Conversation on the Model

Our conversation (so far)
An imaginary dialogue between us and psycho-neuroscientists

 

Psycho-neuroscientists

We have recognised experimentally, thanks to the tools we use in diagnostic imaging (allowing us to visualise the functioning of the brain during a certain type of stimulation), thanks to the
anatomical-clinical method and thanks to experimental physiology, that the Unconscious, the pillar on which the entire psychoanalytic system rests, does indeed exist.

We have identified the sites of unconscious mental functions, precise cortical and subcortical synaptic circuits. The concept of repression has finally found its place and explanation.

We have identified the centrality of emotion (also foundational to psychoanalysis), understood as the unique pattern of response with which the brain deals with any stimulus, internal and external.

 

Le Doux:

Whatever happens in our environment (external world), or within us (internal world), is perceived, processed, elaborated in our brain through emotions.

Let me explain how.

With a first, instantaneous, brief, subcortical, phylogenetically ancient response, which tells us immediately (without us feeling it) whether it is a stimulus that threatens our survival. And with a second, slow response: the same stimulus makes a longer trip from the thalamus (a subcortical structure) to the cortex, where it is processed in a more complex way, also involving the memory database.

We now know that most mental activity is absolutely unconscious; only a very small part involves consciousness.

What repercussions do these neuroscientific discoveries have on therapeutic practice?

The repercussions can only be positive. The reciprocal opening of psychoanalysis and neuroscience helps patients to no longer see a clear opposition between talk therapy and medication. The two disciplines are two sides of the same coin, as are mind and body.

This integrated knowledge of the human mind that we propose is to the benefit of psychotherapy itself, which is enriched with insights to address issues that have always been problematic, already pointed out by Freud.

Us: what are these insights?

Solms:

Neuropsychoanalysis proposes to integrate the two disciplines so as to overcome the traditional dualism between somatic and psychic, thereby reaching a new and more comprehensive understanding of mental functions and psychic disorders.

In fact, this dualism has always led to a stark contraposition that hinders the understanding of man in his entirety. I have been and continue to be the main promoter of this integration and thus of neuropsychoanalysis.

From a practical point of view, on the one hand, I perform a neuro-psychological examination, as detailed as possible, on patients with a focal neurological lesion; on the other hand, I subject these same patients to classical psychoanalysis.

I thus investigate directly on an empirical level the possible correlations between the mechanisms of the brain and those of the psyche.

Us:
We do not agree at all, and we will attempt to explain why.
If we start from the a priori distinction between body and mind, that is to say, if we do not question it, as if body and mind really existed there in the external world, outside of us; that is to say, if we avoid genealogically investigating their origin, in short, starting from two distinct objects, and whose distinction is assumed, it is not really possible to find a link in which dualism is not reproduced, following a regress to infinity.

In other words, in every link (between the psyche and the brain, for instance) that we manage to find, we will always first have to explain how the two faces of the psychic and the bodily stand together...

...We repeat that in the current debate it is apodictically assumed that there are bodies, clearly biological, and minds, clearly psychological. These bodies and minds are said to truly exist, to be things of the world, entities, in and of themselves, completely independent of the scientific writing practices that investigate them (roughly, neuroscience and psychology). In short, minds and bodies are said to be facts!

Whereas minds and bodies are not facts at all, things in themselves. Outside the practices, namely, the disciplines that study and name them, they do not exist!

Solms:

You answer as if you were threatened. As if you did not believe in science. Instead, it must be most gratifying (and not threatening!) for psychoanalysts to discover that we can erect our own edifice from the foundations laid by Freudian thought, instead of throwing it all away and having to start all over again!

It is stimulating to identify the weak points in Freudian theory as we integrate and revise his work; after all, we are only completing his work.

Chorus (of psycho-neuroscientists):

Psychotherapy is confirmed and not refuted in its effectiveness by the contribution of neuroscience!

An example. Neuroscience allows us to visualise the structural and permanent changes in certain areas of the brain, produced by psychotherapy... Subjective experience modifies brain and mental functioning, we have seen and demonstrated this with our tools. It is now a question of continuing to work in the direction of a constant refinement of technique, aiming to open to all areas of knowledge. The humanistic vocation of psychoanalysis, its closeness to art, philosophy, poetry, remains unaltered, even through and despite the dialogue with the sciences.

Us: (How can we not understand one another like this?)

Are you certain these visualisations and demonstrations of (bodily) modifications of yours are congruous?

Chorus:

One must not be afraid of losing one’s identity, otherwise we risk sterile and sadly self-referential stiffening!

Us:

What an extraordinary rhetorical effect, what a powerful suggestive atmosphere these theses of yours carry! (“They confirm psychoanalysis! Finally, the mind/environment/body gap is bridged!”)

Us:
You say that we, critics of this psycho-neuroscientific view, are obscurantists, anti-scientists.

Nothing could be falser.

We are utterly fascinated by the explosion of scientific discoveries, especially in the last few decades. They draw horizons of an unimaginable complexity; they offer us the possibility of accessing the world and the universe; of treating ourselves with medicine equipped with increasingly sophisticated and precise tools; of seeing ourselves for what we are, grains of dust (namely: particles) in whirling motion “in the infinite
sky and worlds”.

We repeat that ours is not a criticism of science (!!), but of your neuropsychoanalytic vision.
To understand the sense of this criticism, let us follow the philosopher Carlo Sini’s discourse together:

***As we have said many times, most scholars and the common man never attempt to understand in the only sensible way (namely, by studying its genesis) the fact that there are bodies and minds in the world and that they have a certain form and not another.

They never investigate whether, behind the words ‘body’ and ‘mind’, there really are ‘things’ endowed with an existence independent of the horizon of meaning that designates them. Vice versa, without reflection, they adhere to neuroscience, or psychology, or psychoanalysis, which take it for granted.

We, on the other hand, are psychoanalysts who take a stand against so-called scientific objectivity and the prevailing choice today to rely on neuroscience and its results in order to live.

To us, the surrender to an absurd biological reductionism is senseless (just as senseless and vacuous the appeal to spiritualistic transcendence is), according to the enduring blunder of the old Cartesian dualism.

We believe that the objects found/constructed by scientists (their marvellous discoveries) are not the equivalent of what is in the world, but the theoretical result of what science has made and produced in the world: maps that orient our thinking and actions. Formulas of knowledge (since always): we cannot forget their operational birth, their true origin.

Neuroscience and psychoanalysis are thus two languages. As languages, they can neither corroborate nor refute one another.

We believe that the great misunderstanding, the shift in meaning that has occurred, lies in the fact that things are confused and, above all, confused with words. This confusion leads to believe that words are like transparent glasses that allow one to see the things they name according to an extraordinarily naive idea of reality.

We are not obscurantist anti-scientists. We are simply far from the idea that we can discover a ‘reality in itself’, (the famous objective truth), existing for real in the world.
The body, the mind, the soul: there are no such things (“in absolute”)!

To those who (scientist, philosopher, theologian, common man) expect to question us in this way (What is body? What is mind? What is the relationship between mind and body?...), we reply that we must first take a step backwards.

To attempt to understand the genealogy of our ways of translating experience into the words of common sense and scientific theories.

Modern science too continues to question in this same way, yet because, at least since Bacon, it does not trust words, it actually goes beyond metaphysics, inaugurating a new type of writing about things. That is, from Galileo, mathematical writing. This, however, he does not know, he does not know that his “objects” are the product of mathematical writing and not realities of nature in themselves; hence when he speaks, the scientist is still naively ideological and metaphysical.

When we finally realise how naive the idea of a “reality in itself” is, we come to the conclusion that reality is something that only arises from the encounter with us, with the tools we equip ourselves with, with our theoretical models, with the specific language we are using.
That is, with our practices, which are simply the infinite ways we translate experience. We believe that, outside of this encounter, there is no reality, no objective truth.
How did the shift in meaning that we are talking about happen? How did this confusion arise?

What has happened is that we have progressively become accustomed to the specialised use of the technical and exosomatic tools of certain sciences. This use has progressively erased and continues to erase the awareness of the technical operation employed, resulting in the severe misunderstanding of the truth of its object.

This severe misunderstanding was already on its way since human beings, thanks to the tool of language, were strongly induced to confuse the work of words with the reality of things.

In this respect, modern scientific practice constitutes the latest grandiose shift in meaning.

How have we failed to realise that it is precisely the “technical” and “material” peculiarities of the (exosomatic) tool that the natural sciences use, time and again, that produce the corresponding scientific “vision” of things, namely, the famous sensory datum?
They mistake for reality the product of the work of a multitude of intertwined practices.

The scotoma must be removed

How did we fail to realise that from this marvellous and mighty work descends the wealth of knowledge and constructions that characterise the processes of contemporary science? A science that, in so doing, gives rise to the construction of a universal habit of so-called “objective” discourse, which is nothing but an endless process of constructing the scientific truth of the world…

We can no longer continue to be so naive. ***

Us 🔁:

It is never an all-or-nothing matter, physical or psychic, concrete or abstract.
It is simply a matter that we can define, in continuous cross-reference, psychic and physical, and vice versa, physical and psychic; micro and macro, and vice versa, macro and micro. It merely depends on the vertex of observation, or rather, on the moment of unfolding of the Möbius strip we find ourselves. This is well illustrated in the book:
“Body and Sense /After Psychosomatics” (Peregrini, 2019)

 

Let us recall that the Möbius strip seems to have two faces; as we watch them disappear on one side, we see them reappear on the other. When we observe them in this way, it is almost impossible to distinguish them: they cease to be ontologically existing things, which, according to the trend, are defined as two sides of the same coin, or something else, to become movements, trajectories, continuously ending up in one another. We can no longer believe that mind and body are divided and must be brought together by looking for correlations between one and the other, nor can we believe that if we reason in terms of systems (mental and bodily), the problem is solved. When we stop looking for correlations between two entities and understand that the mind continually refers back to the body and vice versa, and the two ‘exist’ by difference from one another, we also understand what it is all about. 

 

The Unconscious and Us:

Psychoanalysis has the Unconscious as its object of research. The Unconscious, for obvious reasons, cannot be located anatomically somewhere in the brain or in some brain process. It would have to take an absurd logical leap.

The (structural) Unconscious as INFINITE

We are speaking of a concept of Infinity that by no means plunges us into the abyss of the transcendent.
We are referring to the “infinitely great”, not in the form of the growing beyond all limits, or in that closely related to the first, of converging infinite succession, but in mathematical terms.
An infinite based on the concept of bi-univocal correspondence between the whole and its proper part.

Voices from Metaphysics

In exploring the infinite, man encounters the indivisible and the unthinkable.
In order to grasp this reality that is alien to “normal” thinking (which, by its very nature, only grasps what is conceptually dividable), thinking devises a new method: it conceives of reality as infinite, hence, infinitely thinkable.
Yet this indivisible reality does not let itself be grasped, as we see in the paradoxes.
“Normal” thinking, by comparison, becomes “breezy thinking”.

An imaginary dialogue between us and the Chilean psychoanalyst Matte Blanco

The Unconscious has a different logic from the asymmetrical, Aristotelian logic of conscious thought. It is called symmetrical logic. It is a bit like that of dreams, taking us into the realm of “Alice in Wonderland”, where everything is subverted and possible.

Concretely, in the products of the human psyche, there are always compromises between these two logics, giving rise to the so-called bi-logic.

In their pure state, the two logics are merely borderline concepts. As one proceeds towards the deep unconscious, the symmetrical logic (chaos) proportionally and increasingly prevails....

Freud and the mathematician Cantor

Seen through bi-logic, Freud and Cantor would have found themselves, unknowingly, faced with the same task: to somehow “translate” or “unfold” by thought, (it also means to set boundaries, to define, to collect into a whole or ensemble and, therefore, necessarily, within finite limits), a reality that in itself would be absolutely refractory to any delimitation and any relation or ordering. In order to “delimit” this “unlimited” and “homogeneous” reality, thought pays a price. This gives rise to “bi-logical paradoxes”,
nothing other than the expression of this dual nature of the world and being.

On the other hand, placing a limit (which is always finite) on this reality would give it the only chance to recognise an ontological foundation...

Us: what ontological foundation?

Us again:
Let us move away from Metaphysics.
(The real change of pace)

Yes to bi-logic, but with a major difference to metaphysics: there is no unique, indivisible, unthinkable object outside of us to strive for.
It is very true that we, with our asymmetrical (Aristotelian) thought, a thought that distinguishes by putting it in temporal succession, do nothing but try to “translate” symmetrical thought, the Unconscious, the infinite. In so doing, we always run into something that inevitably paralyses our discourse, paralysing the very gesture of representation and interpretation: we wander into the unspeakable.
That is why we must start the conversation all over again.
There is always a stumbling block.
We can never speak the whole of experience.

With Matte Blanco:

In this way, infinity also becomes the Unconscious of mathematics, in the sense of an expression of the unthinkable foundation to which are suspended the finite constructions and discrete operations of reason from which mathematical objects are also born...

Us:

There is no doubt that Matte Blanco, with his research on the infinite, has offered us an extraordinary path, and he has done so by recognising precisely a very singular logic, which, intertwined with the logic that usually characterises scientific thought, can go so far as to found a new mathematics - the one that Bion used when he spoke of the mathematics of “Being-at-one”, to deal with human passions.

Bi-logical mathematics in which the infinite and the infinitesimal lose all their strangeness and paradoxicality and find justification.

We come to understand, at the end of this journey, that mathematics and psychoanalysis, as the science of the Unconscious, rediscover that they share the same “founding aporia”, which, in the words of René Thom, is to “reconcile the immediate intuition of continuity with the generativity – by definition discontinuous – of the operations”.

It means, for us, to reconcile the indivisible mode that expresses itself in the Unconscious and the Infinite with the necessarily finite and discrete operations....

Bocchiola (Singularity)

If the unconscious is the object of psychoanalysis and if this unconscious is not the psychological backroom of consciousness, but that stumbling block that is in no way reducible to the metaphysical anthropology of neuroscience and psychology; if the unconscious is that dimension that interrupts the order of discourses, that paralyses the very gesture of interpretation and representation (and not as its external limit, mind you, but as its internal fracture, from this viewpoint the example of the navel of the dream is highly accurate), then its other name is that of singularity.

If the order of the word is that of judgement, as is the case in alphabetical writing at least, if this order assumes experience in the register of the universal (we must remember that the alphabetical word, far from making the absent thing present, actually makes the present thing absent, perforating it in view of its concept and meaning), then the unconscious is the name of what in experience resists this operation, it is the name of what cannot be said in judgement, which escapes secondary elaboration, preventing it from “telling the whole” of experience.

We would need, at this point, an epistemology of singularity, which clearly cannot be the universalistic one of the positive sciences, which we analysts increasingly look to, be it out of naivety or prejudice.

We need to know, however, that we are by no means ever faced with a supposed truth of the external world to fathom and try to discover, but that whatever “objective” nature we attribute to the facts and to our search, in reality, those facts and that specific search for the object are simply an installation resulting from the mighty work of man in all its ramifications, an effect of his cultivation and culture, of his hands and his language, that is, of the infinite “machines” that take place there.

Ramella (The Model):

We, in fact, unlike Matte Blanco, do not believe that the model of the single indivisible object that truly exists is remotely compatible with our theoretical model, whose pictogram is the Möbius strip (or Klein’s bottle).

We are in a clinical theoretical sphere that implies a complex model of temporality that cannot be traced back to the uniqueness of an original object, precisely because body and mind in (our) clinical practice are interchangeable, they both intervene, sometimes simultaneously, in the healing process, always referring back to one another.

All this implies a clinical procedure that is by no means based on deductive logic, in which phenomena are traced back to a pre-established theoretical model, but rather on abductive logic, which allows a “singular” model to be constructed.

A sort of bespoke haute couture work, in which universality is guaranteed by a theory in which the exception is the rule and contingency a necessity.
Otherwise, we would always remain imprisoned in Aristotle and psychology.
Yet we are not psychologists, we are psychoanalysts!

Peregrini (The Model):

In order to adequately understand this transformation, a propaedeutics of thought is needed, which starts from the need to go beyond the traditional, Enlightenment-based, categorial “system knowledge”, based on the principle of “post hoc erga propter hoc”, in order to embark on a path of knowledge that is antinomian to it: “reticulum”, dimensional, actually, multi-dimensional, traced by “post hoc, erga ante hoc”.

A knowledge in which the distinction between observed object and observer disappears (subject and object are no longer to be found at all, unless we write them in our alphabetical, dividing, language) and where the percipient modifies the perceived and vice versa (not in the most banal sense of the vulgate), and where relativity, not axiomaticity; verisimilitude, not truth, constitute the code of knowledge (Ancona 1999).

Let us think of rhizomatic thought as understood by the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (“Millepiani”): it essentially has the character of allowing open circulation between concepts, of favoring differentiated paths and novel connections.

The traditional sense of the univocity of meaning, as well as the deterministic dialectical production of concepts would fade, giving way to the partial non-relation of open thought.

From a certain moment onwards, psychoanalysis has in fact introduced this new possibility of knowledge, replacing the game of induction/deduction with abduction in a large part of its proceeding, and indicating the tracks to be followed in order to reach the goal to be known: certainly not the relevant, clear facts, processable according to the usual procedure...

Instead, classical psychoanalysis has remained partly trapped in the meshes of implanted knowledge, anchored, that is, to that “ocnophilic” (Balint, 1937) proceeding that prevented it from widening the internal world of its patients to its multi-personal, “philobatic” relational nature...

Bion, in the Kleinian phase, had also been entangled in these qualms of intellectualization, yet he then left Aristotelian-Kantian logic for a new logic, which we might call Platonic-Matteblanchian.

According to this logic, the essence of psychoanalytic work is to intuitively grasp the truth of the subject under analysis, and to transform with him and in him.
An important theoretical current in psychoanalysis says that all this generates a Field....

The most important observation that comes to me is that I have always been in a Field.

That is, the Field is not generated by the juxtaposition of distinct elements (for example, the analyst and the patient together), but pre-exists them.

Analysis becomes the “laboratory” par excellence in which what can only be so, because the interweaving of bodies-minds-environment has always been there, is highlighted and described (and therefore, from the description, appears true).

In the sense that The Field is not created, it is there, and we, by entering into it, can describe it from within: by describing it, we make it present, true; from this point of view it is as if we created it...

Following Bion, we know that, in order to actualize all this, the analyst “must” place himself in a state as close as possible to the dream, the state of reverie, in which he listens to the patient’s discourse, and the effects of this discourse, and the echo in the analyst, and his “response”, and the listening to the listening..., as if one were dreaming, inhabited by another logic, where the trajectories carry infinity in
their bodies...

To feel and see something and think something else: this is an abductive act of the mind. It means that the abductive gaze grasps in every fact its possible surprising feature, the passage that allows the gaze to glimpse the possible leap towards a new knowledge...

It is difficult, yet not impossible, to plan one's future on the basis of the “cone of plausibility”, which provides a clue as to the hypotheses of the future that each of us can construct.

Yes, we always find ourselves in a logjam, in a very rapid turnover of occasional truths that always strive to become absolute.

Yet we have debunked the famous absolute truth.

Us (considerations on the Model):

We have long had concerns about the practice of psychoanalysis and about the fact that the underlying theories have become a veritable tower of Babel.
We have multiple points of view where everything is accepted as “psychoanalysis”.

Our field in general is drifting into sociological discourse (too much); in our national and international meetings there is very little room for clinical discussions... or, sometimes, there are so many clinical discussions that we would need to have reference points...

Us: Is the decline of psychoanalysis and all this confusion one of the main reasons for the hunt for scientificity?
Is a different idea of scientificity possible?

The greatest obstacle to the use of psychodynamic therapy and psychoanalysis is certainly the duration of treatment, so that “short” treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), often regarded as the gold standard, are preferred.

Insurance protocols in many countries do the rest: let us think of the USA and the Mental Health Parity
Act, the law that mandates maximum insurance cover for mental disorders.

Peregrini:
The modern ethical task

A new alliance, which, for the very life of research, must replace the old “unity”, the old “God”, with a new “nature”, Copernican, Brunian, Spinozian, through a new “art of life”.
Until scientific work finds its way to such an integration, dualistic superstition and ideological arrogance will continue to besiege our practices of knowledge and their social, economic, political applications.

Us:
Is it possible to rediscover the meaning of this discipline of ours, today seen as a luxury, because it does not fit into the logic of today’s labor market?

Ramella:

What are the bases of logical reasoning underlying the process of elaboration and application of treatment in the currently dominant model?

They seem to be bases born from the naive (scientifically false) idea that man’s nature derives from his internal physical and psychological conformation.
This dual conformation is thought to fully justify its pathological manifestations, according to a sort of manual built on a grand homogenization, where the differences between individuals and the weight of the resulting complexity almost completely fade.

Such a (false) assumption results in an epistemological and logical model that becomes a sort of scientific theology, whose ultimate mirage seems to be to reach definitive discoveries that would allow a certain definition, a sort of permanent framing of “what is man”.

All this happens because we somehow end up evading the universe of singularity and therefore ignoring “what is cure”.

Let us take a closer look at this model, which is superimposable in medicine and psychoanalysis, despite the considerable difference between the two disciplines.

Both medical and psychological fields, in fact, are embedded in logical-epistemological models that tend to make each approach to the human homologous.

We are well aware that the progress of medicine and particularly neuroscience, the result of refined and effective research supported, of course, by powerful economic/intellectual investment, has led to outstanding results with respect to a “certain kind of knowledge” of pathological, so-called physical and mental phenomena.

The real problem is that these findings are then used in an axiomatic and generalizing manner.

Hence, here lies all the damage, in the superficial, sloppy, and perhaps even bad faith use of scientific findings.

To better understand what patterns underlie the research in question, and what contradictions mark them, especially in the therapeutic arena, I will bring some examples.

The most significant damage of SARS-CoV-2 infection is brought about by an abnormal inflammatory reaction that is a cytokine storm, or hypercytokinemia, mediated by the immune system.

As research has shown, the immune system has large individual variability and, more importantly, presents strong diversity based on gender differences.

Why then are treatment protocols identical in males and females, despite the fact that the immune system functions quite differently in the two?

Indeed, it is a system, the immune system, that is far more modulable in women (let us just think of the extent to which they must adapt to the presence of “a foreign body” during pregnancy), and far more stable, more fixed, so to speak, in men.

Why then not take into consideration – given it is scientifically possible – the variability of each individual’s immune system within the same gender, to set up therapy?

The treatment system with standardized protocols based on a flatly naturalistic model of “all that” does not take this into account at all!

The exact same observations could be made about the dopaminergic hypothesis of the onset of delusion, on which the treatment protocols for psychosis are based.

These are models of treatment that in no way consider the variability in gender, personal history, and the networks of family and social interactions in which the onset of delusion is embedded.

Both anthropology and ethology have highlighted, in addition, the importance of symbolic and institutional order influences in which humans grow, in the constitution of the individual.

We know, for example, the role of empty signifiers (mana) in deconstructing the heavily deterministic linguistic rigidities so typical of the model in vogue...

(From Wikipedia, 2023: Floating signifiers or empty signifiers are linguistic concepts in which signifiers do not have precise reference meanings, that is, they are words that have no correspondence with a precise object. Claude Lévi-Strauss first used this term with regard to words such as mana (substance with which that which is magical is permeated), or oomph (an American slang term for sexual attractiveness) “to represent an undetermined quantity of signification, in itself void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning." A floating signifier, that is, a word with “symbolic value zero”, finds its necessity in “allowing symbolic thought to operate despite the contradiction inherent in it...”).

The same occurs in psychoanalysis:
The psychoanalyst searches, all too often, within the patient’s narrative for the aspects that validate his or her theories, enacting true scotomizations of relevant dynamics proper to individual mental functioning.

Not least of all (lupus in fabula), in recent years the certainty given by the confirmation of psychological aspects in the facts of neuroscience has also taken hold enormously...
(The mind-brain...consciousness in the brain stem...and other peculiar ways of thinking and saying that juxtapose things and concepts in a most arbitrary way, to say the least).

Last but not least, neuroscientific forms of confirmation of psychoanalytic concepts have nothing to do with the patient’s treatment needs!

For the patient benefits from the analyst’s sharing and even sometimes acceptance of his (the patient’s) way of reading/interpreting himself.
While he poorly digests, or at best supinely accepts, sometimes painfully, interpretations that are abstractly generalizing, or worse still, confirmed by a psycho-neuroscientific “supposed knowledge”.

Indeed, in most cases, despite the apparent simplification and the flaunted certainty of so-called “organic” data, this model, which after all seeks only to validate itself, is often implicit and poorly thought out, blocks any potential for further transformation (certainly more challenging), namely, the true meaning of analysis: Tending toward “O” (Bion). Absolute doubt.

Let us ask, for example, what effect it may have on the analyst to know that some of his theoretical moments are confirmed by neuroscientific research.
Let us ask what the analyst makes of these “certainties”...

One could say, somewhat playing with mathematical models, that “mainstream” treatment of disorders from which humans are afflicted is built on an “orientable surface”.

Within this surface would lie the relevant scientific, neuropsychological findings, while the outside would be represented by the multiplicity of symptoms, which do not enter a singular (unique), humanizing relationship with one another, but instead remain confined, unrelated, as is the case in the classic example of an orientable surface, the sphere.

In fact, the inside of the sphere is not in communication with its outside, the symptomatological limit therefore does not enter into relationship with the inner volume; a “singular”, specific, humanizing relationship is impossible, even if sought.
Too much pre-constituted knowledge, too many “certainties” as the backroom of classic psychoanalytic tools, too much superficiality in the use of the now-famous empathy, seal the surface of the sphere.

The result is that the outside finds neither true support nor true validation in the inside, which is superimposed on it without any possibility of exchange.

Such a system produces the effect that clinical thinking (but can it really be called “thinking”?) is based exclusively on deductive logic, for which facts have the sole role of validating the theory, which in turn implies a reduction of symptomatic variability according to a single pre-established law.

Symptomatic and morbid variability is, so to speak, substantialized into so-called matter.

Let us reflect thoroughly for a moment on neuro-psychoanalysis.

Do we not realize that in this way mental functioning, finally “substantialized” through “brain imaging”, is apodictically superimposed on symptomatic multiplicity?!

The end of clinical thinking, as it was understood in the origin of medicine and medical semiotics, finds its reason in the apparent need (which in my opinion becomes anti-therapeutic) to unearth in the patient the facts that confirm the theory that is pre-constituted in the therapist’s head.

It is the “matter” that guards the veracity of these facts!!!

By no means do I wish to belittle, as it happens, even scientific findings to mere subjective practices.
Far from it.

I wish to propose a theoretical model that relates such findings, which are undoubtedly also the result of researchers’ subjective practices, to individual variabilities.

For this, I reverse the problem.

I wish to find the universal not in the (basically metaphysical) emphasis of the particular of scientific discovery, but in the singularity of the individual, also and particularly in reason of what science discovers.

Let us see how.

The model we are proposing is based on the clinical application of the unorientable plane, specifically, the Möbius strip, in which there is a continuous interchange between inside and outside, between symptom and pathological reality, such that it is not only material reality that determines the symptom, but it is the clinical observation of the symptom itself that creates the reality (somewhat on the simplified basis of the self-fulfilling prophecy).
Just as, one might say, the observation of the quantum “mollusk” of microscopic fluctuations creates reality itself.
   A quote from MOCCHI:
   “It goes without saying that the gesture of one who adopts the view of psychoanalysis, philosophy, poetry, provides, indeed, for a leap forward, welcomes with gratitude the discoveries of science, but on one condition, that the inductive process, the leap from the part to the whole, be supplemented and illuminated by a very slow backward journey, by an examination as complete as possible of its steps.

If the purpose of the undertaking is to alleviate a person’s “psychic” suffering, the leap cannot have a generic direction, rely on a statistical criterion. It must be guided from the outset by this idea: that the whole toward which one is jumping is “that individual” (Hin Enkelte) and no other, and that the design of his future (synthesis) will be all the more effective the more the reconstruction of his past (analysis) will be able to reach the smallest details, without neglecting or skipping even one.

From this perspective, the Möbius strip reveals other directions and dynamics, complementing those highlighted by the initial definition. For it is true that the strip has only one face, but at a certain point it twists, a reversal that splits and reverses its direction; thanks to that single turning point, the continuity of the movement can be scanned, in addition to the generic coming and going that appears to science, in three other ways: 1. as an increase and decrease, with respect to that point, of distance and speed, that is, of space with respect to time, or of quantity with respect to quality; 2. as a movement of transformation or passage, through the point, from one opposite to another; 3. lastly, as the opening of these and other infinite differences: an opening or threshold that coincides with the point itself, with its
unique and indefinable identity.

According to this model, the illusion of the observer’s concept of objectifying neutrality as well as the concept of truth as the adaptation of the intellect to the thing would also be lost in the psychoanalytic clinical practice.

It would then be a matter, according to an abductive logic, of reaching the “singular” construction, precisely, of a law that explains the facts, rather than the logic of the fact that validates the theory...”
(End quote)

Returning to Mocchi’s final sentence: "it would be a matter, according to an *abductive* logic, of reaching the “singular” construction of a law that explains the facts, instead of the logic of the fact that validates the law...”

Thus, it would blur any deductive logic, in a pure sharing and co-construction of the living.

(*The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce was the first to propose the concept of abduction as the introduction of explanatory hypotheses, developing this argument in his conception of the logic of scientific discovery. Peirce extended its meaning, considering it “the first step in scientific reasoning” in which a hypothesis is established to explain certain empirical facts*).

In short, the route should be reversed.

First of all, one should stop searching for facts that confirm a predetermined and substantiated law, as instead turns out to be the model so in vogue nowadays, which has such limitations and trivializes complexity to such an extent.

Bocchiola

(Interventions from the Società Italiana di Psicoanalisi Mailing List 2023, freely translated)

Must psychoanalysis truly interact with the positive sciences on their same level, demanding the same kind of scientificity? In the passion for neuroscience, what is disconcerting is the epistemological subservience, or perhaps the naive belief that that of the (traditional) sciences is the only possible form of rationality.

Because, let us face it, the scientificity used by neuro-psychoanalysis seems to me to be reduced to a fetish, a superstition, a phallic prosthesis, nothing more; and this disquiets me, given there is not only the recourse to scientificity, but also a rational use of this recourse, although I would prefer to call it “genealogical”.

Which would perhaps help us put things in a less theological perspective, considering scientific rationality and its claim to universal, one-size-fits-all, objective and repeatable knowledge are not the offspring of the mind of God, but the result, precisely, of a genealogy that should be clarified and of which we should be aware, if only to put things in perspective.

Some basic (preliminary) questions:

-given that the material of our work is singular cases, would psychoanalysis be a knowledge of the singularity or a science of the universal?

- do we have in mind what the nature of the scientific universal is? The nature of the gesture that establishes it? And what are the consequences for our clinical practice?

- is the Freudian unconscious compatible with the Aristotelian anthropology that underpins the architecture of the positive and human sciences?

- are we aware of this architecture and its rules? (We should be, given we are “acted upon” by it.)

- are these rules compatible with clinical experience? (If I think about the sign problem, and look at the dream, I would tend to say no.)

- psychoanalytic concepts: what epistemic status do they have (and they do, but I will not reveal all the cards now) if, as evident, they are not bendable to the modus operandi of the sciences?

- to the extent that we take for granted the conceptual horizon of the sciences (which is then that of old metaphysics), how do we claim to answer problems that this same horizon produces?

In example
- the mind-body relationship, condemned to an irresolvable petitio principium.
- the origin of meaning (which in scientific dualism/monism is irresolvable) also doomed to infinite regress.
- yet, without this question, how to think about archaic psychism in such a way that our reflection does not presuppose exactly what we should prove?

Long story short: scientific knowledge is born out of a specific gesture, embedded in a precise historical dimension, which is the constitutive one of Western metaphysics, in a game played between Parmenides and Aristotle, well before that with Galileo. It comes into being thanks to a specific gesture that establishes the lexicon of universality, which is therefore such only within its own canon (which is that of alphabetical writing), its own practice, and of which it repeats all prejudices (for example, neuroscience repeats, by simplifying and trivializing it, Aristotelian anthropology).

Therefore, we are neither faced with absolute knowledge, nor with relative knowledge (as in all dualisms, relativism and absolutism say the same thing, are the same gesture), but with a specific *writing practice* that simply establishes its objects (biological bodies, psychological minds, neurons, organisms, and so forth) in its own image and likeness, as indeed do all writing practices.

Which takes nothing away from the greatness and usefulness of the scientific enterprise, to which we all agree.

The real problem is another: on the subject of science, we should recall that we are not dealing with sacred scripture, but with a contingent practice (and not a universal one, albeit built around the prejudice of universality!) and its evolutions and transformations.

The main transformation to which science is subjected moves it from being a knowledge whose truth is the adaptation of the word to the thing, to a constructivist, probabilistic and statistical knowledge.
The fact remains that, at its heart, the rationale of science, its main characteristic, remains intact: the thing “must” have the form of the word, otherwise, we simply would not know anything about it, we could not even say that it exists.

In example: the Dream

The dream event, its occurrence, is not something that exists in itself, it is rather something that exists through the disciplines (practices) that make it thinkable.
In our case, universalist and psychoanalytic medicine.
When we think of the dream, we therefore do not allude to the dream thing, to which the word conforms.
If we took away psychoanalytic (discipline) writing, there would be no dream as a subjective life event.
And if we took away medical writing, there would be (for us, of course) no dream as a biological phenomenon....

At the bottom of the scientific enterprise, which instead claims to identify the thing in itself, reality, objective truth (as if there were an objective truth!), all symbolic violence thus remains.

If it finally wanted to emancipate itself from scientism, psychoanalysis in its clinical practice and with respect to its object – the unconscious (granted, if we can indeed assume it as our common ground), could finally point out inconsistencies, aporias and frank errors.

Do we truly believe that if science says the thing then the sense and depth of reasoning are guaranteed?

Oedipus responds to the Sphinx – I quote Blanchot’s wonderful interpretation of the myth – by assuming his riddle as if it were a scientific problem (in passing, if a scientific problem does not have the form of the riddle, then it is not scientific): he enters Thebes victorious, mates with his mother, begets sibling sons, the gods lose it and curse Thebes.

A disaster. The monster outside the walls dies, but it is Oedipus who has become one, a monster, and now rules Thebes. And monster he has become precisely by dealing with the enigma (what is man), as if it were a scientific problem, and forgetting instead the depth of the question.

That depth that will never become universal knowledge, but which nevertheless forces one to mark the step before ”it”, namely, the abyss of the question “what is man?”