Traces … but: “Healing means daring to step outside ones fence”!
‘Right Now’
‘When can we get closer to ourselves? In bed, on the road, at home, where so many things seem better when we return? Everyone knows the feeling of having forgotten something in his or her conscious life, something that was left halfway and did not come to light. That is why it often seems so important what was meant to be said just now and has escaped us. When you leave a room in which you have lived for a long time, you look around strangely before you leave. Something is left here, too, that one has not grasped. Still you take it with you to start again elsewhere’. [E. Bloch]
Among the physiological difficulties, there is one referring to the possibility of seeing and observing events at the very moment they happen and involve us.
How, then, can we deal with the zeitgeist in which we ourselves are immersed?
This is why we believe it is important to begin a work of reflection, a work that involves the possibility of reflecting on the experience we are having and, in so doing, fostering a perspective dimension of it.
This is work aimed at identifying the levels of distress that run through our culture, and their genesis.
We are supported by the belief that the psychoanalytic method is a useful tool in this process. It is, in fact, a method that has as its fundamental statute the observation of what we call psychic reality. When we speak about psychic reality, we mean a reality that resides within the subject, and which goes to condition with desires and fantasies what we are operating in the world.
A large part of the environment around us does not invite us to listen to our inner world, and our attention, if spoken of at all, is increasingly focused on the new media rather than on deepening the contents and their meaning.
In our proposal, as Freud did with the quote placed at the beginning of his essay ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, we will hold valid the statement, "Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo".
Therefore, we will attempt to state our positions in a manner analogous to that used in The Interpretation of Dreams where we move between latent and manifest contents. Through free association, we can say that we propose hypotheses in which our view of the social life will consider observations concerning the psychological mechanisms and states of the individuals who comprise it. It is a way of proceeding that necessarily involves several points of view: the economic, the social, and the political; however, in our case, a special emphasis will be given to the psychological. We believe the help that can be derived from psychology, particularly the contribution of psychodynamic psychology, is fundamental in order to be able to grasp those forces that determine the actions of humankind. In other words, to use a well-known statement, "The ego is not master in its own home". And if it is not master in its own home, it can hardly be master when it leaves home.
Psychoanalysis can offer us useful insight in understanding what Freud in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ already pointed out as a grave danger to humanity. That is, the danger of diverting the anxieties and conflicts of our inner world to wars and destructive powers. It is only by being able to better understand and face this world that we can act in a more responsible way in the world around us and in living with others, while avoiding the situation where the group and/or unconscious crowd takes over the individual's ability to discern.
While it is clear that it is important to be able to intervene in these forces that run through society, we also know how difficult this operation is. It involves approaching forces that are intertwined with our psychic defense mechanisms - mechanisms that are deputed to the removal of everything that is undesirable and which creates discomfort. But it is equally true that this need for splitting comes to interfere with the possibility of facing reality as it arises.
In this way, when defense mechanisms are amplified, it can have the effect that what we are defending ourselves from and therefore push away creates its harmful effect without our conscious component being aware of it.
This awareness is an operation that involves frustration and the ability to tolerate moments of pain and bewilderment. In this regard, we find it useful to recall the thought of W. Bion when in ‘Learning from Experience’, he tells us how precarious the human being's ability to tolerate truths about himself is and how, consequently, the mind is always ready to create lies to oppose this pain.
W. Bion in Cogitations (1992) says, “The man who is mentally healthy is able to gain strength and consolation and the material through which he can achieve mental development through his contact with reality, no matter whether that reality is painful or not. This view may owe its origin to experience in no way metaphysical, but such as might be achieved through failure to admit the existence of a physical hazard to physical progress and the resultant fall. The reciprocal view is that no man can become mentally healthy save by a process of constant search for fact and a determination to eschew any elements, however seductive or pleasurable, that interpose themselves between himself and his environment as it really is. As a psycho-analyst I include the man’s own personality as a part, and a very important part, of his environment. By contrast it may be said that man owes his health, and his capacity for continued health, to his ability to shield himself during his growth as an individual by repeating in his personal life the history of the race’s capacity for self-deception against truth that his mind is not fitted to receive without disaster. Like the earth, he carries with him an atmosphere, albeit a mental one, which shields him from the mental counterpart of the cosmic and other rays at present supposed to be rendered innocuous to men, thanks to the physical atmosphere.” (W. Bion, Cogitations 1992)
Another problem that arises from the outset concerns the possibility of extending the psychoanalytic method into contexts other than the individual clinic.
In ‘The Problem of Analysis Conducted by Non-Medical Practitioners’ (1926) Freud tells us, "Psychoanalysis, as a 'psychology of the deep' or doctrine of the Psychic Unconscious, may become indispensable to all the sciences that study the history of the origins of human civilization and its great institutions, such as art, religion and social organization. I think that it has already offered these sciences considerable help in solving their problems, but these are only minimal contributions compared with those that can be obtained when historians, psychologists of religions, glottologists, etc., are enabled to make use themselves of the new research tool placed at their disposal. The therapeutic use of analysis is only one of its applications, and the future will perhaps show that it is not the most important." (S. Freud, 1926)
Extending these remarks by Freud, one comes to hypothesize the possibility of thinking of a new meta-psychology. A meta-psychology that, as was the case at the beginning of the discoveries about the value of the unconscious and how decisive this was in understanding the human being, may now, through "the extension of psychoanalytic practice to multi-psychic devices call into question the conception of another model of intelligibility to account for the plurality of places, dynamics and economies of unconscious psychic reality that emerge in such devices ..." (René Kaès, The Extension of Psychoanalysis, 2015)
As Bion's early experiences in his observations of groups one begins, in fact, he already speaks of the group mind and the plurality of each individual. One comes, therefore, to approach and extend that Copernican revolution already initiated by Freud regarding the loss of centrality of the individual.
It is appropriate, therefore, to remain faithful to Freud's thought by declining it on the variations of experience that are produced in the process of a progressive knowledge of the unconscious. Knowledge, which, as can be guessed, can never be accomplished. (Caldironi L., 2018)
Luca Caldironi
References:
Bion W., ‘Learning from Experience’, Karnak Books, London, 1962
Bion W., ‘Cogitations’, Karnak Books, London, 1992
Caldironi L., ‘Psychoanalysis and Cyberspace’ in ‘Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis’, Routledge, London and New York, 2018
Freud S., ‘Opera Omnia 1886-1938’, vol.10, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino
Kaès R., ‘The Extension of Psychoanalysis’, in ‘L’estensione della psicoanalisi’, Franco Angeli, Milano, 2021