however
– worried for their stability, i.e. to perpetuate the order of the system
– end up by dramatising this change interpreting it univocally as
egotistic and destructively potentiality or simply unsuitable for social life. They, truly, don’t
mistrust so much selfishness (that can be totally functional to a competitive
and individualistic system) and of mere inadequacy (that can utilise in
ideological terms, i.e. as negative example good enough to confirm the
existing) they rather mistrust moral critical potential, because this always
aims at transforming the existing in function of the emerging needs.
To give an example of how much this can
be singular and powerful – at psychological level and, at least
virtually, even at social level – full maturity of the need to individualise
i want to report hereunder a biographical episode. It is an episode from a
young Jewish-American student’s just over sixteen and was witnessing with his
rich sensitivity the tragic events of the second world war. He had been for more then five years very
perplex about the “truth” propagandised on the “noble” reasons of the war, and had constantly been avoiding to
take precise position in that regard. But it was still unavoidable for him to
reach the top of the doubtfulness and of the critical discomfort when, on a day of 1945, he got to know of the
nuclear bombing suffered from Japan. On that occasion he could not avoid
“listening” with absolute clearance his dissociation from events, therefore living
experiences which in some way led him to express his dissociation towards the
exterior. That boy was Noam Chomsky, one of the most important linguists and
philosophers of contemporary history, who tells the episode of a long interview
of 1987.
I remember that the day when the bomb over Hiroshima was released I couldn’t literally speak to anybody. I could see nobody… I went for a walk in perfect loneliness. I happened to be in a summer camping and when I listened to the news I went into the wood and stayed there on my own for a couple of hours. I didn’t speak to anybody of this and later I could never understand the reactions of people. I felt completely isolated (Chomsky, 1987, p. 45).
It is in this case the need to
individualise brought to a very high degree of development: this sixteen-years-old
boy is able to feel and to think in a totally disharmonious way as compared to
those who are the dominant feelings and thought in that very moment not only in
America, where he lives, but also inside the winners’ world. This is certainly
not easy: he is a minor, he belongs to a minority culture, and lives in a
country and in a world kept together by that particular form of conformism
which became later the “official version” of events. At sixteen he disconcertingly discovers that his intellectual
sensitivity cuts him out from his country’s community and from the “meaning”
that the entire world wanted to give to history.
The episode is striking; but it is clear that the same dramatic intensity can reveal itself in events connected to apparently minor contexts: The conflict with one of the parents or the family or with a local tradition can be an event of not minor relevance, thus able to radically “unbalance” the as |