RETYING THE THREADS

An ethical horizon

Let us pick up our fil rouge again:
Philosopher Carlo Sini’s text, Inizio [Beginning].
Page 140:

We must “cure” our valiant scientists of their enduring “Cartesian fever”, we must finally draw them out of their superstition, to set them on the path to a new religion, to a new conscious unity of the human race and its planetary civilisation.

I believe this is the real modern ethical task for the purpose of a new alliance, which, for the very life of research, replaces the old “unity”, the old “God”, with a new “nature”, Copernican, Brunian, Spinozian, thanks to 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, and political applications [Tr. by Olivia Marchese].

The level of medicalisation of human life has become worryingly high, with the risk of reducing personalities to circumscribed sets of neurochemical coordinates. Despite this, we are all sincerely proud of the magnificent achievements of medical research, particularly neuroscientific research.
We all recognise and use medical treatments that make use of highly advanced techniques. 

It is precisely because we have intelligent medicine, equipped with increasingly powerful tools and hyper-specialised knowledge, that we cannot afford to continue to fall into the superstitious search for reciprocal mind-body-brain connections.

Those connections simply do not exist, they do not reveal any objective truth; they are the result of a blunder.
Mind, body and brain are not substances, they are not divided entities that must somehow be reunited...etc, etc.
The question, hence the search for their existence, is nonsensical.

There are no changes in the brain that cause changes in the mind or, conversely, there are no discourses, no words, that cause changes in the brain.
It is absurd to talk about it, because there are no things in themselves, isolated, precisely, as mind, body, and brain, that at some point connect. It is not an ontological universe, but an epistemological one, linked to the different forms of knowledge.

 

An example

For decades, specialists from different backgrounds, psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychosomatists, physicians, particularly neuroscientists, ... have been working together to understand the development of the mind-body by studying it at various levels (of knowledge). From the level of biological organisation, to the level of socio-cultural and psychological functioning. For decades, scholars have been working together on the interaction between the environment and the maturation of organic structures and their functions. They have thus developed a multidimensional model of the relationship between environment, structure, and function, so as to come closer to an understanding of human emotional development, studying, for example, how the attachment bond between mother and child and their affective communication is interactively created and which structures/functions it influences. All these studies have led to clear and fascinating results.

Yet there is a weak, very weak point:
the extraordinary results of this great body of research in no way allows us to know realities in themselves, distinct, such as environment, mind, and body, and their mutual influences, precisely bridging the mind- body gap. Far from it. They bear witness to, and fully confirm, the fact that the intertwining of bodies, minds, and environment is present from the very beginning.

As we said, in no way does it lead us to think of this interweaving as the juxtaposition of distinct things, which are assumed to exist in themselves.
Quite the opposite.
It leads us to believe that the cleavage between bodies, minds and environment occurs precisely because of the alphabetic language used in the West.
And the individual languages (the practices of the various disciplines involved), insofar as they remain alive, each with its own specificity, without selling themselves out, can help one another a great deal, enriching one another (they define each other better and help us understand the continuous cross-reference between the universal and the singular). Also, they clarify that the problem is epistemological, of knowledge, not ontological.
See: Body and sense. After Psychosomatics (Peregrini, p. 154)

 

The scientific idiolect

The neuroscientist and psychotherapist A. N. Schore, in Affect regulation and repair of the self (New York, Norton & Co, 2003) on page 23, writes:
Positron emission tomography (PET) demonstrated that when normal subjects silently fantasize dysphoric affect-laden images about object loss (e.g., imagining the death of a loved one), increased blood flow and activation is recorded in specifically the orbital prefrontal areas (...). In other words, we can now operationalize an online, real-time representation of an object relation.

 

A critique of correspondentism

There are at least two “ifs” that lead us to take “correspondences” with extreme circumspection, to say the
least.
For example, faced with studies that claim that a certain part of the brain called the anterior cingulate is activated when conflict situations occur, we must ask ourselves whether, whenever we see the anterior cingulate activated, we are entitled to think that the subject in question is experiencing conflict situations.
Statements of this kind (even far more articulate than this) unduly simplify reality, given that they establish a connection between events, which, even if translated in terms of a network rather than a linear connection, remains, precisely, linear (considering the connection between different points in a network remains linear in itself).

 

We do not wish to dispute the immense suggestiveness that such simplism has on common sense, nor the power of rhetorical persuasion that such arguments always have.

Instead, we wish to point out that the level of these hypotheses remains purely descriptive of competing events, of which the link, the nexus, is not thought of, established, or specified. (Proof, once again, that the principle of causality has more to do with rhetoric than with reality).
Hence the correspondentism that underpins these hypotheses, it must be said, simply remains a form of materialist monism in disguise.
Indeed, the truth of the psychic series is only admitted within the detection of its somatic basis, which thus retains epistemic primacy! (insofar as it is most observable) and ontological (as the basis from which the psychic occurs).

Once again, a thorough reflection on the typology of the bond is omitted, and, moreover, on how it will ever be possible to deduce from the somatic (thought of as opposed to the psychic) the psychic itself.

Let us return to Schore’s discourse:
It cannot but fascinate us, inducing us to think about the simultaneity of the mental and the corporeal in a truly ontological sense.

Unfortunately though, the fantasies of loss and the flows of blood in certain areas of the brain are not at all things in themselves, distinct, which must then be connected...
If we think along these lines, in dualistic terms, thereby obviously chasing the usual ontological monism, we will have to continue chasing it, tightening to the utmost (poor us) the strings of correlations.

 

We will then have fallen definitively into the trap. 

Is the body we touch, see and measure – in this case, with a marvellous instrument called a positron emission tomograph – more real, more concrete, and therefore more important than the mind, which we do not see?

Thus, we have allowed ourselves to be utterly dazzled by the superiority of what we believe to be “concreteness”, with the consequences that ensue.

 

The idiolect again
the connectome

The human brain, consisting of a still largely unknown network of interconnected nerve cells, areas and systems, is probably the most complex and fascinating machine in our universe. Understanding how it works and revealing this network of connections through true mapping constitutes the field of study of connectomics.

The connectome is a complete structural description of the network of elements and connections that make up the human brain.  The challenge set by scientists is to unravel the activity of a little under a hundred billion neurons.

Hence the Human Connectome project appears, with the aim of creating a detailed model explaining the structure-function relationships, starting from analysis at the cellular level through to macroscopic study by brain area.

 

Brain mapping techniques

There are various diagnostic techniques, starting with the classic CT and MRI, which allow the macroscopic structure of the brain to be non-invasively observed, up to modern functional neuroimaging techniques (fMRI, DTI, PET and qEEG), which are gradually reaching their goal: they allow changes in metabolism, electrical activity in the brain, blood and oxygen flow in certain areas, and the diffusion of water molecules in brain tissue to be detected. 

 

And here we come to the heart of the matter, in an (almost sci-fi) project worthy of the Star Wars saga.

All these methods will detect brain damage at the origin of illnesses such as depression, anxiety, delusions and hallucinations, in that they are capable of detecting alterations even in brains that do not show obvious macroscopic lesions, as in many patients suffering from mental disorders.

 

The results of this research are fascinating. However, the sense given to all the work is absurd.

The study of the connectome may therefore revolutionise the classic division between neurological and mental illnesses! (In the first article on the website, we too spoke about Autism).

A mapping of brain connections will thus provide information on the brain alterations responsible for mental disorders such as depression, anxiety and psychosis, allowing for more accurate diagnoses and targeted therapies that are more effective than the current ones.

The distinction between functional and organic illnesses will therefore no longer have any reason to exist. (In the sense that, as the causes of illness become visible, everything will appear to have roots in the body!!!). 

The message of neuroscientist S. Seung in his book Connectome (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2012), goes along these lines: we will be able to discover the dynamic mapping of every mental state and process, not only motor patterns and perceptions, but memories, emotional-affective fluctuations, complex thoughts. Yes, we may be able to identify “connectopathies” (deficits or anomalies in synaptic transmission), etiopathogenetic moments of a broad pathological spectrum, from autistic syndromes to degenerative ones... We will also enter the tangle of individual neurons, with their synapses and electrical impulses, receptors and neurotransmitters, where construction and elimination, namely, activation and inhibition of stimuli, coexist incessantly. And finally, we will see ever moving neurons, as they reweave connections, strengthening or weakening them; as they reconnect, creating or eliminating synapses; as they rewire, making or retracting changes; as they regenerate, with new neurons taking the place of old ones.

The nonsense

In short, we will read live emotional-affective fluctuations in the brain [in keeping with the scenario of perfect biological reductionism] and then triumphantly claim to be absolutely able to know the reality (in itself) of the body, of the brain, of the mind.

Neuroscience will then definitively take over, and we of the psyche, if we have not made the necessary adaptation to science, will disappear.

No. We will not disappear at all (at least, not in this sense).

And (paraphrasing Sini), to the scientists, to the psychoanalysts of the sciences in the strongest sense and, more generally, to common sense, who apostrophise us as if we were idealistic clowns, we reply no, we are not idealistic clowns, we do not believe at all that the table is there because we think it; and if we no longer think it, only air remains.
We are not saying this at all.
We have never said that things are there because they are interpreted, because they are put into practice.

The physicist Carlo Rovelli in Helgoland writes: there is no way of seeing reality that is not dependent on a perspective.

What we are saying is that there are things, of course there are, but only in the way of being in a practice; that is, there are no things whose way of being is not relative to a practice. 

Yet it is not that practice is the cause of their being, rather, it is their “mode”. To say that “a thing exists”, “a thing is so” indicates that in that practice you find it.

 

Other arguments, other scientists, with a different depth. Retying the threads.

Ilya Prigogine, Russian physicist and chemist naturalised Belgian, Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry 1977, sheds a different light.
Not only is the regularity of the “starry sky” a marvel of nature, the sky in which clouds evolve with ever new shapes is also a marvel.

In the theatre of nature, a change of scene is taking place: the “Cartesian” paradigm, which calculates the stars, is being succeeded by the “Darwinian” paradigm, which attempts to reconstruct the history of the clouds, in which that of the world is found...

The intention is to outline a perspective of knowledge, in which the “science of nature” is jointly the “history of nature”. 

Following Carlo Sini: we must deepen genealogical thinking and research.

We are always subject to the alphabet, to its enchantments and superstitions: we are guided by this practice, yet we do not realise it. Hidden beneath our detached and scientific knowledge lies an endless chain of operations and other forms of knowledge that intertwine with one another and are unnoticed because our attention is captured by the purpose of the present practice; however, this antiquity of practices, though ignored, is not indifferent to us, we are subject to it; we are an internal object of these constantly occurring practices.

We are beings that have no meaning without their history; alongside the truths of science there are others, with identical dignity and importance... 

It would make no sense to rid ourselves of the alphabet or of our scientific knowledge, by no means is this the matter. 

It is only a question of understanding what is truly at stake. 

There is no escaping elsewhere, it is instead a question of living within our knowledge and our practices and taking responsibility for how we are thinking. 

There is no elsewhere, no imaginary Orient to go to or return to, there is a West in which to remain, transforming our way of being, using wise actions (practices) that “know” how.

There are no absolute (ab-solute) objects, dissolved from the practices that put them into being.

There are no minds and bodies as absolute objects (to be placed in relations) outside the practices that institute them. 

It is the letters of the alphabet that make possible, as a transparent glass, the idea of a reality in itself, onto-logically corresponding to the concept. 

This is the blunder into which we fall. 

As we have already seen, mind and body thus become objects endowed with substance, forced to divide and “pretend” to reunite in a game of mirrors to infinity.

A new alliance

Let us think of Ilya Prigogine and the historian Luigi Zanzi, with the idea of a “new alliance”. Let us think of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, a Belgian chemist and philosopher… 

Let us think of scholars who hint at a relationship between the processes of spontaneous self-organisation and human life itself, implying a revision of the concepts of science and universe conveyed by the Copernican revolution, bringing into play the notions of structure, function, social system, and history.

"The new alliance" develops with an ideal link, with another scientist, Jacques Monod, French biologist and philosopher, Nobel Prize winner for medicine in 1965, to appease the anguish of modern man, which stems from the separation between the world of values and the world of knowledge introduced by the scientific revolution. A revolution that shattered the “ancient alliance” between man and an animistic nature governed by finalism. 

The ancient alliance is broken; man finally knows that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe from which he emerged by chance. 

Prigogine and Stengers acknowledge the rigour and coherence of Monod’s disenchanted philosophical consequences: from a science such as the classical one aimed at determining the universal laws of a clock-universe, regulated by a simple and reversible mechanism, to a science that puts forth the hypothesis of a blind destiny marked by chance and physical and biological necessity, indifferent to any purpose or condition.

 

Yet it is possible to go further: the perspectives opened  by today’s science pose the conditions for a “new alliance”, precisely. 

The ancient animistic alliance of the finalised world is dead, but so is the modern alliance, the alliance of the world-clock over which the modern scientist felt invested to exercise his jurisdiction.

The time has come for new alliances, alliances that have always been tied, long misunderstood, between the history of men, their society, their knowledge and the exploratory adventure of nature. 

It is necessary to retie the two cultures separated by modern science, to show that the mathematical sciences of nature, as they discover the problems of complexity and becoming, also grow capable of understanding something of the meaning of certain fundamental questions expressed by myths, religions and philosophies.

 

The Method

Universal 🔁 Singular

1) Setting everything in motion.

2) Transition from “knowing about”, to being. 

(Knowledge that, as we have by now understood, is always relative and becoming, because it is subject to the infinite interweaving of practices that generate it from time to time)

To speak of Method, let us return to philosopher Mauro Mocchi’s Commentary, on the website, after the three initial articles.

Let us again look at the pictogram of our model, the Möbius Strip (shown below).

Let us look at it in its continuous unfolding.

If we adopt the view of science, which we must absolutely take into account (it delivers us the universal), the strip is a “non-orientable surface”, given that it lacks a single point that allows orientation, coordinates and proportions to be established; any point can indifferently perform the same function. That is, it can make itself the origin of the three perpendiculars necessary to form a volume, a space within which the place and movement of everything can be strictly defined. Precisely because it lacks a fixed origin or threshold, the strip can only have one face and one edge.  

Moving from a random point on the surface, the line of a pencil will insensitively pass from the outer side to the inner side, to find itself, without encountering obstacles or sharp bends, at its starting point. 

This definition of the Möbius strip, by virtue of its being scientific (and within anyone’s reach), becomes ipso facto of collective interest. 

What to do, in order to do something else? 

It is not a question of doing “against” – reducing everything to oppositions is science’s strong point – but of doing “alongside”, simply continuing to unfold the point of view of other visions, from psychoanalysis to philosophy, to art..., in such a way that their strengths complement and enrich the point of view of the dominant culture, from which the surplus of domination will be subtracted.

It is not a matter of mere juxtapositions.

This scientific view of the strip can be welcomed with interest, yet only provided that the leap from part to whole, the inductive process, is illuminated by a very long historical journey, backwards, highlighting as far as possible the countless steps to get there. 

For diagnosis and treatment, not only of psychic suffering, we cannot rely solely on the generic direction and statistical criterion indicated by science. (Even medicine holds that an illness is such if in a hundred different people it is a hundred different illnesses). 

Let us then see the “other” possible directions and dynamics of the Möbius strip.

It is true that the strip has only one face, but it is also true that, at a certain point, this face undergoes a twist that splits and reverses its direction. 🔂

Thanks to this single turning point, the continuity of movement, in addition to being a generic coming and going (read by science), might be articulated in three other ways.

1) It can be an increase or decrease, with respect to that point, of distance and speed, namely, of space with respect to time, or of quantity with respect to quality. 

2) It can be a movement of transformation or passage, through the point, from one opposite to another.

3) It can open to other infinite differences. 

In the sense that that very point becomes a potential opening to infinity. It is called, precisely, an opening or threshold, and coincides with the point itself, with its unique and indefinable identity. 

In the view of science, however, the moment of the turning point is a point like any other. 

The pencil passes over it but does not dwell on it, because its purpose is to establish constants and typicalities common to several points, or rather to all points, including those outside and extraneous to its path. 

What a drastic simplification of reality this is, which, to an increasingly rapid calculating thought, makes fragments of reality appear smaller and smaller (the entire Machenschaft of the West to... produce a single-photon tomograph).

It is necessary, then, as “healers of the psyche”, not to end up increasingly crushed by the data of the so-called exact sciences. 

It is necessary to retie the threads of dialogue in the direction indicated by the three levels of reading and posture of the Möbius strip, towards a practice of thought that resumes mediating the terms at play, making its analyses fruitful thanks to a deeper work of synthesis. 

Only anabasis to the seemingly immobile engine of substance provides true katabatic capacity.

 

The physicist Carlo Rovelli, in Helgoland:

The best description of reality that we have found is in terms of events that weave a web of interactions. “Entities” are nothing other than ephemeral nodes in this network. Their properties are not determined until the moment of these interactions; they exist only in relation to something else. Everything is what it is only with respect to something else. Every vision is partial. There is no way of seeing reality that is not dependent on a perspective – no point of view that is absolute and universal. And yet, points of view communicate, knowledge is in dialogue with itself and with reality. In the dialogue those points of view modify, enrich, converge – and our understanding of reality deepens.

Translated by Olivia Marchese

PSYCHOANALYTIC CLINICAL PRACTICE
On the website: claudiaperegrini.com

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