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Synopsis Body and Sense (After Psychosomatics) [1]
Why does the mind body problem, the so-called MBP, accompany the whole 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 paramount questions that lie well beyond the mind body relationship.
Moreover, no one has ever solved the underlying issue of the problem.
Many have tried.
Mental occurrences, as some hypothesize, may only be something that takes place inside us, in our body, or at the very least in tight connection to bodily occurrences.
While others hold that mind and body are identical and bear the same substance, only appearance differs. Or on the contrary, the two processes, organic and mental, are deemed completely different, despite occurring together all along.
We are faced with a plethora of hypotheses that chase one another without ever allowing to reach a solution.
Let us consider the current mainstream hypothesis, the so-called ontological monism with dualism of knowledge: bodily and mental phenomena are only conceptually distinct, in thought and in speech, because we always find them together in existing reality, precisely as if they belonged to an ancient unit (the mind-body unit, with a hyphen).
Come to think of it, what is this unit? Where in the world is this presumed single object that Western thought might have split in two? What does it mean? One can but answer that this is unthinkable.
Furthermore, supposing we managed to truly find the real correspondence between mental and bodily phenomena, which type of correspondence would it be? Because we are well aware that the relationship between a physical state and a mental state is neither constant, nor simple.
Professor and research director at the Derner Institute of Adelphi University in New York, Bucci is a psychoanalyst who has undertaken a particularly dense research career to broaden the horizons of Freudian psychoanalysis towards the contents of neuroscience, on one hand, and of cognitive science on the other (1997, Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science, NY: The Guilford Press).
Her model, called ‘multiple code theory’, on one hand indeed appears as a in-depth analysis of the Freudian differentiation between primary and secondary processes, while at the same time markedly distancing itself from the latter. Bucci holds that the concepts of primary and secondary processes, despite their importance in having set the bases upon which to construe a systematic psychological model of thought, require (as in all of Freud) a coherent redefinition within the current research context. Following the cognitive science perspective, we may overcome any dualism so as to reach multiple processing modes. In order to account for observations in the clinical setting, as well as for all aspects of information processing, including emotional information processing across the whole lifespan, here comes the theory of ‘multiple codes’, which are three fundamental modes, or three systems by which human beings process information, including emotional information, and form internal representations: the sub-symbolic non verbal mode, the symbolic non verbal mode and the symbolic verbal mode.
Sub-symbolic processing involves all those stimuli - from feelings to motor and sensory information - non verbal, that are processed ‘in parallel’: for example, when we understand the emotions in someone’s facial expression, or we compose a piece of music, or we recognize a familiar voice in the commotion of a meeting, or we do a header on a cross at just the right time and height, or we intuit the right timing for interpretation in psychotherapy. Non verbal symbolic processing instead involves those mental images (a face, a song, an expression, or as the Beatles sang, something in the way she moves attracts me like no other woman...), which, albeit available to consciousness, cannot be translated into words.
Finally, the verbal symbolic mode involves the refined mental instrument by which the individual communicates his internal world to others. It is through this latter mode that knowledge and culture are passed on from one individual to another, and from one generation to another.
The three systems are governed by different principles, yet they are also interconnected. Our health depends on the richness of their interconnectedness. Bucci defines this complex and bidirectional connection - from emotions to words and vice versa - as ‘referential process’ , and she has elaborated tools to assess referential activity.
I believe the ‘multiple code’ model, although it tackles the MBP better than others (indeed, thanks to the symbolic and sub-symbolic systems we no longer speak of mind and body), actually continues to face the problem in the usual utterly dualistic terms. In that, despite being a suggestive model, I highly doubt we may exhaustively solve the leap between symbolic and sub-symbolic in this way. The leap is the side effect of our ways of writing the experience, not something that exists in itself.
Nonetheless, we continue to pose the problem in the same way, relentlessly asking ourselves whether mind and body are entities that were once united into a single object, which Western thought then divided (hence to be united again), or whether they are distinct entities to be kept separate.
We ask ourselves whether these entities communicate or not (how often do we hear that mind and body influence each other, talk to each other!). Today many answer as follows: of course they communicate, through hormones!
Kandel, the Nobel prize for Medicine, has proved it: environment, relationships and words exert a trophic influence on the junctions (synapses) between nerve cells.
Kandel, neuroscientist and Nobel for medicine in 2000, has in fact marvelously shown that experiences become (also) biological structures. Thus, he has seemingly bridged the mind (environment) body gap. The continuous activation of cells at certain neuronal junctions in fact triggers genetic cellular mechanisms that promote the growth of further synapses in correspondence to those junctions. This means that nervous cells grow and connect thanks to synapses that are constantly activated by environmental inputs. And the degree and pleasantness of the activity have a trophic effect in themselves.
It is in such a way that speech may promote a protein expression of genes, which, by influencing the presynaptic ionic canals, modify the functionality of nervous areas involved, the number and potency of synapses. Speech, through the emotions it evokes, modifies the structure and functions of nervous areas involved thanks to synaptic plasticity. Furthermore, when a bodily area changes, the whole body changes.
Hence, remaining at a biological level, we might say that speech and transmitted affect influence the body, just as certain drugs do, faster indeed, but less durably.
All true, provided we remain within the framework of the unsolvable dualism/monism, of causalism, or within a certain logic. However, upon stepping into a different logic, certain remarks arise
Personally, I feel distant from those who reason along these lines, asserting that the mind body leap has now been solved, precisely by certain branches of medicine such as psycho-neuro-endocrinology. This science seems to have bridged the gap by proving that the psyche, the environment and biological systems/the body, influence each other bidirectionally. And I also feel quite distant from that radical or eliminative reductionism by which medicine holds that the mind is the brain, while psychoanalysis holds that those who study the mind should not be concerned with the brain.
Why?
To answer, I shall attempt to step outside the conceptual perimeter of dualism/monism.
And outside the idea that mind and body are two truly existing things in the world.
Let us start with ‘speech’, understood as something ‘abstract‘ that influences the ‘concrete’, the junctions between nerve cells.
Why on earth should speech be something abstract?
Believing speech is not an act of the body is an erroneous thought, an abstraction that wholly disregards its event and gives in to the superstition of meaning, forgetting that speech is instead born, is inscribed and proceeds from body to body, from bodies to bodies.
Following Didier Anzieu (and poets such as Rimbaud with Voyelles), speech has materic and sensible qualities. Speech as sound is the mind’s first shell, from as far back as certain gestation periods of the fetus. Also, as certain studies have now confirmed, following a singular, subjective read (thus going beyond a merely biological level), the outcomes of talking cure have richer and more long-lasting effects than psychotropic drugs alone. What is more, they occasionally trigger more immediate and stupefying effects: how many of us have experienced, as analysts and patients, almost magical therapeutic encounters, when after reaching the session anguished and with stomach cramps, we leave rid of pain or anxiety.
This happens because words modify what we call the body’s physiology, and they do so not because they are magical, but for two fundamental reasons. As we have said, because they are events that are just as carnal as the action of an arm or of a sensorial impression (acoustic, motor, phonatory, both internal - when we utter a word or sound, and external - when we listen, be it even to our own speech as if subjected to our own saying). Therefore, it is unclear why words should not carry with them an operativity that we are used to defining concrete or somatic.
The second fundamental reason is that it is just as unclear why words should not be therapeutic, namely, should not have to do with the truth of our suffering.
This all implies that this truth, far from lying in the ideal world of the spirit, is already arranged, allocated, having the shape and nature of our carnal presence in the world, well before and far deeper than any nonsense we might tell ourselves.
Following the reasoning of the philosopher Carlo Sini and of his pupil, philosopher and psychoanalyst Andrea Bocchiola, we realize that we never attempt to understand, in the only sensible way possible (hence studying its genesis), the fact that there are bodies and minds in the world, and that they possess a certain shape and not another. We never investigate whether behind the words ‘body’ and ‘mind’ there truly are ‘things’, bearing an existence that is independent from the horizon of sense that designates them. Vice versa, without reflecting, we adhere to the neurosciences or the psychologies and/or to psychoanalysis, which take it as a given. Suffice it to think about how these disciplines’ subdivision itself returns an anthropological partition whereby the bodies are assigned to neuroscience (to medicine), the minds to psychology, and the psycho-soma to psychoanalysis.
Far from the idea of being able to discover a ‘reality in itself’, truly existing in the world, to instead attempt to understand the genealogy of our ways of translating experience into the words of common sense and scientific theories, I believe reality is something that stems solely from the encounter with one another, with our tools, our theoretical models, the specific language we are using. That is, with our practices, which are ways of translating experience. Outside that encounter, there is nothing.
Therefore, a first (fundamental) question arises: why is it that in the West this thought of ours is born, bearing dividing power, and why does this thought pose as its limit the mind and body to be united (if we are monists) into a single (unthinkable) object that is believed to truly exist, a sort of indivisible unit?
And a second question: are we sure to be able to solve the mind body problem remaining within the logic of dividing thought and of reality conceived, indeed, as indivisible and ontologically existing unit?
Here some shall pace up and down: this is philosophy!
Yes, it is philosophy. Or rather, thought.
When we think, we notice that mind and body cease to be totally distinct ‘entities’, to be kept distinct, or (following the current trend) to be united into a hypothetical, absurd, unthinkable, indivisible single object. Mind and body thus become ‘things’ that are strictly contained in the words we use, so coexistent as to both seem surfaces that roll and unroll, slipping into one another without any solution of continuity. While we watch them disappear from one side, there they appear from the other. When we observe them in this manner, it is almost impossible to distinguish them: they cease to be ontologically existent things which, depending on the trend, are defined as two sides of the same coin, or something else, to then become movements, trajectories, continuously ending up in one another. We can no longer believe that mind and body are divided and to be united in search of correlations between the two; neither can we believe that, were we to reason in terms of systems (mental and bodily) the problem would be solved. When we stop searching for correlations between two entities and come to terms with the fact that mind and body incessantly feed back to one another, and that they ‘exist’ by the difference between one another, we understand what it is about: it is precisely the (linguistic) translation of the experience we are living that creates the two. The two are but writing practices; ways of writing an experience that involves the living, man; ways of contacting this data, man, on the part of man, and ways of attempting to unfold him and explain him, through an alphabetical device and specific types of tools.
A certain culture and a certain language lead to believe that what is real is only that which somehow falls under the five senses; it induces us to hallucinate a sort of profound split between the so-called material world and abstract world. Let us think of illnesses. They are physical if they can somehow be seen and measured, psychic if they are invisible. Yet this too is a bubble, a trap. The presence or absence of ‘matter’ depends on the ‘level’ at which a ‘structure’ or a ‘system’ are observed, and on the tools used to observe them. It is therefore always a question of read. Nowadays, for example, we can say that a certain part of the autistic spectrum is connected to something physical, neurotransmitter-related, because we have equipped ourselves with highly sophisticated abilities in reading the so-called world of neurotransmitters, which we did not have before.
It is never a question of all-or-nothing, physical or psychic, concrete or abstract!
It is simply an issue that can be continually defined in feedback from psychic to physical and vice versa, physical and psychic; micro and macro and vice versa, macro and micro. It depends on the vertex of observation, or better, on the moment of scrolling of the Möbius strip in which we are situated. This is clearly seen in the book (and in the collection) Body and Sense (After Psychosomatics).
The mathematician Hofstadter is right in asserting that we mark conceptual boundaries around entities that we more easily perceive, and in so doing, we tailor what reality seems to be to us. We are small miracles of self-reference, believing in things that disintegrate as soon as we set out to search for them, yet, when we do not search for them, they are absolutely real.
Being used to thinking along the lines of more or less old registers, in any case always traditional, for example following dualism of knowledge that pursues ontological monism, we continue to believe in things like mind and body, in absolute existence, divided, and to be united.
Our thought does not shift easily, it does not reflect deeply enough upon the fact that mind and body, internal and external, are not two ‘things’ in themselves, real and pre-constituted, which after the presumed separation are to be united; further, however one might carry out the separation, their indivisible reality is simply never reached.
In the literature we often find confusion: on one hand there is a distinction, basing the psyche on the body and vice versa, following a linear path; there is then the attempt to remedy the distinction by conceiving psyche and body within a so-called complexity (understood as a jumble of chaotic directions and multiple causalities, even retroactive); finally, we attempt to unite them into a single thing, existing in reality. Based on these premises, our thought seems to endlessly bounce between dualisms that are never finite, which refer back to monisms that are never finite, and vice versa, as in a mirror room.
Freud himself posed the problem in a way that I would dare define somewhat ingenuous or aproblematic. Indeed, if we look closely, there is no internal before the organism constitutes itself as sentient threshold (that well-known PC threshold -perception/consciousness-). ‘External physical world’ and (internal) ‘psychic apparatus’ are psychic notions, products, or formations, in the sense of objects that do not truly exist, or rather, that exist only in connection to the language and concept.
Thus, the problem should be posed in another way: where do we begin to explain the psychic apparatus (the internal)?
One might immediately object, as says Carlo Sini, that only madmen confuse things with words.
One might object that we all know that language alludes to reality!
So put, this objection is not true and stems from the usual, continuous confusion: we confuse between knowing that, speaking, we allude to reality (truly existing outside us), and knowing what speech names as ‘reality’, namely, as what is other than speech, including the word ‘reality’.
When we begin to reflect upon the fact that psychoanalytic language is nothing more than translation and interpretation, and that things in themselves therefore do not truly exist, such as libido, dreams, oneiric self representations, then continuing to believe that language alludes to reality begins to come across as markedly pre-logical, or in any case quite ingenuous.
On the other hand, the exact sciences too (as they used to be defined) are imaginific languages. Let us think of medicine: it speaks of events (says the occurring experience) within its practice of speech, that is, it measures, construes and translates into its signs, for example the signs of the electroencephalogram, the electrocardiogram, X-Rays, CT scans, MRIs.
Let us think of the physical changes in paradoxical or REM sleep. For example, of the drop in muscle tone by which, when we dream, we cannot escape because of motor impotence. We cannot get out of bed and leave, unless we sleepwalk.
Let us now attempt to put together the data referring to sudden muscle hypotonia (the drop in muscle tone) and those brief and recurring anguished dreams in which we feel as if we were falling (as if we mysteriously slipped) from a sudden step. And it truly feels as if we were taking that leap, or we actually feel and see ourselves falling into the void of a precipice.
At this stage, we may no longer separate the fact read by medicine and traditionally defined as physical - the drop in muscle tone, with its sensory repercussions, translated into porto-images -, that is, the universal data, from the singular data, namely, the specific content of those oneiric anguishes, as might be read by psychoanalysis.
I believe that providing transference interpretation in psychoanalytic treatment to the experience of fall-loss that is present in the oneiric content of the anguished dream, without bearing in mind the ‘biological’ data (the universal drop in muscle tone), is an action that is incomplete and incorrect.
Let us therefore imagine putting the two pieces of data together.
How?
Let us imagine that the sensory impressions associated to the drop in muscle tone unfold along a continuum - hence they may not be separated - together with the oneiric images of fall-leap, with their emotional-affective loads, which differ from dreamer to dreamer and from dream to dream.
Or, let us imagine the ‘mental images’ and their affective loads as an ‘internalizing’ of ‘bodily’ data (sensory impressions), and the bodily data as an ‘externalizing’ of the ‘mental’ ones. Let us thus attempt to follow them along these lines, these pieces of data, to think of them precisely in their continuous reciprocity and specularity, as if on a Möbius strip: as they internalize, the sensations associated to the drop in muscle tone turn into affect and images of fall/loss, which, as they externalize, once again turn into ‘physical’ sensations.
As if on a strip that rolls and unrolls, to then roll and unroll again, continuously.
What might be the use in continuing to assert that a pathology feeds on solely genetic (internal) causes, or, solely environmental (external)?
Furthermore: do ‘causes’ as we have always understood them, truly exist?
I shall bring the example of a very common pathology that is depression, in psychoanalytic tradition, an illness that is absolutely ‘mental’, upon which scholars have been reflecting forever. A book “La malattia inglese” (The English illness, Simonazzi L., 2004, Roma: Il Mulino) tells about how a problem that at the time was seen as only medical - melancholy - was one of the most common disorders in the British isles between the 1500s and the 1700s, raising such a debate as to involve not only doctors, but also theologists, scholars, philosophers and moralists. Moreover, it discusses the scientific statute of medicine and its relations to religion and magic, the relation between soul and body, the function of passions, the possibility of controlling them with reason, the relation between civilization process and illnesses.
Let us now try to imagine what happens in the body read by medicine, when one is depressed.
A constant alteration of certain neuropeptides occurs, together with the so-called somatoform pains, organic pains that are called ‘functional’.
We are thus referred back to a being together of the state of depressed mood and functional pains with the altered metabolism of those neuropeptides.
The big question: how is knowing this useful?
It is useful to psychoanalysts to move toward an ‘out-of-sense’, because the ‘neuropeptide alteration’ issue at first glance rings no bells, it is disorienting and not part of the jargon; hence, to attempt to expand the feeling ‘with’, to attempt to expand the understanding ‘with’, practicing with this new discourse and linguistic doubling helps to push oneself towards identifications with that ill body that are ‘to the limit’. Uniting two languages helps imagine that the ‘organic’ pains that the patient continues to report run so intertwined, in continuous reversibility, with an alteration of neuropeptide molecules and electric circuits, that we are naturally brought to push ourselves continuously and simultaneously, at least in our mute perception, onto the carnality of sense and the significance of the body.
Where a phenomenon is to be interpreted on the basis of transference and patient history, there is also, together, inseparably, a metamorphosis of the body, which is that same history.
Bearing all this in mind means being bilingual analysts.
Of course, medical doctors would largely benefit too from working side by side (at least) with psychologists!
With this mental attitude, those who deal with the psyche may develop a curiosity towards the fact that depression means, simultaneously, increased activity of the sympathetic nervous system compared to the calming parasympathetic one, thus, a reduction in time between one heartbeat and another, a reduction of variability in cardiac frequency, with the consequence that the heart can fall ill. Furthermore, it means the release of inflammatory substances, cytokines and c-reactive proteins, the main inflammatory blood index; it means increase in blood coagulation, with the risk of thrombosis; it means alteration of the serotonin circuit, a polyhedric molecule that is crucial for many functions in the body, with consequent lesion of blood vessel linings, especially of the coronary arteries.
It is a grand theatre of corporeity, a metaphoric of the extended thing that also allows to dream of the patient in another way.
Calling the Unconscious - the Existing - does not signify retrieving its statute of being, so inconsistent, so evanescent on an ontic level, it instead means retrieving it on an ethical level.
About it, Freud says: In any case, we must go there.
Indeed, somewhere, or rather, in an other space, neither psychic nor organic, the unconscious always reappears, it cannot be eluded. It is not an order, it bears nothing of the symbolic order, we might define it as the place of continuous mutation, infinity, understood as limit, the history of which in psychoanalysis I shall attempt to speak of next.
Bion is the great analyst who at a certain point in life attempts to operate the change, breaking away from the idea that the Unconscious (its derivates) be reducible to knowing, and introducing absolute doubt, the sign ‘O’: “[...] the facts “in themselves” [absolute] of the session. What the facts “in themselves” [absolute] are we shall never know; thus, I shall indicate them with the mark O”.
It is the Chilean Matte Blanco who identifies in infinity, tied to the unconscious, the very heart of psychoanalysis: Freudian dialectics between unconscious and consciousness becomes dialectics between the infinity of the unconscious and the finite limits of human consciousness. This conception of the unconscious entails surpassing a single ‘infinity’, and introduces the idea of infinities of a different order. The structural unconscious is essentially a symmetrical way of being (everything is evened out with the rest, no contradictions): “it is emotion and it is expressed as intensity, tending towards infinite values, even when on the surface it seems “tamed”.
It is especially Lacan, at a certain point, in his last seminars, who eventually alters the whole paradigm: the unconscious no longer functions as language, but it is that which does not function at all, that which is not reducible to any knowing.
Center stage is no longer the symbolic but the Real, the impossible that can never be reached: it leaves traces, yet they are traces that “not only erase themselves, but that any use of discourse tends to erase, analytic discourse as any other”.
Indeed, Lacan strongly underlines that his Real has nothing to do with the biological body, real, concrete, so to speak, or with what is required of reality in order to found science. I shall return to a thought of his: “Who knows what happens in one’s own body? It is something extraordinarily subjective. For some it is even the sense they give to the unconscious...”
“The Unconscious is somatic processes” says Freud in the Outline of Psycho-Analysis. Where ‘somatic processes’ are understood as what is neither written nor writable by any science, the universal, the singular object, the unrepresentable, the constitutive void without which there would be no thought.
We think precisely because there exists the unthinkable (the true Unconscious), that which may never be translated into representation. The end, the (ultimate) truth, will never be reached.
The Unconscious is not the Unaware of the neurosciences!
Let us salvage the specificity of the single languages, albeit learning to weave them together, as we shall see in the clinical cases in the book.
At this stage, what is the point of the term psychosomatics, with all its vast world of research, theoretical formulations and clinical applications (which are in any case to be thoroughly understood!), considering this term and this world were born and raised within the mind body problem and its conceptual perimeter?
If the problem is no longer that of bridging the mind body gap, does it still make sense to speak of psychosomatics?
As we were saying, when we step outside the common thought that believes the internal (psyche) and the external (body) are pre-constituted ‘things’, and enter a chiasmatic logic, we understand that the deferred (indeed, external and internal) are not things at all, but rather that they emerge from language. Better still, they emerge from the threshold of language, from its crevice. Thus, they are articulated on the basis of their reciprocity and alternation, sharing the inside and the outside, internal and external, in the sense that one is clearly external for the other and vice versa. There exist neither origin nor destination; there exists oscillation, a vibration, a crossing, that does not occur from pre-constituted places, continuously leading the external (the environment and the body) to internalize itself (in the mind) and vice versa. Following this thought, external and internal cease to be res or substantia, to become movements imagined through our discourse
Now, in light of this thought, what is the meaning of data from the famous scientific studies that investigate structural and functional changes induced by relations (the environment, the external) on the nervous system, in particular and more generally, on the neuro-immuno-endocrine system, hence on the whole body (the internal)?
In short, what will it mean in the future to affirm that the external influences the internal?
One might object: who renounces the ideal of objective knowing, of distinct things (internal/external; mind/body...), in a ‘perfectly objective’ world?
It is not a matter of ridding ourselves of all scientific research carried out until now, but of asking ourselves: why, despite conclusions, has the figure of the researcher been repressed in contemporary research? We are to find a way to reinsert the scientist researcher into science, which would call into question the whole materialistic or metaphysical perspective. A different emphasis should be posed on the subject who observes. The differences between the metaphysical and epistemological positions (which I would gladly call epistemontological, borrowing M. M. Ponty’s ‘new ontology’) are enormous.
These years, for example, have offered us a plethora of studies on the nature of consciousness: in none of these studies are certain essential factors truly taken into account, the vividness, the intrinsic presence of the subject who perceives and carries out research, his theories, his moods, his inescapable projections.
The first step should be that of elaborating experimental practices that may be exported to other contexts (for example, the practices we are offered by microphysics?), with the challenge of understanding how such practices alter the nature of the debate on scientific method, and appreciating their role in a possible scientific revolution.
The information available is always necessarily incomplete, because ultimately, as we have seen, we may never reach the truth. At the basis of any knowing there exists the unconscious, understood as infinite object, limit, constitutive void, without which we would not be able to think, and hence we would not be able to carry out research.
We are equipped with increasingly innovative tools that allow us to perceive new images and new theoretical models as we go on. We are constantly grappling with the understanding of ‘things’. Suffice it to think about the number of statutes of the Unconscious that have been construed in time.
We have attempted to show how, in order to interpret things, we must endlessly start from the beginning, trace back history, in an effort that is first and foremost genealogical.
Furthermore, we must start thinking in the unusual terms of ‘things’ that are impossible to see, called interconnections, flows, dynamics, transformations, movement.
When we are able to do this, our understanding of situations shifts.
For example, the understanding of the concept of being ‘inside’ (internal) and ‘outside’ (external) shifts.
It is difficult to explain in words that internal and external are only ever moving situations created by thought and language. Yet when we try to support it with images, indeed imagining setting ourselves on a moving border as on a Möbius strip, which folds and unfolds and again folds in a tireless movement, then ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, body and mind, exclusively become ways of naming a position that hangs in the balance of the specific moment we are going through.
We cannot stick any pole in the ground, hoping it might help us say: this is inside, it is mental, and this is outside, it is bodily, or this other is the environment.
Only to then convince ourselves that we have finally bridged the gap between the two (or the three).
We may glimpse the end of this impasse when we begin to feel and think in terms of a new architecture of being, subject to continuous metamorphosis and reversibility.
Organizing and consolidating are never allowed.
Going back to Freud, from whom we started, we must bear well in mind, always, that there exists no internal before the organism has constituted itself as sentient threshold (the well-known PC - perception/consciousness - threshold). ‘External physical world’ and (internal) ‘psychic apparatus’ are therefore ‘psychic’ notions, products or formations, in the sense of objects that do not truly exist, or rather, that exist only in connection to the language and concept. Threshold is a concept that alludes to something that moves, a limit, an oscillating elastic support that hosts and cancels.
[1] The essay was born within a long working group at the Centro Milanese di Psicoanalisi Cesare Musatti. It avails itself of Viviana Maribel Rampon’s contributions (graphic and the part on ‘causes’), who is also responsible for all online organizational aspects. The editing is by Claudio Cassardo; the English translation is by Olivia Marchese.
