ORGANIC PSYCHIC ILLNESSES

In these times of medication overuse, it is of paramount importance to think along different lines, not in a hyper-specialistic sense, about ILLNESSES, based on changing certain assumptions and cognitive modalities (for example, why do we need to continue to distinguish illnesses in the old way, between physical and psychic?).

First of all, in order to better understand human pathology, and then configure a type of prevention and treatment that truly take into account not only the mechanisms, but also the existential situations, namely, the context in which a given pathology is diagnosed and experienced.

The assumption is that any dualistic conception, even when we believe we have found the links (correlations) between the mental and the bodily, can only influence the diagnostic framework and treatment incorrectly.

This conversation of ours does not happen at once: after getting underway (see LinkedIn, 2019) it was forced to come to a stop due to force majeure.

Today it resumes. This time, we truly wish to move forward.

 

Why, under different assumptions, are diagnoses and treatment modified?

 

A Premise

We believe there to be sufficient wisdom in the mind of each of us to ensure some support in the discovery of truth, which, first of all, is never absolute, but relative. Relative, because it is always in relation to something else, never absolute “in itself”, but changeable: it clearly seeks and says things as they are, but since things are never motionless or the same, continuously changing, this truth is always provisional.

In this sense, seeking “what reality is”, thus moving away from automatisms in thinking, from fetish- truths, in order to enter a process of true engagement that is free from commonplaces, free from habitual ways of reasoning, is certainly exhausting. It is, in fact, a process that comes with many crises, and lulls, and radical – hence uncomfortable – shifts in perspective.

*The fact, for example, of realizing that all human science and its research (and psychoanalysis, and psychosomatics...) are entrenched in a vision that remains totally dualistic, is a first, non-trivial step. Realizing then that we are not roaming a ready-made reality, outside of us – because reality is a set of events we are part of and that we simultaneously create, in short, a process that “is made” with us – is a second important step.

Truth, from this point of view, is nothing other than reality in continuous change, we would say, “on a journey”.

When we investigate reality with these assumptions, we discover that truth and reality are two sides of the same coin. And this would be the third step. *

(*Freely adapted from Inizio [Beginning] by Carlo Sini, Eds. Jaca Book, 2016).

This talk is the result of a three-way conversation between: Claudia Peregrini, (physician and psychoanalyst), Andrea Bocchiola (philosopher and psychoanalyst) and Marco Ramella (physician and psychoanalyst).

 

An example

Let us start with an example of human pathology that is known to all: Autism. A generalized developmental disorder with very early onset, and dramatically hindered interpersonal relationships and basic learning of social skills.

It is one of the fields in which research (starting from biologically based research) is expanding rapidly.

To begin with, it would be better to call them “Autisms” in the plural, given the huge number of conditions present in very different realities. Better still, “Autistic Spectrum”.

 

*Recent scientific thinking

(*freely adapted from an interview with Francesco Barale, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst)

"Autisms" are considered, by the tumultuous and very rich field of neuroscience, as conditions that express atypical neurodevelopment, understood both as atypical organizations of the functioning of specific brain areas, and as atypical organizations of the coherent functioning of different brain districts.

This atypia is in turn rooted in other atypical processes of synapse formation (neuronal junctions) and organization and reorganization of brain networks dating back to the very first months of pregnancy.

The roots of autism are therefore thought to be very ancient, almost primal.

Let us bear in mind that we are reasoning in terms of complex dynamic systems where movements of equilibrium and disequilibrium between risk and protective factors of various kinds (starting with biological ones) intersect in a non “linear” manner.

In complex systems, etiopathogenesis (the causes) is never simple, direct, as cause-effect, but instead multiple and indeed complex.

These are the current scientific conclusions

 

Let us review the concepts and words of scientific discourse stemming from a great deal of research

Clearly, at this point in research, one can no longer resort to improbable “psychogenesis” for a condition such as Autism, as when there was talk of causes linked to a “refrigerator mother” or even to certain fantasies in the early months of pregnancy, in short, to bad relationships, as if it were a single great cause.

 

A first observation

Such crude and simplistic psychogenesis is rightly entirely outdated, if one excludes small groups far from the international scientific community, yet the psychic/physical problem, posed in these terms, is at the very least misleading.

Despite having acquired valuable scientific knowledge, scientists, in this way, fail to reach the heart of the matter, remaining prisoners of the old mind-body dualism, namely, in the world of ultimatums, of the dichotomy between organic and psychic worlds. This way of reasoning also reintroduces, despite the “complexity” to which it alludes, the old notion of cause – mental or organic.

 

A second observation

It is no longer conceivable to argue that an illness (wrongly defined as only mental) does or does not have an exclusively organic explanation, or that an illness (defined as organic) does or does not have an exclusively mental explanation.

Nor can one solve the problem by using complex dynamic systems to explain an illness. They only further entangle the matter, without “solving” it, not least because the whole idea of cause would require substantial rethinking.

 

True instead

Back to the start

On the one hand, we have discovered that a certain part of the autistic spectrum is related to something physical, namely, to certain neurodevelopmental atypical features, and have thus concluded that the causes are not psychic. On the other, we have also introduced the concept of mental correlates, as an attempt to elude the problem by showing that everything is both psychic and physical.

The truth however, we believe, lies elsewhere.

We do not, in fact, encounter neurodevelopmental atypia as a thing in itself, detached from us, so that we can say that it is a physical illness and not a psychic one.

Physical stuff, not psychic!

It is true, however, that researchers have equipped themselves with new tools as well as with the increasingly sophisticated ability to read the so-called “organic” world, in this case the neurological world. It is a question of read, precisely.

What we have been able to see and learn, by means of new, specific tools, events, and dynamics, which we previously consigned to the so-called abstract (psychic?) world, because we could not see them or detect them, are not, as already mentioned, things in themselves, outside of us.

The new reality (the atypia) that appeared to us in this way, is not an absolute truth, found once and for all. It is instead a truth that is closely related (hence, relative) to the tools used, specific languages, historical context, practices employed (as Carlo Sini calls them), all of which, together, contribute to producing a truth effect.

This does not mean that reality does not exist. It means that it exists, it is revealed to us, only grasped through our tools and within our theoretical models and specific languages.

This way of thinking might seem obvious (reinventing the wheel!), but it is not. Rather, it is a way of thinking that changes everything. First and foremost, the type of research itself.

 

Philosophy

When Sini says that current neuroscience is so efficient and indeed extraordinary in many of its operations, but, at the same time, when it speaks of the SENSE of its work, in its unconscious Cartesian dualism, it is an endless field of examples of hardly fathomable idiocy, he makes us realize that research and discoveries treated as absolute data, detached from their fundamental relationship with their context, become a sort of superstitious triviality. When it is said, for instance, that certain discoveries are the definitive haven of truth and that the time will come when the artificial edifice of psychoanalysis will crumble under the avalanches of neuroscientific results...well, we remain in the realm of pure, obtuse superstition.

Let us think back to the whole topic of atypia of the neuronal world as the cause (albeit in a complex sense) of Autism!

 

Analogies with current Physics

This thought is reflected in quantum physics, for example in Helgoland, Eds. Adelphi, 2020, by Carlo Rovelli, physicist and writer. In fact, he asserts that it has been discovered that what is real cannot exist motionless in front of us. It is not only the limits of our perception and knowledge that give us a partial view of things, but it is the things themselves that change because they are constantly acting upon one another.

The world that appears in the gaze of quantum physics, Rovelli explains, is transformed by the set of relations that things, from the infinitely small to every aspect of reality, bear with each other. Not only are there facts or ideas, but also the feel of those facts and ideas. Matter is in relation to consciousness. Everything is in relation to.

We, for example, are not only our own feeling, but also the feeling of others: parents, children, friends, lovers, that is: we are also in relation to others than ourselves. Hence, this read of reality generates a revolution that also affects the idea we have of ourselves.

 

Things are not something other than us, of a different nature.

The planets in our system orbit the sun, the gravitational force is the attraction exerted by celestial bodies (just as human bodies attract and repel one another in different orbits). The dense network of modifications determines, as Einstein's general relativity teaches, space and time. Space and time become precisely the shapes of the relations that “things” have with each other.

 

The real is not the elsewhere of our feeling, on the contrary, it is this constant modification.

It seems, from this perspective, that the eighteenth-century hope of a reality unmodified by those who interpret it, was an optimistic projection, dictated by the distress caused by living in uncertainty. Yet reality, unfortunately, is not in front of us, it is the constant movement which we are part of, the swarming of exchanges, electron jumps, superpositions and alternative worlds.

 

The Nobel for physics Niels Bohr goes so far as to overturn the traditional idea according to which physics is concerned with matter/energy somehow understood as substance

In the sense that physics would not aim at all to find out what nature is like, but what we can say about nature.

The matter becomes exquisitely epistemological, no longer investigating a reality, albeit made up of pure relations, but placed outside of us.

 

Now back to the basic issue

The eternal mind-body problem

Why does the eternal mind-body problem, known as MBP, accompany the entire path of Western thought? Because it is an endless topic that begins with the relationship between soul and body, a crux that refers to an infinite series of questions of fundamental importance located far beyond the mind-body relationship.
Moreover, the underlying issue has never been solved by anyone. Many have tried.
Mental events, some speculate, can only be something that happens inside us, in our bodies, or at least in close connection with bodily events. Others argue that body and mind are identical, have the same substance, only appearance is different. Or, on the contrary, the two processes, the organic and the mental, are totally different, although they occur together, all the time.

We thus come up against a sea of hypotheses that chase one another without ever allowing us to reach a solution.

Let us consider today's mainstream hypothesis, the so-called ontological monism with dualism of knowledge: bodily and mental phenomena are only conceptually distinct, in thought and speech, because we always find them together in existing reality, just as if they were part of an ancient unit (the body-mind unit, with the hyphen).

Come to think of it, what is this unit?

Where in the world is this presumed single object that Western thought has supposedly split into two?

What does it mean?

It is said to be unthinkable for the human mind (?)

Additionally, supposing we could indeed find the real correspondence between mental and bodily phenomena, what correspondence is it? Because we know very well that the relationship between a physical state and a psychic state is neither constant nor simple.

When investigating the links between mind and body, even if we keep saying that research is outdated or obsolete, we are actually always faced with confusion. In the literature, on the one hand, a distinction is made whereby the mind is based on the body and vice versa, and on the other hand, an attempt is made to remedy the distinction by placing psyche and body within complexity (understood as a jumble of chaotic directions and multiple causalities, even retroactive).

With these assumptions, it seems that our thinking keeps running into never-ending dualisms, which refer back to never-ending monisms, and vice versa.

The fact that we must choose whether something, an illness for example, is physical or psychic or psychophysical (all Psychosomatics) pertains to a false problem.

 

Let us repeat

It is never a question of all-or-nothing, physical or psychic (however much they are seen as related according to complex dynamic systems), of macro or micro, of concrete or abstract.

It is simply a question that we can define, in a continuous cross-reference, psychic and physical and vice versa, physical and psychic, micro and macro and vice versa, it simply depends on the vertex or point of observation from which we place ourselves.

 

Let us move

In order to read “reality”, let us look at the Möbius strip below, in yellow and orange.

 

While at first glance the strip appears to show two faces (in our case, we call them mind-body), in other words after the split, upon closer inspection there are not two faces at all: it is a continuous inward and outward movement of a strip in perpetual motion, the folding, rolling up and unrolling that creates an inside and an outside.

Origin and destination do not exist: the fold always folds in on itself, it does not proceed further, but returns to itself. The psyche becomes body and the body, psyche.

Psychoanalytic practice testifies to this.

We analysts are constantly hanging in the balance between “mental” and “organic”. When we slide down the psychic face, we always encounter the body, and vice versa.

 

So, what is real?

Even if we continued to use the old dualism, dividing abstract from concrete, subject from object, us from the reality outside us, and so forth, we would still have to admit now that it is precisely a certain (dualistic) culture and language that lead us to believe that only what somehow falls under the five senses is real, leading us to hallucinate a kind of deep split between the so-called material and abstract worlds. From this viewpoint, illnesses are said to be physical if they can somehow be seen and measured, psychic if they are invisible.

Yet this too is a soap bubble, a trap:

In fact, the presence or absence of what we believe to be 'matter' depends on the 'level' (or rather, on the moment of scrolling of the Möbius strip) from which a 'structure', a 'system', are observed, and on the tools with which they are observed.

 

Returning to Autism, outside any form of radical dualism, we repeat

Part of the autistic spectrum is linked to something physical, not because we have found patterns of atypia in the neuronal reality investigated, visible, immutable alterations, but because we have equipped ourselves with very sophisticated capabilities for reading the neuronal world, which we did not have before.

Today, this is what this new read tells us.

And tomorrow?

It is an enormous shift in perspective.

And we are, so to speak, embodied in the ever-changing process of knowledge that takes place with us.

 

Why do we continue to insist on strong dualism?

(* Our addition)

Perhaps the mathematician Höfstadter is right when he says that we draw conceptual boundaries around the entities (ways of thinking) that we most easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality.

(As if it truly were a reality outside of us) *

That is to say, we are little miracles of self-reference, we believe in “things” that then crumble as soon as we examine them closely and seriously, yet, when we do not investigate them, they become absolutely true and real again!

 

Today we can investigate more and more, with an almost “absolute” truth effect

 

The wonder of new tools

We can, for example, observe the process of infection, such as that caused by the new coronavirus, by 3D scanning an organ or the entire human body. This is the scientific revolution made possible thanks to the brightest new X-ray source ever obtained, at the Esrf (European Synchrotron Radiation Facility) super microscope in Grenoble (France) based on synchrotron light.

Conceived by an Italian physicist, the new source that has made the European supermicroscope the most powerful in the world is called Esrf-Extremely Brilliant Source (Esrf-Ebs).

Thanks to it, the machine is now able to generate X-ray beams that are 100 times brighter than those previously possible...

 

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Beginning of our conversation on the article

 

Intervention by Dr Marco Ramella

The “uncertain” work, as defined by the psychoanalyst Racamier, of treating psychic suffering, is always grappling with the need to balance a piece of knowledge, a theoretical model, with therapeutic practice, with treatment on the “field”.

How to apply theoretical knowledge to clinical practice is the necessary and essential step of any theoretical model.

In more abstract terms, it is a matter of thinking about how to relate knowledge to life, and how inevitably (and hopefully) life modifies knowledge. Better still, how knowledge becomes life, nourishes it and sometimes returns it. Among the tasks of the “psychoanalyst without a couch”, Racamier had placed at the highest level the never-ending and ever-evolving ability to continuously transition from theory to practice and practice to theory, in a never-ending movement of reciprocal and fruitful contamination that could enact continuous knowledge, never monolithic or substantialized, never ideological.

In this sense, starting from my colleague Peregrini’s theoretical model, I propose a few considerations stemming from my work as psychiatrist/psychoanalyst in my private practice and in psychiatric institutions.

In my work as psychiatrist, I have often come across a “strange” phenomenon: patients who were referred by psychotherapist and/or psychoanalyst colleagues for psychopharmacological treatment and who had a good period of psychotherapy and/or analysis behind them, willingly accepted psychopharmacological treatment, confidently and often with better therapeutic results.

As if the drug were accepted by the patient within a positive transference dimension, and perceived as a chemical variant not opposed to, but rather complementary to, interpretation.

A sort of “biochemical interpretation”.

In other words, medication was more effective than in patients who did not have a psychotherapeutic pathway behind them, and often perceived the drug with a “toxic” connotation, with the risk of addiction to be wary of.

I therefore reflected at length on the concept of psychopharmacological resistance.

Where is the obstacle that prevents the patient from making positive use of the drug?

In genes? In the psychic? (the fear of confident reliance on pharmacological or psychological treatment).

Might we perhaps imagine at this point that we are encountering an indecipherable and undecidable overlap between the genetic and the psychological? Does epigenetics not go in the direction of this overlap?

Let us take another example: Bipolar Disorder, currently one of the most popular diagnoses. Why is it that sometimes the administration of mood stabilizers such as lithium or others is effective and sometimes not? Do we always come across organic resistance to medication, or must we take into account a personological aspect of certain patients, linked to an ideal of self-sufficiency that hinders the drug's functionality?

If, as Merleau-Ponty would say, “truth mutates”, should we perhaps imagine that, within the
framework of the model proposed by our colleague, each patient encounter, and the modality of that encounter, bears a retroactive effect on the origin, and modifies the course of therapy (in other realms, is this not the relational model of physics proposed by Rovelli?).

Should we perhaps ask ourselves how the event of the encounter intervenes to modify the truth of the origins, or to constitute a heterogenesis, and thus introduce a variability of the therapeutic work which, leaving aside naturalisms and ideologisms, moves just like on a Möebius strip in the somatic and the psychic?...

I now turn to some considerations on the treatment of mental suffering in institutions. Those who have long worked in psychiatric institutions know well the extent to which the theoretical models underlying caregivers’ training often determine splitting mechanisms with disruptive consequences, which, as Comelli writes, lead one to ask “who treats the institutions that treat”. Such splits are often determined by the irreconcilability of two antithetical etiopathogenetic myths: that of organ genesis and that of psychogenesis, which, precisely, as myths, need to be deconstructed or perhaps simply debunked.

Is the idea of an unchanging “substance” – be it organic or psychic – that explains and accounts for the complexity of phenomena and symptoms, not the legacy of a “metaphysical” conception of science that has underpinned Western thought for centuries?

Is the model of organic correlates of psychic instances not an evolution of that conception? We are still within the substantialist Aristotelian model!

The theoretical perspective set forth by Peregrini seems to exclude any naturalistic and/or psychogeneticist perspective.

In this model, the element of truth is not the absolute of the immutable substance, but the encounter as an event that produces meaning, remaining within which, nothing is excluded in the therapeutic pathway, be it on the psychic or somatic side, be it drug or word. Where even, and in an only apparently paradoxical dimension, the drug becomes psychic and the word, chemical.

Corporeal and mental intertwine and meet in the heterogenesis of symptoms and both are included in the construction of a pathway that brings out a clinical truth that is both singular, because it belongs to that patient and only to them, and universal, because universal is the need of human nature, of an exchange and an encounter that are producers of meaning and truth.

The Möbius strip model proposed by Peregrini finely expresses the sense of heterogenesis and a priori undecidability between psychic and somatic in the origin of symptomatic phenomena.

If we run the strip on the internal surface, we inevitably find ourselves on the external surface, and vice versa. If we run through the psychic, we run into the somatic, in practice, and vice versa.

Peregrini's model seeks above all to break free from the age-old dilemma between psychic and somatic and leads, without falling into superficial eclecticism, to a clinical practice that is open to the encounter, in which ethics, science, subjectivity and corporeality finally meet beyond any ideologism.

 

Intervention by Dr Andrea Bocchiola

While waiting to intervene more articulately on the reflections inaugurated by Claudia, I will attempt to draft the most critical aspects of the reflection around the mind-body problem, even at the cost of a certain philosophical hermeticity, which I will attempt to unravel in subsequent interventions.

 

1. On the self-contradictory nature of the mind-body problem

From a dualist perspective and categorial horizon, it is impossible to find the mythical link between the two. It is a trivially logical problem. Starting from the a priori distinction of body and mind and not questioning it, that is, not genealogically investigating its origin, in short, starting from two distinct objects, the distinction of which is assumed, it is impossible to find a link in which dualism is not reproduced, according to an infinite regress. In other words, in every link of conjunction that I manage to unearth, I will always have to explain how the two faces of the psychic and the corporeal stay together.

The corollary of this simple observation is that the whole mind-body debate, insofar as it does not move from a genealogical deconstruction of its own issue – that is to say, from an awareness of how those concepts named after the body and the mind were produced, and of the gesture that by posing them instituted the problem of their relationship – is doomed to irrelevance and to an eternal petitio principii.

 

2. On the self-contradictory nature of any dualism and monism (and on their underlying identity)

Getting straight to the point, let us say that, from the viewpoint of conceptual logic, dualism and monism are and say the same. As Plato had already observed, the friends of earth (materialists) and those of heaven (idealists) say and do the same thing: they reduce the existent to one. The two adversaries act as mirrors, they are specular images of the same gesture: they start from two (the mind and the body) and find themselves in one (the mind epiphenomenon of the body or the body expression of the mind). However, they then must return to two (the mind and the body), given the impossibility of explaining how the mind comes up from the body or the body from the mind.

 

3. On the problem of realism

In the current debate, it is apodictically assumed that there exist bodies, obviously biological, and minds, obviously psychological. These bodies and minds are said to really 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).

Minds and bodies are said to be, in short, facts.

The mind-body debate is thus tainted by a second dualism, that opposing scientific writing practices from their corresponding objects. And the correlate of this opposition is the naive model of truth as correspondence, namely, as the adaptation of the word (scientific doctrine) to the thing (reality).

And we again find the problems mentioned above. How word and thing fit together is an identical problem to how psyche and body fit together. If we assume their independence, we burn the bridges we wish to build between them. Galileo had intuited this when he said that in scientific thought one only finds what one already knows (otherwise experimental construction would not be scientific) and in this way, he had intuited the inseparable links between theory and reality; yet not in the banal sense that the presence of the observer disturbs or distorts the understanding of the object regardless, but in the sense that each writing practice produces its own object in its own image and likeness. Indeed, the dark kernel of truth as adequately from word to thing is that if the thing does not already have the shape of the word, the latter cannot know anything about the thing. In other words, either the thing has the shape of the word, or we can say nothing of it. On the contrary, we can only speak of the things of the world through the game of writing practices that establish them, that, literally, invent them. The body as a biological body is not a real thing, it is an epistemological object that has the shape and nature of the development of the scientific practices that institute it. The same goes for the psyche and psychology. They are epistemic objects, the result of a complex genealogy, which should be reconstructed to avoid being overwhelmed by it and mistaking candles for lanterns.

After all, we need not look that far. None of us is a biological body or a psychological mind, we are not a mind without our body or a body without our mind, we are simply neither, even less so constrained to a biological or psychological form. Mind and body are not adequate words to say what we are in our personal, singular experience. They are writing effects that are superimposed on our life experience, just as the abdominal ultrasound scan is not a photograph of our interior (and indeed, the matters of fact of objective medicine must be interpreted).

 

4. On the retroactive effect of “truth”

When we have at our disposal the “apodictic truths” of the biological body (which proceeds from endless transformations of the scientific writing of the world) and of the psychological mind (ditto), we are irresistibly inclined to project it back to the origin, behind us, and mistake it for a real thing and not for what it is, namely, an effect, and a very refined one, of the scientific writing practices that produced them. Only, in doing so, we are simply putting the horse behind the cart, or more precisely, what comes after in a before that is misunderstood as substance.

When Aristotle organized the organon of sciences, each with its own specific object, it was not a matter of simply matching a certain type of “facts” of the world with the corresponding discipline. Rather, it was a matter of “extracting” phenomena from the world, each corresponding to the criteria of scientific taxonomy. To each -logy, its specific object, which exists only as a product of the logical writing that establishes it. As an example, the geologist's mountain is not the primary substance that constitutes the mountains of the world, but is the outcome of an abductive writing process that establishes it as such, alongside the mountains of the mountaineer or alpinist, and even earlier, of the gods and their myths, and so on.

The essential point is therefore not to make this mistake, that is, not to be subjected to the retroactive effect of truth, mistaking two epistemological objects for two substances (whose relations we should then establish), as regrettably happens in neuroscientific and psychological research.

 

5. A biopolitical problem

Neuroscience and psychology, victims of the retroactive effect of truth, run an important risk: that of unreflectively remaining in the conceptual circuit of Aristotelian metaphysical anthropology, moreover deprived of its most complex and profound parts (such as the reflection on act and potency, or on entelechy) and of transforming themselves into disciplinary practices that force subjectivity into that shape (which, being unreflectively assumed, cannot even be subjected to critical examination). In other words, neuroscience and psychology, by inscribing themselves in the aporias of the mind-body problem, behind the veneer and allure of invoked scientificity, run the risk of being reduced to a disciplinary practice of control and sanction of experience and subjectivity (which, after all, psychology has been, at least since Hobbes' time).

 

6. On the object of psychoanalysis

I believe it might be agreed that the object of psychoanalysis is the unconscious, whether repressed (dynamic unconscious) or foreclosed (Real, in Lacan's sense). In other words, mind and body are not the object of psychoanalysis. For two reasons. Because the unconscious fundamentally, and assuming it makes sense, ignores the distinction, just as dreamwork undermines the distinction between word and thing, between sign and signifier (and thus between body and soul). And because, if the unconscious is the object of psychoanalysis, we must also remember, also with Lacan’s help in the Seminar on the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, that this is not simply the backroom of consciousness, but the stumbling block that prevents the psyche (and psychology) and the brain (and neuroscience) from extending their discursive device (and disciplining in the Foucauldian, biopolitical sense) over the worlds of life.

At the risk of repeating myself, the object of psychoanalysis, in short, is neither the mind nor the body, and fails to fit into the (trivialized) Aristotelian anthropology that underpins the efforts of neuroscience and psychology. It is exactly that area that prevents neuroscience and psychology from closing their grip on life, organizing the subject around the grammar of action of a body ordered by medicine and a soul under the ideological control of psychology. Exactly as the navel of the dream, the moment it appears, it blocks the preconscious associative flows of analyst and patient, paralyzing their hermeneutic textual process of dream interpretation and preventing the order of discourse from absorbing in fieri, the infinity of life.

After all, we should remember that it is only through the stumbling block of the unconscious, the irreducibility by principle of silence, that word and thought can make sense. Only by breaking against the limit can the order of sense make sense. Indeed, if everything made sense, nothing would make sense.

 

7. Unconscious-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.

 

Bibliographic note.

This text was composed in order to respond in real time to the debate opened by Claudia. At the time of its writing the writer is abroad and does not have access to their personal library, thus a proper bibliography or apparatus of citations, otherwise necessary, was not available. For now, I can only point out the underlying philosophical references, in Carlo Sini's research on writing practices and in particular his La mente e il corpo [Mind and body], La strategia dell’anima [The strategy of the soul], Kinesis, Immagini di verità [Images of truth], and many of his other works. In addition to Sini, essential references include: J. Lacan, The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, M. Merleau-Ponty, The visible and the invisible, P. Gambazzi, The eye and its unconscious. In these texts can be found, with due breadth of argumentation, what the brief reflections of this contribution refer to.