Personal Identity between Philosophy and Psychology: A Perpetual Metamorphosis? [1 ed.] 1527563529, 9781527563520

Table of contents :
Contents
Presentation
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Conclusion
Bibliography

Citation preview

Personal Identity between Philosophy and Psychology

Personal Identity between Philosophy and Psychology: A Perpetual Metamorphosis? By

Vinicio Busacchi and Giuseppe Martini

Personal Identity between Philosophy and Psychology: A Perpetual Metamorphosis? By Vinicio Busacchi and Giuseppe Martini This book first published 2021 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2021 by Vinicio Busacchi and Giuseppe Martini All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-6352-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-6352-0

CONTENTS

Presentation ................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1 .................................................................................................. 14 Personal Identity: A Persistent Dilemma 1. A brief historical-theoretical synthesis 2. Identity construction: the psychoanalytic perspective Chapter 2 .................................................................................................. 29 The Deconstruction of Identity 1. From individuation to deconstruction 2. From Derrida’s (paradigm of) deconstruction to identity’s deconstruction 3. From deconstruction to dissociation 4. Between philosophy and psychoanalysis: toward personal identity via delusion Chapter 3 .................................................................................................. 53 The Narrative Reconstruction of Identity 1. Narration between psychoanalysis and psychiatry 2. Narrative identity between substantialism and the theatre of self-representation Chapter 4 .................................................................................................. 74 Corporal Identity 1. Mind-body models 2. Others’ inscription within the self and mind inscription within the body 3. Material-body and symbolic-body in the genesis of identity 4. The postmodern body: between omnipotence and dislocation Chapter 5 .................................................................................................. 89 Identity and Time 1. An evanescent and substantial theme 2. Body and time 3. The enigma of time 4. Time and identitarian transformations

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Chapter 6 ................................................................................................ 104 To Translate the Suffering 1. Beyond Ricoeur 2. To translate the suffering 3. The three phases of translation in psychoanalysis 4. The question of interlanguage within a psychoanalytic setting 5. The paradigm of translation and the challenge of psychoses 6. Some notes on psychoanalysis and the ethics of translation Conclusion .............................................................................................. 121 A New Perspective on Personal Identity between Translation and Transformation Bibliography ........................................................................................... 126

PRESENTATION

What is personal identity? What forms its nature? Is there a difference between identity and personality? What makes a “person” an individual, and what exactly is the person? What role is played by character, nature, environment, society, values and destiny in defining and substantiating a personal identity? How do persistence and change in identity coexist within a person? What is the nature of such a “change”? Is it just a natural process? And, are we sure it is a “process”? Which mechanism or force or dynamism determines it? And what is the function of culture, tradition and knowledge in representatively defining who we are and the way in which we understand ourselves, our relationship with others and, in general, the human being? We are currently facing an additional reflective challenge due to the fragmentation of our understanding and knowledge around the human being because of the progressive differentiation and specialization of knowledges. Paul Ricoeur revealed this sort of paradox (a lack of comprehensive understanding due to an improvement in exact knowledge): We have at our disposal a symbolic logic, an exegetical science, an anthropology, and a psychoanalysis and, perhaps for the first time, we are able to encompass in a single question the problem of the unification of human discourse. The very progress of the aforementioned disparate disciplines has both revealed and intensified the dismemberment of that discourse. Today the unity of human language poses a problem. (Ricoeur 1970, 3–4)

From a certain perspective, by following this diagnosis it seems that the search for a unified synthetic and comprehensive understanding is far less reasonable and achievable than to (re-)consider the problem from the tensional perspective of an interdisciplinary work. The dialectics of different disciplinary approaches and knowledges, as well as different theoretical-speculative perspectives and traditions, can be more productive in deepening and readdressing problems concerning human identity. It is by following this line of reasoning that we have decided to analyse and discuss the above questions (and all connected problems and dilemmas) from the dialectical perspective of psychoanalysis and philosophy. As is known, these are among two of the most important disciplines to offer significant and productive advancements in the current study of human identity.

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Between them, they offer a massive vocabulary and a vast and flexible theoretical system. At the same time, they manage to “absorb”, consider and summarise important content and knowledge stemming from other disciplines such as neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry. It is useful to immediately specify the use and interpretation of the key concepts–such as “identity”, “individual” and “person”–and the overview of the problematic. A historical-theoretical approach helps to (briefly) summarise the main critical aspects and major models of identity which are still animating contemporary debate and research. Both directly and indirectly, this book will constantly define its positions, theorisations and critical analyses, keeping track of those models and their concrete, scientific contents. Together with their contributions, all scholars and scientists mentioned below will be implicitly considered as an unavoidable reference or a critical term of dialectical comparison.

1. Identity as a process Georg W. F. Hegel was the first to conceive of human identity as a process. Beyond its specific character as a spiritualistic/idealistic philosophy, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) may be interpreted as the paradigmatic example of an approach to human identity in which the accomplishment of personal identity comes via a process. In fact, it is expressive of a teleological view that lends itself to exploring the development of personal identity through a constant (logical-ontological) three-sided dialectics of affirmation, negation/differentiation and unification (or thesis, antithesis and synthesis). The moment of reunification represents a new starting point of a new dialectical moment of affirmation, negation/differentiation and unification, until the end of a final and higher level of realization or accomplishment. Hegel’s perspective supports the idea of a process of personal development in a psychological, existential (or experiential) and moral sense. The negative is the true dynamic element, and it can be experienced in many ways: an inner limitation, a suffering, an external obstacle, a difficult situation, a critical relationship or an interrelational experience. It can be said, on the one hand, that some philosophers and scholars (Alexandre Kojève, Jean Hyppolite, Paul Ricoeur and others) explicitly refer to Hegel by offering their own anthropological interpretation; on the other hand, other perspectives can indirectly be put in parallel and in connection with Hegel’s view because of the great similarities they reveal. This is the case with William James’s philosophical point of view, for example. Not only does his pragmatic perspective counterpoise René

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Descartes’s substantialist and rationalist approach to the Cogito and (thus) personal identity, but also–in accordance with evolutionism–his vision intertwines the idea of identity as a flux with the idea of a perpetual, essential, progressive processuality. This is an idea largely shared among pragmatists and neopragmatists who mirror Darwinism and interpret personal identity as “emerging” from biological or organic life. Among contemporary neo-pragmatists, it is John Searle who proposes, maybe better than others, a productive theoretical mix of evolutionist and phenomenological approaches to the human being. The result is a naturalistic model which can be classified as reductionist, but at the same time acts as a kind of dialectical-processual model. In a further sense, the concept of processuality can be found in certain interdisciplinary research projects based on a kind of phenomenological approach that is directly or indirectly linked to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology (as Searle’s was). Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch’s neurophenomenology represents one of the most articulated and ambitious projects of this nature (see Varela, Thompson, Rosch 1991). It revitalises, extends and redefines the potentiality of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, mixing it with cognitive science (and subsequently with additional philosophical traditions and different scientific disciplines). Somehow, Alva Noë’s enactivism (Noë 2009) or Vittorio Gallese’s studies and reflections on mirror neurons (see, for example, Gallese 2006) follow a similar interdisciplinary, phenomenological approach.

2. Identity as a dynamism A very different theoretical model of identity is provided by Sigmund Freud’s dynamic model. Beyond the variety of ideas and understanding of human identity and psychic life that he developed over decades, Freud retained a conception of a psychic life that is dependent on neurobiological function and, at the same time, characterised by a “middle-way” dynamism of energetism and experience (that is, of mechanism and will, instinct, desire etc.). More specifically, in Freud we find two major moments of theoreticalanthropological elaboration. There is a passage from Freud’s early perspective on psychic life, focused on the theory of drives, that is, of the conflicting dialectic between the instances of the ego and the libidinal drives (still maintained in his metapsychological period); and a second perspective focused on a deeper dynamism between life drives and death drives. Together, these writings confirm the persistence and centrality of the element of dynamics in Freud’s vision. In one way or another, all theories,

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practices and methodological-therapeutic approaches in dynamic psychology have Freud’s “lesson” as their main reference. Certainly, dynamic psychology faced tremendous transformation and even the history of psychoanalysis is a history of different, alternative, even mixed and conflicting models of psychic life. However, these models still persist as predominantly “dynamic”, as is the case in theoreticalspeculative studies when Freud’s psychoanalysis is (re)interpreted in connection to other models, such as Hegel’s. This can be seen, for example, in the works of Hyppolite and Paul Ricoeur, for example. It is interesting to put Hegel and Freud in connection. There is a certain justification for this, because, as in Hegel’s vision, Freud conceives of the conflicting and antithetical context (between conscious and unconscious life) as a fundamental “mechanism” in the definition and maturation of personal identity. At the same time, behind Freud’s connected idea that “The ego is not master in its own house” (Freud 1968, 143) lies his productive contribution in arguing against the substantialist approach to the human being which was traditionally conceived of as accomplished ab origine. Somehow, we find something similar in Hegel’s approach. However, Freud’s scepticism is stronger and deeply antithetical to a substantialist approach, more so than with Hegel. In fact, where Freud relieves tensions between regressive drives and progressive drives, and therapy is used to overcome a psychic experience blocked and trapped because of the past, Hegel describes a teleological-progressive movement of the spirit across various challenges and vicissitudes to become fully accomplished. Freud’s individual is a frustrated, contradictory, unfree and inauthentic being. Conversely, Hegel’s individual is a spiritual entity, always involved in dramatic dialectics in order to become free, accomplished and realised. Freud’s theorisation has been strongly reconsidered and transformed, even within psychoanalysis itself, stretching it to its extreme and even overturning it. This is the case with Jacques Lacan’s structuralist approach, in which personal identity disappears behind the constitutive structure of psychic life (i.e., there is no full, concrete and autonomous self). Even certain uses of psychoanalysis in philosophy do not mirror its essential aspect as a dynamic model. Gilles Deleuze, for example, largely refers to Freud, but at the same time conceives of identity as a practical-social artefact and a perpetual non-substantial phenomenon, something more similar to a stable simulacrum or a “play of contrasts” in which there is neither dynamism nor dialectics. In his view, all modern philosophical and scientific research around the human being (Freud’s included) follows an anti-Hegelian line of reasoning. He does not want to re-establish dialectics as a paradigm or as a way to positively recompose all contradiction and

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tensions in human personal development; conversely, he considers contradiction and unaccomplishment as something “stable”. However, under his deconstructive perspective he aims to reintroduce a kind of dynamism: the dynamism of a perpetual process of demolition (which is the process of life itself). The misunderstanding that could easily arise from transferring Freud’s divided subject from the psychopathological and clinical domain, which is its true context, to the philosophical domain (as a universal paradigm) should not be overlooked. In fact, even if neurotically split, the subjectivity of a philosopher who reflects on his own fractures remains in all respects a “strong” subject that has nothing to do with borderline nonintegration or with the schizophrenic void and, perhaps, not even with the deficiency of the narcissistic self. However, it is true that it is not easy to separate scientific-theoretic research from philosophical-speculative work both in science and philosophy. This is particularly true if we reconsider the process of determining a new paradigmatic model: that of identity as social construction.

3. Identity as a social construction Various philosophical and psychological studies have come to converge on the idea that the social dimension is the core of human identity, in the sense that the full development of personal identity largely depends on social factors and aspects. We are social beings. The work of George H. Mead, as a behavioural and social psychologist, as well as a pragmatist philosopher, emerges as a true reference point. His 1934 oeuvre, Mind, Self and Society, constitutes the synthesis of an articulated psychological, sociological and philosophical perspective in which human beings are substantially seen as members of a society: they cannot experience a mind or a self outside of the social human process. At the same time, human society cannot exist without an individual’s mind and self. As Mead clearly affirms: Human society as we know it could not exist without minds and selves, since all its most characteristic features presuppose the possession of minds and selves by its individual members; but its individual members would not possess minds and selves if these had not arisen within or emerged out of the human social process in its lower stages of development those stages at which it was merely a resultant of, and wholly dependent upon, the physiological differentiations and demands of the individual organisms implicated in it. (Mead 1972, 227)

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This movement of reciprocal influence and determination is not intended to be understood as a circular movement of interdependent codetermination. In Mead’s interpretation, social process comes first, then the mind. In fact, There must have been […] lower stages of the human social process, not only for physiological reasons, but also (if our social theory of the origin and nature of minds and selves is correct) because minds and selves, consciousness and intelligence, could not otherwise have emerged; because, that is, some sort of an ongoing social process in which human beings were implicated must have been there in advance of the existence of minds and selves in human beings, in order to make possible the development, by human beings, of minds and selves within or in terms of that process. (Ibid.)

A variety of theorisations can be put in parallel with Mead’s model, starting with a contemporary of his: Lev Vygotsky. By developing research around the mind-language relationship, Vygotsky came to theorise the centrality of the linguistic and relational-communicative dimension in the formation of the self. In addition, and quite similarly to Mead (in that he considers the interiorization of cultural and symbolic social practices), Vygotsky underlines the dependence of the development of higher psychic functions on the internalisation of social codes, functions and rules. Several scholars have recognised the validity of this view and implemented it. Among them, Jürgen Habermas subsumes it within his communicative critical-sociological research (see Habermas 1981); David J. Chalmers and Gregory Bateson within their information and computation theories (see Chalmers 1966, Bateson 1972); and Paul Watzlawick, Janet Helmick Beavin and Don D. Jackson within a pragmatic, cybernetical psychotherapeutic key (Watzlawick, Beavin, Jackson 1967).

4. Identity as intersubjectivity The model of identity as intersubjectivity is strictly related to the previous model. Even if it was largely elaborated within the hermeneuticalphilosophical tradition during the twentieth century–thus, within a different theoretical and speculative context in comparison with Hegel’s phenomenology and Mead’s pragmatism–this model has several aspects similar or relating to the behavioural and even to the dialectic approach. Obviously, the degree of similarity and connection depends on the scholar’s particular interpretation and articulation; however, it can be in general collocated between Hegel’s and Mead’s models. The key concepts and categories to

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frame the main axes of this conception must be understood in their philosophical, psychological and sociological sense, and they are the following: language, social interaction, alterity, reciprocity and mutual recognition. In scientific terms, both psychological and sociological research have equal relevance. This is because, on the one side, the development of social competences such as mutual respect and the recognition of another person as a person similar to me in sentiment, humanity and dignity is in parallel with one’s psychological (and moral) development. On the other side, psychological (and moral) development can be achieved only by a progressive, parallel process of interiorization of cultural, traditional, moral and normative practices and rules which exist only within the social sphere. Here again, Mead’s work can help in considering both the balance between the psychological and sociological dimensions, and the role of language as a mediator between experience, social reality, the formation of the self and the true nature of intersubjective relation. As is known, he speaks of “symbolic interactionism”, and “transfers” into it all the essential aspects of psychological and sociological human interaction, underlining that, essentially, human interaction is a kind of symbolic-cultural practice in which all emotional, motivational and value-related elements find a symbolic means of expression and an immediate non-rational mutual understanding and recognition. For Mead, in fact, it is in language that experience and the social world find a sign and symbolic decoding capable of mutual understanding and sharing. This is a process that goes hand-inhand with the development of the ability to “recognise” the other and to assume–mainly emotionally–the other’s point of view (generalised other). It is true that Mead tends to focus on the discourse of symbolic interaction, although he recognises the centrality of emotions and values. In contrast, other authors focus on the discourse of the interrelational dialectic or the dialectic of recognition between persons–that is, by considering the individual as a whole, made of language, reason, sentiments, values etc. Among these, we mention Axel Honneth’s social-critical approach and Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological-hermeneutic approach (see, respectively, Honneth 1992 and Ricoeur 2004): two different models of intersubjectivity based on hybrid theoretical-speculative research around recognition in which both Hegel’s dialectic and Mead’s pragmatic approaches are brought to play in different ways. Significantly different, but at the same time under an identical paradigm, is Habermas’s theorisation, within which language and communication are key to the complete understanding of human interaction and the intersubjective practice within the public sphere (see Habermas 1981). For Habermas, personal emancipation and recognition are

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fundamentally questions of active participation, belonging and social critical action, that is, the communicative dialectics among social actors. The quality of communicative relationships mirrors the degree of emancipation and of individual and social maturation. In this model, psychoanalysis plays an important role, above all via these theoretical-practical studies centred on issues concerning interpersonal or intersubjective aspects or considering those aspects in redefining their theorisation and practices. This is the case, for example, with Heinz Kohut’s self psychology. The theoretical and clinical advantages deriving from this discipline’s assignation of a central role to the idea of self, rather than to the ego, are not to be underestimated. Once the idea of the “other” has achieved a similar relevance, the consequence is to focus on the individual him/herself in a more comprehensive way that is equal to overcoming the abstract distinction among psychic instances. However, one wonders if precisely the contemporary psychoanalytic conceptualisations around the self end up running the risk of putting the original unaccomplishment and non-mastery in brackets. Such a conceptualisation in fact represents a weakening of the idea of a fracture or decentralisation, especially in that it presupposes, a priori, the idea of the self as a psychological structure through which the experience of oneself acquires cohesion and continuity (see Stolorow and Atwood 1994). However, we must consider additional theoretical developments through which we can grasp the essential nature of the intersubjective dynamic, starting from the analytical (therapeutic) relationship. Of particular interest are Donald W. Winnicott and Wilfred R. Bion’s studies (Winnicott 1958; Bion 1962) defining the idea of the analyst as a container–an approach which, contrary to the metaphor of the “analyst as a mirror”, implies the entry into play of a strongly relational dimension. Even a more traditional psychoanalytical perspective may help to deepen questions concerning intersubjectivity: we are referring here to the line that places value on the counter-transferal movement, understood in a generalised sense and therefore, actually, as a co-transference. One feature that arises from considering (inter)subjectivity through countertransference is the importance of the analyst’s awareness of his/her own conflicts, of his/her own internal lacerations with which he/she inevitably descends into internal analytical exchange. Furthermore, it brings to the fore the idea that the analyst’s subjectivity as a person comes into play in the interactionist and interpersonalist model, in which it is manifested through paying particular attention to concrete relationships. These considerations bring the analyst into play as a person that is “entire”: on the one hand, he/she is fully involved in an emotional and physical sense (i.e. the most basic and immediate level of reality), on the other hand, he/she is involved as a

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specific individual with his/her own role, social position and decisionmaking capacity (see, for example, Hoffman 1998).

5. Identity as a structure A new model of identity has been defined by the linguistic turn. This is the model of identity as a structure. It finds its paradigmatic expression both in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological work and in Jacques Lacan’s anthropological-psychoanalytical theory. While the first declares the dissolution of the human being, the second theorises the disappearance of “personal identity” as “personal” under the idea that the unconscious is structured like a language. Lacan prospects a double renversement of personal identity. On the one side, there is the renversement in terms of dominance and control between conscious and unconscious life, as psychoanalysis conceives of it (and Lacan reverses Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum principle, by saying “I am where I don’t think”). On the other side, the idea of a linguistically structured unconscious enables a specific idea of the unconscious not only as a reality basically characterised from signifying processes, but also as a culturally and socially dependent reality in which personal particularity and uniqueness are of marginal relevance. Following Lacan’s view, we can say that the structural model does not consider possible the idea of personal identity as an autonomous and consistent reality.

6. Identity as symbolic life In contrast with structuralism, the hermeneutical tradition has developed a second model (after the intersubjective one). This is the model of identity as symbolic life, which is the result of an intertwined theoretical synthesis between traditional exegetical-hermeneutical studies, existentialism, philosophical hermeneutics and psychoanalysis. We can consider Carl Gustav Jung, Gabriel Marcel and Paul Ricoeur as the major theorists of this viewpoint. Jung’s perspective (as defined in his 1928 paper “Über die Energetik der Seele”) is well known. As he states: Psychic development cannot be accomplished by intention and will alone; it needs the attraction of the symbol, whose value quantum exceeds that of the cause. But the formation of a symbol cannot take place until the mind has dwelt long enough on the elementary facts, that is to say until the inner or outer necessities of the life-process have brought about a transformation of energy. If man lived altogether instinctively and automatically, the transformation could

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As known, early Freudian psychoanalysis, initially linked to a certain reductionism (in Ernest Jones as well as in Freud), was antithetical to Jung’s perspective. However, it subsequently recognised the importance of a distinction between the ego and the objective world in a way able to allow access to the symbol. Above all it is thanks to Klein’s group, and particularly thanks to Hanna Segal, that the belonging of the symbolic function to the ego was underlined (see Segal 1957). Actually, only when the egoic instance is constituted, is it possible to recognise reality as something “other than me” and therefore to distinguish the symbol as an ego’s expression from the symbolised thing. Within a different theoretical contest (different but still linked to hermeneutics), Alfred Lorenzer suggests the opportunity to distinguish the “centre of the formation of the symbol”, which should be found in the ego, from its “source of stimulus” including the id (see Lorenzer 1971). Such a tension can be better understood in the light of Bion’s contributions: if there is a state of non-thought, from which thought is also generated, and if this state is characterised by a dimension of infinity which, however, can only be expressed when it is reduced to finitude that is, it becomes thinkable then we can understand the symbolic function as a bridge-function. It can be considered as the regulator of the flow of permanent communication that allows ideas to be producers of further meaning, as well as bearers of a defined sense. The symbol is therefore not an attribute of indistinction, but the function that allows one to proceed from indistinction (which remains the original event) and return to it. In other words, this is the function that allows one to retake from the magma of the origins without getting lost (see Martini 1998, 2005). Therefore, symbol has a paradoxical constitution in that it implies the coexistence of a rapprochement and distancing operation, which could be understood as the magmatic pole and the signal pole of the symbolic function. With a constant reference to the symbolic process or to the symbolic function, we can understand it as the connection between nonrepresentational unconscious, the unconscious representation and the conscious thought which is limited by the restrictions of the logical order. The symbolic process would thus configure the complex path of thought (which inevitably crosses those three areas) that connects the symbol (or rather, the symbolic image) to the symbolised object. In order to reach an integrated conception of the symbol, beyond the extremes of reductionism and excess, it is necessary to recognise, with Mario Trevi, that

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the insignificability of the symbol does not abolish the irrepressible attempt to assign significance to this signifier suspended on the void or projected onto an indistinct future. But this operation of attribution of significance should be so shrewd as to postpone, every time it is concluded, to another similar operation, which is similarly limited and opening up to a further nature of a new significance. The symbol has no meaning but endures (and transcends) innumerable processes of meaning. (Trevi 1990, 22; author’s trans.)

Assuming these premises, it is possible to conceive of identity in a concrete, effective way as something that is under symbolic construction, transformation and evolution.

7. Identity as narration There is a third, more recent, theoretical-practical model of identity that, together with the intersubjective and the symbolic model, has a significant connection with philosophical hermeneutics. This is the model of identity as narration. In a way quite similar to the previous one, this model intertwines some advancements in philosophical hermeneutics with certain developments in psychoanalysis. Where hermeneutical advancements depend upon a philosophical rethinking of central themes studied in narrative hermeneutics, psychoanalytical developments are concerned with those theoretical studies focused on the role of language, communication and narration played in auto-interpretative processes, as well as in therapeutic and clinical interactional processes. In philosophy, the major role in defining this model has been played by Paul Ricoeur (see Ricoeur 1983–1985, 1990). Conversely, in the scientific field it is Jerome Bruner’s research that has had a central function of reference (see Bruner 1986). Among psychoanalysts, we must recall Roy Schafer and Donald Spence (see Spence 1982): they emphasise the hermeneutic role of interpretation, representation and narration but, unfortunately, did so in a unilateral way, articulating a weak discourse unable to recognise and analyse the “referential drive” (Ricoeur) of the discourse. This position has received two criticisms: on the part of the North Americans, the criticism of creationism; on the part of the French, the criticism of ignoring the chaotic nature of the unconscious and rather aiming at consistency and exhaustiveness. On the contrary, in Ricoeur’s philosophy of narration, we find a distancing from both creationism (being a philosopher attentive to the referential drives) and coherentism (being a philosopher who considers the category of inachèvement as central).

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8. Identity as a neuro-functional mechanism Finally, under the paradigm of identity as a neuro-functional mechanism, we propose to summarise almost all members of that variegated set of emergentistic, reductionist monistic, dualistic-interactionist models which define and reconduct personal identity to the functioning of the brain. Even this model has tremendous importance in deepening the question of personal identity under different perspectives and it does so in a comprehensive way (that is, in a way that considers all aspects, including our neurobiological constitution, functioning and mechanism). Karl Popper, John C. Eccles and Wilder Penfield are among the most important and moderate scholars who regard the brain as the central function and reference for the study of personal identity. Conversely, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Daniel Dennett, Gerald Edelman and Owen Flanagan are among the most “polarised” scholars who embrace a physicalist reductionist view. Paul and Patricia Churchland and Stephen Stich are even more “polarised” in their embrace of the so-called eliminitavist perspective. It is through these models that the research presented in this volume will analyse all critical and theoretical aspects, in search of a more balanced and comprehensive vision which is able to avoid all extreme or unilateral theorizations. As previously mentioned, this study frames the problem of personal identity as a problem of a scientific and speculative nature–more precisely as a psychoanalytic and philosophical-hermeneutical question. However, its comprehensive “vocation” forces it to cross different disciplinary, theoretical and methodological fields. In an effort to thematise and make different models and points of view interact, we have evaluated the only way to mirror the complexity and real multi-faceting of personal identity as fact. On the one hand, the clarification and philosophical deepening of different conceptual and theoretical dimensions and perspectives represents a productive approach to redefining and engaging in critical reflection around any applicative use of a specific model in psychoanalysis. On the other hand, the process of theoretical-practical analysis and reflective reconsideration in psychoanalysis forms a decisive tool of control, correction, orientation and rethinking for an investigation oriented by philosophical-speculative purposes. Regressive and progressive thrusts, continuity and discontinuity, advance and arrest, experience and possibility, affirmation and disavowal, affectivity and initiative, character and project, action and responsibility, autonomy and relationship: all these form the “magmatic substance” of the reality of personal identity and the fact of being and becoming a person. We are born as individuals, but to become a person is a complex, tortuous process.

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We do not believe we are offering a new scientific theory or philosophy; rather, we want to offer a new point of departure for theoreticalscientific and speculative advancement. We will be reconsidering the fundamental characteristics of a dynamic and hermeneutic vision of identity, tracing a middle-way perspective and, at the same time, absorbing Bion’s idea of transformation and Ricoeur’s philosophy of translation.

CHAPTER 1 PERSONAL IDENTITY: A PERSISTENT DILEMMA

1. A brief historical-theoretical synthesis The concepts of “subject” and “foundation” have a long history of theoretical (re-)determination and transformation. Compared to the former, the notion of foundation has been more semantically stable, maintaining, in one way or another, its dual Greek and Latin, matrix: “foundation” as the ontological cause (ȜȩȖȠȢ or ĮੂIJȓĮ) of something and as the logical raison d’être (ratio). With the pre-Socratic philosophers, foundation as ȜȩȖȠȢ gained a polysemic variety, but it is Aristotle’s use of ȜȩȖȠȢ as causality and (one’s own) necessity that significantly affected the speculative discourse on personal identity (and beyond) throughout the centuries. This double meaning mirrors the intertwining, in Aristotle, between the process of knowing something and the process of demonstrating or producing such knowledge (see Anal. Post., I.2 71b9). In his view, the foundation is the logical and ontological necessity of something, that is, its effectiveness both as a real object and as an object of knowledge. In the modern era, a similar reaffirmation occurs with Hegel, but within a highly differentiated philosophical context. Consider, for example, the way in which Leibniz redefines the concept, overcoming the idea of necessity, through his principle of sufficient reason. It is thanks to modern philosophers that in the contemporary era we have inherited all major uses of “foundation” from antiquity: foundation as a legitimate constitution, foundation as a necessary constitution and foundation as a possibility. As for the concept of the “subject”, the oldest use of it goes back to Plato and Aristotle, in reference to specific determinations or qualities of a thing. The corresponding Greek word is ȪʌȠȤİȓȝİȣȠȣ, a term with a vast range of uses, from metaphysics to gnoseology and from logic to grammar. Conversely, its second major meaning–of “subject” as individual, spirit, human being and so on–is of a modern derivation. Yet, in modern philosophy, we find a clear intertwining between the two uses, especially

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putting in parallel with Aristotle’s metaphysical discourse around the “subject” and the substantialist approach to the human being, as seen in modern philosophers such as Descartes. Aristotle conceives of the subject as a “substrate”; and “the substrate is that of which the rest are predicated, while it is not itself predicated of anything else” (Metaphysics, VII.3 1028b). It is the matter, the form and the union of matter and form of which a thing is composed. It is the objective reality to which predicates and determinations are referred and attributed. It is true that only in Medieval philosophy would the concepts of subject and substance be unified as one (because for Aristotle the subject remains just one modality of the substance); however, the key concepts and determinations have an Aristotelian derivation. René Descartes would be the first among modern philosophers to define the subject (or Cogito) as a thinking thing, a mental substance. In the second meditation of his Meditations on First Philosophy, he states: “What am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wants, refuses, and also imagines and senses” (Meditations, II). Conceiving the subject or soul as a substratum, John Locke develops a perspective in parallel with that of Descartes, even though he is the author of a well-known critique of the notion of substance (see An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, 23, 2). In fact, Locke opens the way for all antisubstantialist perspectives against conceptions of personal identity as a permanent, stable and concrete thing. David Hume’s criticism against personal identity has a narrow connection with Locke’s empiricist critique. Hume sees the ego simply as “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement” (Treatise of Human Nature [1738], I, 6). For him, Identity depends on the relations of ideas; and these relations produce identity, by means of that easy transition they occasion. But as the relations, and the easiness of the transition may diminish by insensible degrees, we have no just standard, by which we can decide any dispute concerning the time, when they acquire or lose a title to the name of identity. (Ibid.)

The speculative and scientific problem concerning the consistency and reality of human subjectivity entered the field of modern and contemporary philosophical inquiry precisely through this synthetic combination or union of subject and substance as variously expressed in Descartes, Locke and Hume. It is due to this dialectic between subjectivity and substantiality that the problem of foundation has ended up identifying

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itself, from modernity onwards, as a term implicated in research around the entity of human subjectivity. Even the idealists Johann G. Fichte and Friedrich W. J. Schelling have moved within this furrow. Fichte’s idea of the ego (or Ego) as an “absolute subject” and Schelling’s “absolute selfconsciousness” directly or indirectly reactualise Spinoza’s philosophy of substance. This is particularly evident in Fichte’s 1794 book, The Science of Knowledge. In its first chapter we find a significant passage related to a study on the dialectics between the non-ego and the ego. In it, the ego is also conceived of and defined as something beyond this distinction, and dialectics is treated as an “absolute and unlimited substance”: The Ego and the Non-Ego, as posited in equality and opposition to each other, are both something (accidences) in the Ego, as divisible substance, and posited through the Ego as absolute and unlimitable substance, to which nothing is equal and nothing opposed; […] an absolute Ego is established as absolutely unconditioned and determinable by nothing higher than itself. (I, 3)

However, starting from the mid-nineteenth century, the perspective began to change significantly with regard to the differentiation and sectorialisation of the philosophical discourse, the advancement and specialization of the sciences and, again, the innumerable forms of interaction and dialectics of philosophy and science. On the one hand, in the twentieth century, we find the problematisation of the question of the subject is approached traditionally; in one way or another, this is the case with Heidegger’s philosophy of the Dasein, for example, in which the subject constitutes a consistent and unified/uniform reality. On the other hand, we can find both denialist conceptions–for example, with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s view–and rigid conceptions, as seen in philosophers such as Nicolai Hartmann (who considers subjectivity as a solely cognitive function), Edmund Husserl (who considers the ego as a function and as a historically unified reality) and John Dewey (who, again, interprets subjectivity as a function, a kind of mix between experience and knowledge). Distinctively, it is Paul Ricoeur who has developed a critical reflection around the various modern and contemporary perspectives on personal identity. Working on the theoretical ground, he considers both speculative and scientific analyses and argumentations about the entities of subjectivity and personal identity, looking for a new, comprehensive philosophy of the human being. He is highly aware of the complex degree of problematization generated as a consequence of the enormous

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development of scientific knowledges and their progressive differentiation. In fact, in his 1965 essay on Freud (Freud and Philosophy) he states: We have at our disposal a symbolic logic, an exegetical science, an anthropology, and a psychoanalysis and, perhaps for the first time, we are able to encompass in a single question the problem of the unification of human discourse. The very progress of the aforementioned disparate disciplines has both revealed and intensified the dismemberment of that discourse. Today the unity of human language poses a problem. (Ricoeur, 1970: 3–4)

This discourse today goes together with a dominant ideological paradigm on the true nature of human identity. Ricoeur defines it as a paradigm determined by the “tactic of suspicion” in which, in one way or another, personal identity is just a “mask”. He explains: Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. It is easier to show their common opposition to a phenomenology of the sacred, understood as a propaedeutic to the “revelation” of meaning, than their interrelationships within a single method of demystification. […] Marx is relegated to economics and the absurd theory of the reflex consciousness; Nietzsche is drawn toward biologism and a perspectivism incapable of expressing itself without contradiction; Freud is restricted to psychiatry and decked out with a simplistic pansexualism. (Ibid.: 32–33)

Freud is associated with Marx and Nietzsche for the fact that all three consider human consciousness as something fundamentally false. This école du soupçon has taught us not only that the certainty of consciousness is illusory, but that the very idea of transparency of consciousness in itself is illusory. Freud entered the problem of false consciousness via the double road of dreams and neurotic symptoms; his working hypothesis has the same limits as his angle of attack, which was, as we shall state fully in the sequel, an economics of instincts. Marx attacks the problem of ideologies from within the limits of economic alienation, now in the sense of political economy. Nietzsche, focusing on the problem of “value”–of evaluation and transvaluation–looks for the key to lying and masks on the side of the “force” and “weakness” of the will to power. (Ibid., 34)

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The development of Ricoeur’s research introduces other critical elements, such as the narrative-representational dimension and the historical-experiential factuality, in problematising the consistency and emancipatory flexibility of personal identity. However, he chooses to maintain the centrality of the dialectical tension generated with the modern ideological paradigm of suspicion and the fragmentary approach of hyperspecialised sciences of the human being. “How to unify in a comprehensive discourse our knowledges around the human being? How to explain and justify the variability and (at the same time) substantiality of personal identity?” These were Ricoeur’s major dilemmas. It is true that with the progressive articulation and diversification of perspectives, the theoretical developments and the disciplinary contributions related to the theme of personal identity, we are witnessing an exponential increase in terminological uses in contemporary times. In addition, meanings, determinations, differentiations and (similar or contradictory) uses are so varied as to constitute a complex conceptual web, a “conceptual network of subjectivity” with similarities and contradictory views and understandings (obviously, in accordance with different theorisations and interpretations). The concept of “spirit” is perhaps among the most obsolete today, but no less important than concepts such as subjectivity or personality, as it is mirrored in the variety of its cultural and theoretical understandings and interpretations. Primarily, it is used to define the introspective sphere of interiority, and the mind. The anthropological use of this concept can be traced back to Stoicism via the use of the Greek term ʌȣİȪȝĮ, “animating breath”. However, it enters the modern speculative world thanks to Descartes’s interpretation of spirit as something concerning the rational sphere or, better, as a synonym of the intellect or reason, that is the Cogito or the “thinking thing”. By unifying “spirit” with the Cogito and reason, Descartes aligns his rationalist view with Locke’s empiricist concept of “mind”–which forms today’s predominant idea of spirit as mind. Beyond the persistent (and productive) contemporary philosophical-religious discourse, the most significant theoretical-speculative variation on “spirit” currently comes from psychoanalysis: more precisely from analytical psychology, which develops Carl G. Jung’s theory about the couple ‘animus’/‘anima’. Jung introduced this distinction to define archetypal structures of the collective unconscious endowed with a compensatory function with respect to the conscious kind of identity. This new use was in response to the need to define a dialectic of complementarity between the poles, at the deep level of psychic life.

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Another essential concept within the conceptual network of subjectivity is the old, perpetually renewed term “identity”. In the philosophical field it has had very distinct definitions, the oldest of which is Aristotle’s use, which constitutes its most significant definition in the context of our research around personal identity. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle defines “identity”, or rather, “sameness”, as a kind of unity that belongs to many or to what is treated as many (“sameness is a unity of the being either of more than one thing or of one thing when it is treated as more than one, i.e. when we say a thing is the same as itself; for we treat it as two”; Metaphysics, book V.9 1018a7). In other words, a relation of identity or sameness is “a unity that belongs to a substantial nature” (see Halper 2009). This is a qualification that remained unchanged–even in science– over the centuries, through countless traditions and doctrines of the Middle Ages, modernity and the contemporary era. Although it does not appear in Freud’s terminology, the concept of identity is present in psychoanalysis and has been at least since the second half of the 1950s, thanks to Erik Erikson’s work on adolescence, in reference to which he introduces the use of the term “ego identity”. This term defines the existential stage of overcoming a series of identification steps and subsequent conflicting stages of integration, up to a state of “higher” synthesis, in adolescence, between the dimension of the ego and the dimension of the belonging to a group. The concept of “consciousness” is also significantly implied in the conceptual network of subjectivity, both for the philosophical and psychological sciences. Historically speaking, only within Stoicism is the full sense of consciousness as awareness of one’s own and of one’s own acts of thought understood. Later, Augustine of Hippo follows the Stoics’ line, mainly in reference to the act of self-reflective return to oneself (conceiving of it as a spiritual experience). In modern times, it is again Descartes who establishes its paradigmatic use, that is, that use designed to mark the following centuries, exactly in the use that is found in the trend towards modern and contemporary thinkers and scholars, at least up to Freud in science and up to Heidegger in philosophy. While Heidegger demolishes the ideal of the metaphysical primacy of consciousness, establishing the inder-Welt-sein idea as the essential characteristic of the Desein, Freud deeply transforms the relationship between subjectivity, mind and inner life, entirely revolutionising the understanding of the psychic life. Freud completely redefines the problem of personal identity via the introduction of new terms (pre-conscious/consciousness, unconscious/unconsciousness, super-ego, id) which redetermine the connections and relationships between each term of the conceptual web of subjectivity. Without doubt, one of the major changes has to do with the new understanding of what the ego is.

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Beyond the general dynamic approach (which has a significant impact against all ideas of ego as something autonomous and stable), starting from 1920, Freud considered the ego as partially unconscious and as a “superficial” function of the mental apparatus. Directly or indirectly, such a perspective reactualised Hume’s criticism against the idea of personal identity as substance. And in some ways, his lesson was to be taken up again and enhanced in the wake of Kant and Idealism, starting from Existentialism, with the affirmation of the idea of the identity of the ego as a relationship or defining it according to a somewhat more fragile, variable and unstable entity (and not as a unity, as it was persistently treated by philosophers like Kant). For Søren Kierkegaard, for example, the ego is the result of a kind of synthesis between the natural dimensions of the body and the soul. Even Pragmatism develops something similar, putting in relational connection different aspects and dimensions of psycho-biological and sociological life. John Dewey, for example, fully develops the implications of the idea of ego as a relationship (1) to oneself, (2) to one’s reality and (3) to the world. In particular, he highlights the creative capacity of action and initiative, that is, the role played by personal experience, pragmatic doing and interaction in the process of psychological, sociological and moral development. Among pragmatist scholars, another important theoretical-speculative contribution comes from the philosopher and scientist Georg H. Mead. In his book Mind, Self and Society (1934), he discusses the emergence of mind and self from the interaction and communicational-behavioural processes between organisms. As we known, this social behaviourism played a central function in defining a new scientific discipline: social psychology. Actually, in Mead it is impossible to separate the description and understanding of the process of maturation of a person as a social being from the processes that characterise the human mind. He particularly focuses the self as a kind of dialectical synthesis between action, interaction, language and emancipation. At the beginning of the third part of the book, Mead’s explains: The language process is essential for the development of the self. The self has a character which is different from that of the physiological organism proper. The self is something which has a development; it is not initially there, at birth, but arises in the process of social experience and activity, that is, develops in the given individual as a result of his relations to that process as a whole and to other individuals within that process. (Mead 1934, 135)

Returning to psychoanalysis, we underline the rich theoretical differentiation among psychoanalysts. Where Freud explains that “The ego is not master in its own house” (Freud 1968, 143), Jacques Lacan interprets

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the ego as a function deriving from the “stage of the mirror”. The identification that takes place in the mirror stage is a fundamental transformation that the subject undergoes by taking the image as his own. It is a transformation by identification that precedes the subsequent process of identification with others through the mediation of language, and which is entirely based on the “mediating function” of the body. It is in relation to the reflection of it that the child conquers the ego in a progressive and structuring way. Piera Aulagnier follows a similar line of reasoning. On the one hand, Aulagnier defines the ego simply as ego knowledge by the ego; on the other, she welcomes Lacan’s theorisation, by (1) downgrading his structuralist discourse for a more historicising perspective and (2) connecting the identification process essentially to the identification phase of the child with the mother. Another significant theoretical and paradigmatic achievement in psychoanalysis comes from Heinz Hartmann’s 1939 book, in which a new important disciplinary domain focused on the ego is established: the “ego psychology”. Hartmann takes as his starting point the idea that the ego has an autonomous function which operates beyond the internal dialectics it has with the id and the super-ego. Not only is the problem of foundation discarded as such, but the very idea of psychic life and personal identity is pragmatically welded to the external world and to the experiential dimension, since the aforementioned functions are primarily functions of adaptation to the external world. Other analysts have a particular relevance in readdressing the understanding of the ego. Among them, we mention Jung, with his analytical psychology, and Heinz Kohut for the different ways in which they thematise the self in dialectic with the ego. For Jung, the self is initially understood as an “empirical concept” designating the entire reality of psychic phenomena and expressing the unity of the personality in its entirety. The unconscious life pushes the self to a place between the experiential and the inexperiential within which the symbolic life and the empirical symbols are located. These symbols are loaded with emotional value and play an important mediating role as they operate in a sort of inter-kingdom within which the fundamental struggle for personal emancipation or individuation is played out. In Jung, individuation “means becoming a single, homogeneous being, and, in so far as ‘individuality’ embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self. We could therefore translate individuation as ‘coming to self-hood’ or ‘self-actualisation’” (Collected Works, 7, paragraph 266). For his part, Kohut has had considerable influence in the Anglo-Saxon world; his perspective has been compared to Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris and Rudolph M. Loewenstein’s ego psychology. Kohut interprets the self as a principle of motivation in the

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making, or as a faculty oriented to the achievement of a progressive, relative, autonomy as a principle of motivation integrating the drives according to the order of its realisation plan and in accordance with a dimension of relationality in the world.

2. Identity construction: the psychoanalytic perspective We can imagine, from both a philosophical and psychoanalytical point of view, the identity question inserted in a sort of pyramidical hierarchy that finds the concepts of self, subject and person at the top. We have seen how, in the philosophical field, the path unravels from the subject to the foundation (with all its metaphysical load), up to the idea of person and personal identity (to which we will return at the end of this work). Psychoanalysis and psychopathology give us a warning as to precisely where identity undergoes the most serious destruction, apparently testifying in favour of the inconsistency and relativity of the notion of subject. It is precisely here that the immeasurable difference between the identitarian crisis of psychosis and the identitarian crisis of modern subjectivity is shown. Therefore, they indirectly denounce the inconsistency of absolute relativism: the possibility of infinitely shaping identity “at one’s pleasure” can be realised only in delusion. The evanescence of the subject, its “interruption”, and its radical transformation in an incomprehensible way are possible, but they are not universal connotations of human nature. They occur in very particular and very painful situations, which also implies the coexistence of two conditions: a) a denial of shared reality and the possible construction of a new and private reality (i.e. delusion) and b) a great psychic suffering. The self is imprisoned within the system of thought that it has generated itself. In psychoses, the evanescence of the subject, asserted by a certain post-modern philosophy, does not imply an extension of existential possibilities and a greater freedom of change, but rather the reverse. The more the subject crosses the void, the less he/she will be able to transform. However, a clarification must be made. The subject never dissolves completely and definitively, not even in cases of more serious psychotic destructuring, such as schizophrenia. Even the most serious psychotic patients maintain a healthy part, as Bion asserted, or in any case, a non-psychotic dimension which provides coherence and continuity (albeit of a reduced degree) to the person. It is thanks to this that we can build a relationship with the other, even in the acute phase of the disease, that is, the one in which the destructuring of the subject is most evident. As mentioned, it is the enigmatic paradoxicality of the subject who is no longer master of his home (which, however, does not imply its denial,

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if Wo Es war, soll Ich werden [Freud 1932]) that represents the first contribution of psychoanalysis to the dismantling of the subject as a foundation. In this sense, Freud’s text is already entirely covered by a dialectical tension that continuously allows it to deconstruct and reconstruct the subject. It is a tension that is lost, to the extent that it is denied or emphasised, within the framework of those orientations which, curiously recalling both to post-modernism, attest both to its negation (in Europe, with the “weak thinking”, French structuralism and Lacanism) and to its sometimes uncritical reconsideration (in America, with self psychology, intersubjectivism and interactionism). As Ogden reminds us, the subject is a decentered subject (Ogden 1994, 16). If Ogden speaks of becoming a subject, Castoriadis, for his part, speaks of the subject as a unity à faire and as a projet psychanalytique (Castoriadis 1975–1990). For Ogden, a dialectic arises, even beyond the specific moment of analysis, between the living, the psychic and the social. The necessary return to consciousness to which Ogden refers here translates into an emphasis on sublimation processes, once again correlated with the dimensions of becoming, of the original incompleteness. He states: “Le sujet humain n’est pas simplement réel, il n’est pas donné, il est à faire et il se fait moyennant certaines conditions et dans certaines circonstances… il est une possibilité abstraite… il est création historique et création dont on peut suivre l’histoire” (Castoriadis 1975–1990, 195). Human subjectivity, explains Castoriadis, is characterised by reflectivity (which should not be mistaken with thinking) and the will (see ibid.). Thus, the demolition and construction of identity represent not only the two always coexisting polarities of the psychoanalytic process and what is psychic, but also the continuous and unresolved movement of every existence. It finds foundation in those identification processes that allow our psychic birth and which accompany us in all ages of life. Identification is always marked by a complex dialectical game between mirroring in others– that is, the imitative assumption of the identity of the object–and internalisation, that is, the ability (a) to make the different identifications flow within the self, (b) to transform them and (c) to make them the building blocks of our personal and particular identity. This is why psychoanalysis, although opposed to Descartes’s certainty and despite having introduced the Spaltung to the heart of the subject, remains extraneous to its demolition. It is no longer seen as a foundation, but as a project which aims at unity but (a) implies multiplicity and (b) offers a multiplicity which aspires to realisation through recognition of the inevitability and the benefits of incompleteness.

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As Alfredo Lombardozzi suggests, in identity, psychoanalysis captures both a factor of continuity, which also rests on unconscious fantasies, and a fluidity, largely generated by life experiences (see Lombardozzi 2015, XVII). Identification processes play an essential role in this. Their function is, in fact, generative of human identity in the beginning (with the infant and child), and transformative of the already organised personality of the adult individual. All identification processes require an interaction between individuals, but necessarily also pass through the internal world of the subject in an exchange with the identifications already acquired. Therefore, identification processes weld the intrapsychic dimension to the interpersonal one in an inseparable way. It is Freud himself, within Lecture 31 (“The Anatomy of the Mental Personality”) of his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1932), who provides a concise definition of identification: “the assimilation of one ego to another one, as a result of which the first ego behaves like the second in certain respects, imitates it and in a sense takes it up into itself” (Freud 1932, 68). However, aggressive or even significant values are not extraneous to this process. Indeed it is Freud who recalls that identification can take the form of a cannibal incorporation (ibid.). He also differentiates two sides of identification. The first leads to the formation of the super-ego, starting from identification with parental figures; the other generates identification with the lost object. This dynamic had already been a subject of reflection in Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1915) and is summed up in the famous aphorism: “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego” (Freud 1915, 249). The person–previously loved and hated ambivalently, and now lost as a result of a separation or mourning–now settles within the ego, becomes part of it, thus generating a sense of guilt and self-hatred. Hence Freud places three modalities of identification, understanding it as (a) an original form of an emotional bond, (b) the replacement of a libidinal bond thanks to the introjection of the object into the ego, and (c) the communion of characteristics with another person who is not subject to sexual instincts (Freud 1921, chap. VII). However, these distinctions have today lost some of their effectiveness and their theoretical relevance. Conversely, what seems to be essential is the distinction that Freud established between primary and secondary identification. With the former we refer to the more ancestral identification mechanisms, such as incorporation and projective identification. These can prevail and persist abnormally in serious disorders, but at the same time they are also the psychological basis for the subsequent development of the individual and for the acquisition of stable and differentiated identifications. Primary identifications allow a progressive emergence from a state of relative somato-psychic indifferentiation and the

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differentiation of the self from the non-self. They provide the basis for the temporal and spatial constancy and continuity of the self. It is these primary identification processes that are given particular importance today, in line with the widespread tendency of contemporary psychoanalysis to pay greater attention to “primitive states of mind”, to the unrepressed unconscious and the unrepresentable psychism. Likewise, the central role of the physiological variant of projective identification (Rosenfeld 1987) is recognised. Thanks to this, in fact, the child can rid him/herself of psychic constructs, however informal, which anguish or terrify him/her by projecting them onto the mother. Then the child can go back to recover them (and therefore identify with them) once they have been mitigated and made tolerable thanks to maternal containment. Imitation also plays an important role in primary identification. Eugenio Gaddini, in his well-known paper “On Imitation”, proposes a distinction between imitation and identification, which, he claims “can represent […] its normal and essential constitutive element, or instead a more or less successful counterfeit. Gaddini also distinguishes imitation from primary identifications, since where the latter imply that “a reality, even though fragmentary, becomes introjected and assimilated” (Gaddini 1968, 476; authors’ trans.), imitations “have to do with the unconscious fantasy and not yet with the reality”. It follows that “imitations and introjections therefore converge in this process, originally fragmentary and gradually more integrated, for which I would like to reserve the term identification” (477). The result is a conception of imitation as a highly primitive process that tends to exclude the object, since with it we tend “to be the object”. If imitation has a regressive character, it thus tends to magically achieve union with the object, in this way becoming, like the object, omnipotent, but at the expense of the sense of identity, of reality, and of the objectual relationship. This is proven by the fact that the fields in which it is easier to observe the phenomenon are those of dreams, character disorders, perversions and psychoses. However, what is perhaps more anticipatory of Gaddini’s contribution is his notation, which, coherently with the primitive–but certainly not necessarily pathological character–of imitation “seems to be connected, originally, with perception, in the sense that primitive perception is physically imitative” (476). Here, the author seems to predict certain current developments in neuroscience (mirror neurons, for example), in this way correlating imitation both with the dimensions of corporality and sensoriality, as Rinaldi notes (see Rinaldi 2014), and with the context that we might today refer to as the unrepressed unconscious. Thus, as in the case of projective identification also of imitation we can have a pathological variant, of which there are many examples in adult life and in the psychology of the masses. There is also a

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physiological variant essential for the growth of the human child. In this second case, it can be understood as a sort of mirroring of the other that favours the construction of the first bricks of identity. In this way, the imitative mechanisms acquire a particular importance precisely in establishing and guaranteeing the space-time continuity of the self. Unlike primary identifications, the “secondary” identifications that Freud ascribes to the end of the Oedipus Complex undoubtedly have the characteristics of ambivalence and specificity. In other words, they are aimed at the specific traits of a determined individual, whether the parent, a significant adult or a peer. We identify ourselves with an ability, a way of posing, a way of being, an aspect of our character, and so on. But these identifications are usually conditioned with a good dose of ambivalence. If it is not limited to an unresolved love-hate dialectic, if it is contained and tolerated, the ambivalence of secondary identifications can be an important growth factor. It is, above all, thanks to this that the other is not internalised as such but profoundly transformed. In this way, the other does not remain an extraneous body, but is inserted (with some of its partial and specific aspects and not in its totality) into the self, which can, as a result, now build, now reinforce, now modify. Of special importance here is the possibility of an integration between the different partial identifications, which can be seen as the “‘building blocks’ of the self […] but with a clarification of which we will now state”. At this point, in fact, the reflection on the relationship (and the difference) between identification and interiorisation (the latter understood as “the basic way of functioning of the psyche”; Loewald 1980, 71) is of particular interest. Hans Loewald stresses that in internalisation, the fundamental point is the transformation of the relationship with an external object into one with an internal object, in which a surrender of the identification with the object is implicit. Identification “tends to erase a difference: subject becomes object and object becomes subject” (83). It follows that the result, or at least ideal, of internalisation is identification of oneself as an individual, and to not be identified with objects. From the necessary and preliminary phases to the moment of interiorisation, identifications are internally dissolved and a new psychic structure appears (see ibid.). It is therefore perhaps appropriate to distinguish the process from the outcome, which is the articulated and never-linear path of identification from what the author calls, precisely, “internalisation”. It implies the renunciation of identity with the object, the emancipation from it and the destruction of the identifications themselves. Identification and internalisation are therefore two processes that always coexist in interpersonal relationships, and their different weighting can make the difference between normal and pathological development. It

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would therefore be an oversimplification to affirm that identification processes are the building blocks of identity if, as we have seen, identity stands as dissolving towards them. At this point the question of what “subject” means in the psychoanalytic vocabulary returns. We could also conclude: Unconscius, ergo Subjectum. It is the unconscious that justifies the idea of the subject or, with more decisive language, it is the unconscious as its matrix that generates the subject. In this way, the idea of the subject reveals itself to be marked by a weakness ab initio, by a reference to the incomplete, the void, the unrepresented; but nevertheless, it is the unconscious that guarantees its evolutionary-transformative destiny. The fact that today’s conceptions attribute to the subject a much broader meaning than that reserved for the removed component goes in the same direction. If, in fact, the unconscious refers to unthought thoughts, thoughts without thinkers, an emotion and a formless sensoriality that have not yet reached the status of representation, then the category of becoming reigns supreme and prevents the foundation from ontologising. Without this, however, that impediment can translate into the disappearance of subjectivity. On the contrary, it is precisely in this incessant work of translation of the shapeless sensation into emotions and thoughts that the “pieces” which constitute the person and that will configure his/her overall orientation and worldview are to be found. Starting from here, it may be appropriate to grasp a double and contrasting vectoriality in the paths of identification, which we will summarise in terms of personation and subjectivation. Even in the interactive reciprocity of identification processes, we can understand with subjectivation those who lead from the other to the self and with personation those who lead from the self to the other. Subjectivation refers to all those movements that constantly accompany the whole of human existence, starting from the psychic birth and that allow the formation and consolidation of personal identity thanks to the otherness that is incorporated and introjected into oneself. Personation, which of course coexists with subjectivation in an irreducible dialectical relationship, rather expresses the movement that translates into a constant affective investment towards the outside. It is an investment that must be understood both in terms of quality of feelings and in terms of spatial modulation even with variations even in excess or defecit, up to the elimination of the self-other distance in confusional states or states of profound empathy. The reference is to those contributions in the philosophical and psychopathological fiend that have firmly bound the question of the self to the question of the other, starting of course, with Paul Ricoeur, who has repeatedly reiterated how the ipse-identity brings into play a dialectic

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between the self and the other which is complementary to that between ipseity and sameness (see Ricoeur 1990, 3). The otherness does not add from the outside to the ipseity, in which a way as to prevent its solipsistic drift, but belongs to its ontological constitution (317). By differentiating subjectivation and personation, we certainly do not intended to deny the circularity and the intimate connection between projective and introjective movements, but to highlight the different relevance that, starting from different phases and existential contingences, the movement from the other and from the self takes. It relevance differs with variations that are also reflected on the ethical level, and therefore relate to personal responsibility. Subjectivation calls into question the passage from pure corporality to the constitution of the psyche and of relationality. In this sense, it is mainly related to primary identification, and it places on the other a fundamentally important function. This significant other, be it the parent, educator or any figure belonging to the world of adults, progressively “gives way”. The passage from subject to person calls the other into a dimension which is no longer “superordinate” but rather of equal exchange. It is recognised not only as an object of our emotional investments, but as a person in turn. The psychoanalytic situation is, perhaps, an intermediate situation. There is a similarity, without equivalent, with the mother-child relationship that shapes those first identifications that will lead to subjectivisation. At the same time, it is without doubt a relationship with the adult world that contributes to the endless process of becoming a person. The symbolic charge of the psychoanalytic situation, as well as the regression phases that it provides, can allow a retracing of the processes of primary identification, including the moments of merging. At the same time, secondary identifications are consolidated through mirroring the figure of the analyst; and the more hate-filled and more self-destructive unresolved ambitions, lessen. Subjectivation and personation intertwine in an inextricable way, as do the paths that lead from the other to selfhood and the path from the self to otherness.

CHAPTER 2 THE DECONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY

1. From individuation to deconstruction Historically, the process of dissolution of the subject as a reflectivespeculative theme runs in parallel with the process of dissolution of the unitary subject due to the advancements of sciences such as biology, neurophysiology and psychopathology in the second half of the nineteenth century. Developments in these disciplines have, in various ways, determined the failure of the principle of individuation. In particular, it resulted from advancements in biology (specifically in cytology) in which the understanding of the structure, life and functioning of cells revealed the intrinsic instability and constant tension caused by higher levels of cell differentiation with living organisms. As Remo Bodei explains: Such questions quickly extend beyond physiology and are applied in an analogous manner to other scientific disciplines or fields of knowledge. The transition from monocellular to multicellular organisms is thus interpreted (according to Spencerian models) as an evolution from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. But since the state of equilibrium reached by the composites is unstable, the more complex the organism and the more differentiated its cells, the more it will be exposed to dissolution. (Bodei 2004, 256)

Within such a context, even Darwin’s evolutionism played a significant role, not only in naturalising the view of the human being, but also in reinforcing the idea of identity as a process. Philosophical research absorbed it in various ways, via the Anglo-Saxon tradition of pragmatism, via psychoanalysis and through the work of the social evolutionists. Among the latter, Herbert Spencer’s evolutionism has been particularly able to productively use the metaphor of evolution from the simple to the complex, from the original to the accomplished, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and so on. In his interpretation, the progressive movement characterising human maturation goes hand-in-hand with the progressive

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articulation of society. In addition, Spencer mirrors a view in which evolution and dissolution somehow appear to be complementary terms. In fact, every society that finds itself unable to undergo constant development is destined to regress; the same is true for every type of organism, including the human being and human psychic life. For with in psychanalysis, not only Freud’s general naturalistic vision of the human being but also various other psychological ideas were linked to Darwin’s conception. Among them, we can, for example, recall the idea reflected by Freud’s assertion that “impressive analogies from biology have prepared us to find that the individual’s mental development repeats the course of human development in an abbreviated form” (Freud 1910b, 97). In general, psychoanalysis absorbs Darwin’s lesson within its dynamic psychology, “converting” the “logic of evolution” into a sort of “processual logic” which tends to consider all neuro-biological, psychic and “spiritual” phenomena in teleological and dialectical-processual terms. It is perhaps in Carl G. Jung’s research that we find the first refined solution of synthesis in connecting, under this perspective, the biological-energetistic dimension to the dimensions of symbolic life and the sphere of meaning. Psychic energy and symbolic life are in constant dialectic within the process of maturation and integration of the personality a complicated process which may even be blocked, unaccomplished or turned into a regressive movement. In fact, Jung’s notion of individuation assumes its fullest theoretical-scientific meaning precisely in reference to this “dynamic vision” of progression, that is, of the process of individuation as a dialectics of individuation and regression1. As is known, the psychoanalytical perspective has largely influenced the philosophical field concerned with investigating the reality of human subjectivity. Above all, we can recall Ricoeur’s work on Freud and Philosophy, in which he develops a hermeneutical interpretation of Freud’s writings that tends to go in the same direction as Jung’s theorisation (rather than Freud’s). By reactualising Hegel’s dialectical approach, Ricoeur reinforces psychoanalysis’s progressive point of view. He interprets subjectivity as a hermeneutic process in which the individual reaches emancipation thanks to the dialectic of archê and telos, that is, the dialectic of regressive and progressive psychic and spiritual movements. In the book he states: In order to have an archê a subject must have a telos. If I understand this relationship between archeology and teleology, I would understand a number of things. First of all I would understand that my notion of reflection is itself abstract as long as this new dialectic has 1

See, for example: Jung 1928, 60 ff.

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not been integrated into it. The subject, we said above, is never the subject one supposes. […] The subject must also discover that the process of “becoming conscious”, through which it appropriates the meaning of its existence as desire and effort, does not belong to it, but belongs to the meaning that is formed in it. The subject must mediate self-consciousness through spirit or mind, that is, through the figures that give a telos to this “becoming conscious”. (Ricoeur 1970, 459)

On the one hand, this specific advancement of neurobiological and psychological sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century favours the idea of the dissolution of the subject in its unity and substantiality. On the other hand, the processual approach opens the way for a new understanding of subjective unity and accomplishment–precisely as an emancipatory movement. In fact, as we will see, Ricoeur is among those who refuse the antisubstantialist resolution. We find additional reason for interest in meditating on Bodei’s paper. In it, he emphasises both the ratio behind the dissolution of the unitary and substantial subject, and the close connection of the problem of identity’s evolution-dissolution with the problem of the social sphere (i.e., social reality itself and the sphere for social development via interaction and intersubjective relationships). This double dimension of the problem of personal identity’s constitution (psychic with respect to the somatic, and of the self with respect to the other) has been the object of extensive and indepth research in both the philosophical and the psychoanalytical fields. However, it is rare in both fields to find an even-handed to the two dimensions. There is a prevalent tendency to polarise the discourse upon subjectivity or upon intersubjectivity, as a result of a sophisticated dialectics of reciprocal influence between philosophy and science. This appears particularly evident in philosophy of mind, where scholars such as David Chalmers, John Searle and Donald Davidson have developed important analyses and theorisations but are too focused on subjectivity. Even in the book Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Davidson 2001), the latter articulates a mind-centred or subject-centred view. Similarly, though perhaps more paradoxically, Searle’s work establishes the comprehensive premise of a social theory but, in turn, this social theory is founded on a radicalised biological conception of the subject that forces the research to remain polarised on a biologisitic, reductionistic vision of the subject-assubject. The whole reality of individual, social and human action returns to the map of biological and organic functioning. For some reason, even such a different tradition as neurophenomenology reveals a similar tendency. Recent developments in this intradisciplinary field show a new articulation toward the intersubjective sphere (as is the case with enactivism), but it has

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foundations in phenomenology, a field which addresses, in a theoretical and methodological way, all things and phenomena from the exclusive point-ofview of the subject. A different discourse arises with pragmatism. Mead, especially, develops a well-balanced perspective of the human being which harmonises, on the one hand, subjective and interrelational aspects in his anthropological philosophy and, on the other, psychological and sociological knowledge in his scientific theorisation. Even within philosophical hermeneutics, we find a clear model for more comprehensive visions. In particular, its hermeneutical-phenomenological lineage articulates and deepens a new understanding of the subject and subjectivity as essentially relational. This is a tradition that brings a different problematic: it tends to polarise things from the other’s perspective, that is, the other or alterity instead of the subject and subjectivity. Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy offers an example of this. Philosophical hermeneutics is a kind of theoretical-speculative mixture in which we find constructive as well as dissolutive theories, unilateral as well as multilateral perspectives. This is particularly true when we consider contemporary contributions in a hermeneutical-phenomenological territory that embraces Jean-Paul Sartre’s as well as Jacques Derrida’s philosophies. In such a territory, Ricoeur’s work emerges as a kind of comprehensive and harmonious miracle: not unilateral, nor radical, nor antisubstantial. Ricoeur’s model is diametrically opposed to Sartre’s nihilistic view and to Derrida’s deconstructionist approach. Even Derrida is quasi-entirely part of the history of philosophical hermeneutics; and his deconstructionism is, for us, relevant to the study of subjectivity and identity from the relational point of view, as well as to the search for a productive connection between dialectics and deconstruction in understanding the dynamism of the psychic life and personal emancipation. An examination of Derrida’s deconstructionism brings out various aspects of the scientific and speculative problematics concerning subjectivity and intersubjectivity, relational life and personal identity. In fact, a certain view developed by studying certain phenomena in psychopathology finds a correspondence with deconstructionism, and the “filter” of phenomenological hermeneutics can turn it in something theoreticallyspeculative productive.

2. From Derrida’s (paradigm of) deconstruction to identity’s deconstruction Derrida’s research starts as a speculative work on writing as a generalisable structure, as the field of différence. In fact, writing always forms an

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articulated, rich and complex network of references and traces, indications and connections. It is from this original starting point that Derrida’s investigation opened to a general philosophy of the alterity and the event, and to a philosophy of the opening-toward-the-future. In Derrida’s view there is a constant tension toward the new and the different, as an expressive part of an inner dialectic dynamism of overcoming, which is the intertwined dynamism of life itself with the human existential project. In addition to the dilemma determined by the formula that final accomplishment is equal to death, there is the dilemma related to the fact that personal realisation perpetually ends up coinciding with the cognitive impossibility of anticipating the future, that is, the impossibility of the future as a positive idea and as a concrete experience. Derrida focuses this central quality of the human experience in his/her perpetual present. The present moment is a current and undefined horizon, anchored to a past, to a context of relational textures (directly with others or indirectly, thanks to the mediation of culture, language etc.) and to an opened future, that is, the undefined surplus which is the possibility of tomorrow itself. This does not mean that there is already, in some way, a pre-understanding or a kind of pre-conditional context which defines or determines what will happen. Quite similarly to Mead’s view expressed in The Philosophy of the Present (1932), for Derrida, in fact, not only is the future a novelty in the sense of difference and distance, it is also the sphere of events, of things that happen in a topical form, unexpectedly and not immediately understandable. Events are not facts, and their experience and understanding comes, later, when that specific event has passed and another one–new, unexpected and unknown– is coming. The thinking, the experiencing and the understanding are always a step back and the uncertainty is perpetual. There is a connection here with the discourse of diversity as a form of otherness; and it is intertwined with the philosophy of difference. This represents another particular side of the deconstructionist discourse on otherness. Derrida predominantly considers the other not as someone similar to me, nor the essential part of me, but treats human beings as social beings. The other is the other, the alter: an individual who is different from me. At the same time, he focuses on the fact that relationship means relationship regardless of the effective existence of mutual knowledge and shared interests. Human relationships are constitutive, but at the same time, because of the fact that the other is the other, they do not deny individual primacy, singularity and unicity. From another perspective, Derrida rejects the distinction between otherness and sameness, as emerges in his critique of Levinas (see Derrida 1964). In his interpretation, otherness is always defined in relation to an identity. The self is the singularity that emerges through defence from the other or, even, from

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everything social, institutional and ideological that tends to embrace the false reality of a full, perpetual present, to a non-distinctive and normalising unification. The deconstructionist difference involves not only the movement of distancing, but the dialectic of development and progress, advancement and emancipation; and it is for this reason that it is interesting for us to see in which way it concurs with complete a positive phenomenologicalhermeneutical philosophy of the human being. In this sense, certain later papers by Derrida are more significant and useful than his early work. In fact, his philosophical anthropological vision emerges step by step, as his interest in anthropological dilemmas deepens. In particular, in his 1972 Marges de la philosophie we find the interesting paper Les fins de l’homme, which collects certain key ideas of Derrida’s “fragmentary” philosophy of the human being. Derrida does not develop a unitary philosophy of the human being; his contributions are rather critical and scattered over a domain largely extraneous to philosophers, and more linked to the work of anthropologists. Only in later papers, such as Les fins de l’homme, does he seem to pay more attention to classical philosophical concepts and ideas. By reading his early works we understand that, in Derrida’s view, the reality of the human being is one that appears, in history and reality, with scripture and writing. It is not the spiritual life or Cogito or social experience, but rather writing which determines the emergence of the human being as human (see Tedlock 1980). As Tedlock explains: The machine turns up in Derrida’s discourse as well, as when he identifies the field of arche-writing, or grammatology, with a “theory of cybernetics” that would “oust all metaphysical concepts– including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory–which until recently served to separate the machine from man” […] What is left of biology in this cybernetic vision is “a toothless humanity that would exist in a prone position using what limbs it had left to push buttons”. (829)

Due to the fact that language assumes such a relevant role, Derrida opens an important chapter of confrontation with linguistics and structuralism. An important and complex dialectics between Claude LéviStrauss’s structural anthropology and Derrida’s deconstruction would determine important advancements as well as new complications, differentiations and conflicts. The major consequence would be the poststructuralist tradition and a new (but more undetermined) philosophical, scientific and cultural mixture.

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The level of complexity in elements of possible convergence and effective divergence between scholars predominantly linked to structuralism rather than deconstructionism and vice-versa, reaches a considerable height when it comes to the reinterpretation of the reality of the unconscious and, by extension, the reality of psychic life. However, Derrida’s position is basically distinctive from structuralism: for him, the unconscious has a historical-cultural and experiential substance; it is essentially related to the personal experience of an individual. His understanding of the unconscious is more linked to the discourse of the individual and collective memory, via a conception of memory understood as différence and trace, in close connection with both his philosophy of writing and representation, and his critique against normalisation (or levelling) and repression (in fact, memory is in a perpetual tensional condition of preservation and reiteration of the known, defensive reactions, and opening up to the new). Following Derrida, we can say that cultural context is significantly involved in the formation of subjective identity, with its willingness to spiritually reproduce itself via cultural transmission. It is always a vehicle and expression of the dimension of human interaction and human sociality, quite similarly to how it is described and theorised in Mead’s Mind, Self and Society. However, more than Mead, Derrida underlines the uniqueness of a particular subject, of an individual in this cultural-social repetition. It is always a repetition with differences. On the one hand, subjectivity is involved in an unsurpassable plot; on the other hand, within that plot it plays something new: the subject moves and expresses itself in a differential form, tending to the new and possibly embracing the future as an open possibility. The challenge of personal progress goes through stratification and twisting, both at the level of memory and of the project, as well as undergoing a dialectic of recognitionby-resistance, that is, a tensional dialectic of cultural, political and social belonging to and differentiation from. The parallel between this progressive view and others, such as Mead’s or Ricoeur’s, is partial, because deconstructionism is the bearer of a relativistic point-of-view which depontentiates the perspective of an accomplishment or realisation in terms of personal identity via progress or emancipation. The relativism that deconstructionism expresses is related to the critique of the substantialist conception of the subject that goes back to David Hume’s scepticism. Derrida can reactualise Hume’s critical philosophy of personal identity through embracing and developing Husserl’s phenomenological interpretation (see Gallagher 1992). Shaun Gallagher is correct in explaining that: The poststructuralist decentering of subjectivity is won by Derrida in part through his struggle with Husserl’s correction of Hume.

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Chapter 2 Neither cogito nor excogito escape the play of différence which is the flux of consciousness. The subject is neither Hume’s identity producing imagination, nor Husserl’s cogito, a self-presence based on a self-constituting, unifying retentional structure, but a constituted product of this textualizing retentional interweaving. The personal subject is itself a text, a “fiction” of self-presence, produced by a pre-personal, infrastructural textualizing which, Derrida says, “is not a primum movens [but] imprints upon the whole a movement of fiction.” (27)

Husserl embraces Hume’s perspective regarding the functioning of consciousness through the “flow of perceptions”, but rejects the need to introduce the idea of a faculty or “transcendental” function unifying consciousness, although he does identify a unifying principle internal to the structure of the flow of perceptions. In fact, it is characterised more by the element of continuity than by discontinuity and fragmentation. And it is by virtue of this close connection between continuity and flow, between perceptual experience and consciousness, that Husserl identifies in the presence-to-him/herself the key to understanding what unity and identity of consciousness is. Derrida worked critically on exactly this point–and more precisely on the time-consciousness nexus. For him, the immediacy of presence-to-him/herself is always already defeated due to mediation by that which opposes the current perceptual content and which, at the same time, “composes” it: non-presence and non-perception; the work of memory (retention) and the moment that follows, of waiting and so on (protention). We are simply describing the movement of difference itself, that is, the movement that determines the subject. Subjectivity, in fact, is the openness to otherness, the incessant movement of difference. The above passage on deconstruction does not offer any conclusive truth about the value of relativism or of a non-substantialist approach, but rather highlights the instrumental significance and usefulness of a transversal and theoretical-tensional approach. Its usefulness and significance are proven by the new understanding–one which is more realistic, better rooted in the factuality, historicity and subjectivity of the individual. For Derrida, it is not only reason that is the result of different forces in perpetual movement, but also polarisation in given linguistic-cultural structures; and the same can be said of the phenomenon of the flow of consciousness or, even, of the sense of interiority as one’s own. Several scholars have found in Derrida’s anti-Husserlian interpretation of consciousness a valid tool for a critique of the mind or the mental functioning without any obligation for such a critique to pass for an ontological analysis.

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From the continuation of our research, evidence will emerge that it is, in a phenomenological-hermeneutical way, possible to harmonise the discourse concerning the body with the discourse concerning the mind in a productive and comprehensive manner. In addition, we will see in which manner, thanks to Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity, the potential false and relativistic self, as a fruit of imagination and self-representation turns into something consistent and “real”.

3. From deconstruction to dissociation In the first chapter, we hypothesised that the disappearance of the subject asserted by structuralism and a certain contemporary philosophy is brought to its most extreme consequences by the psychopathological figure of delusion. In fact, it ends up unmasking that disappearance as spurious, something which, in fact, can only occur in madness and even then only partially. In the following section, we will return to and analyse this issue. However, for now we would like to introduce another pivotal figure in psychopathology: dissociation, which seems to us to recall deconstructionism closely and suggest a comparison. Dissociation can, in the first instance, be perceived as a deconstruction of identity in the very elements that went into composing it, and that now return to untie themselves. Both delusion and dissociation can be understood as disturbances of the sameness, located at different depths. We therefore propose the following distinction. From an angle that is perhaps more anthropological than clinical, those disorders that do not radically alter the consciousness of the self can be understood as disorders mainly affecting ipseity. They alter the identity of the person who undergoes one or multiple setbacks that bind him/her to the compulsion to repeat dysfunctional relational models. In other situations, however, which clinicians include among the psychoses, the self transforms itself in an evident and sometimes inconsistent way, losing its basic continuity and constancy. In such cases, we could say that the self “abandons” its very nature. Delusion in fact implies a disappearance of the previous identity and the acquisition of a new, but unfortunately fictious, identity. Dissociation, in turn, consists of a splitting that breaks the identity with a vertical slit and generates in its place, in extreme cases, a double personality, or at least, and more frequently, a double and alternative way of perceiving oneself and of relating to others. But dissociation can manifest itself in at least three very different ways. Let us briefly examine them. i. Physiological dissociation. First of all, it must be recognised that the discourse cannot stop at psychopathology, or with dissociation understood as an extreme model of deconstruction. In fact, both psychiatry

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and psychoanalysis, the former with Pierre Janet, the latter with Philip Bromberg and several other North American authors, considers the possibility of such a thing as a healthy dissociation. This healthy dissociation would be in some ways equivalent to that multiplicity of the self which represents the (implicit) starting point of the philosophical discourse from Hume onwards. Still in the psychoanalytic field, we have progressively moved in the direction of an enhancement of multiplicity, more in line with “postmodern” sensitivities (this happened because of the abandonment of the emphasis once placed on the unity and continuity of the subject–ideas that were not only clearly expressed in Jaspers’s psychopathology, but also in various currents of psychoanalytic thought, from Freud himself up to, at least, the psychology of the ego). In this way, it became possible to grasp (as Freud did regarding repression) the “healthy” and universal qualities of certain mechanisms whose presence was initially highlighted exclusively in mental disorders. In short, the question arises as to whether dissociation should be understood as a mechanism that is always pathological in itself, or as a modality of psychism of varying intensity and differing functionality that can oscillate from the pathological pole to that of the physiological, even reaching the point of being creative. The conclusion seems to bind the two possible points of view together: having the self’s coordination, there is also a physiological dissociation that is expressed through diversified aspects of one’s own person in conditions that require precisely the staking of attitudes, relational models and very different emotions. Bromberg, in particular, specifically contrasts physiological and defensive dissociation, stating that the objective of the former is “to maintain personal continuity, coherence, and integrity of the sense of self and to avoid the traumatic dissolution of selfhood”. In fact, “Self-experience originates in relatively unlinked self-states, each coherent in its own right, and the experience of being a unitary self… is an acquired, developmentally adaptive illusion” (Bromberg 1998–2001, 182). It follows that “health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them” (186; author’s italic). Even Wilma Bucci, in addressing dissociation from the point-ofview of her multiple code theory, starts from the assumption that “We are all more dissociated than not” (Bucci 2007, 166) and emphasises the need “to be explicitly acknowledged, between our modern recognition of the inherently complex nature of human psychic organization, and the timehonoured view of dissociative processes as having their roots in the response to trauma, stress and anxiety” (ibid.). In conclusion, one wonders how physiological dissociation differs from the dialectic dissociation between the states of the self that had already been posed previously by both

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psychoanalytic and philosophical thought; and one further wonders how it interfaces with the question of authenticity. Perhaps certain obstacles can be solved by starting from the twodimensional nature of the self between idem and ipse, and also from certain categories of Jaspers’s psychopathology, such as ego-consciousness. The self’s integrity involves unity, separation (from the outside world and from others) and continuity over time. It is a short step from these questions to those concerning identity and the person. We recall that the person in modern thought–with Locke in particular–is closely related to the ego and conscience and “characterised by identity over time, guaranteed by memory and for this reason [it is also the] bearer of responsibility” (Meccariello 2003). It would therefore follow that the philosophical (and also psychopathological) discourse with ethics falls to the task of memory, as the mature Ricoeur would recall with his reflection on recognition and forgiveness (pardon). However, for the purposes of our discussion, it is especially important to point out how dissociation and the discontinuities (affective, relational and intellectual) that it implies can be considered physiological only if dialectically balanced with a certain coherence and continuity of the self. It is for this reason that the balance of memory (neither too much nor too little memory; see Ricoeur, 2000) takes on such a marked importance, not only on an ethical and philosophical level, but also as a guarantor of a condition of mental health). ii. Dissociation as a pathological defence. On the other hand, when dissociation is used for a predominantly defensive purpose, then we fully return to the field of psychopathology. This occurs especially where the defence is implemented against abuse or serious childhood trauma, such as in borderline personality disorder (BPD), or in response to catastrophic events, such as in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dissociation enters the psychoanalytic literature with post-Kleinian authors, such as Otto Kernberg (1984, 2006), on the one hand, and on the other with the interpersonalists. In this regard, it is worth mentioning Harry Sack Sullivan’s pioneering contribution. He speaks of the birth of the ego as a “dynamism to preserve the feeling of security” (Sullivan 1940–1953, 46) and highlights how “any tendencies of the personality that are not so approved, that are in fact strongly disapproved, are dissociated from personal awareness”. The dissociated tendencies “which do not cease to exist merely because they are excluded from the self, manifest themselves in actions, activities, of which the person himself remains quite unaware” (ibid.). It follows that the presence of motivational systems in a state of dissociation will greatly favour the development of a mental disorder, while

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the healthy development of the personality will be inversely proportional to the dissociated tendencies (see ibid.). Kernberg, in turn, in his contributions from the 1980s inspired by the Kleinian model, speaks of “splitting” rather than “dissociation” and includes it among the most primitive defence mechanisms. It is described as the perception of external objects as totally good or totally bad, from which extreme and contradictory oscillations of the conception of one’s self also derive (Kernberg 1984, 38). In his later works, he would explicitly refer to dissociation as the key mechanism of borderline functioning. In particular, the “syndrome of identity diffusion”, considered central in this pathology, is correlated with “the predominance of primitive dissociation or splitting of the idealised segment of experience from the paranoid one” with the consequence of “distorting interpersonal interactions” leading to a lack “of self-reflectiveness and of mentalization in a broad sense, decreasing the capacity to assess other people’s behaviour and motivation in depth” (Kernberg 2006, 983). In these descriptions, the defensive aspect of dissociation is evident, accompanied by its characterization in a pathological sense, whether related to trauma or not. It is also necessary to consider that at the basis of the most serious forms of dissociation, identification and disidentification processes can be closely intertwined, but extremely evanescent (see Russel Meares, 2000). This implicitly suggests the bringing into play of imitative mechanisms which can, as seen in the first chapter, represent a serious limit for the development of a sense of identity if they persist beyond measure. Finally, in an enlarged conception of the pathological variant of dissociation, it is also possible to refer to the body-mind dimension, meaning it is “a situation in which the body in itself concretely continues to exist, but in fact disappears from the observable horizon of the mind” (Lombardi 2016, 23; authors’ trans.). Also from this perspective, the pathological manifestations are multiple and often dramatic: anorexia, adolescent crises of a psychotic brand, gender dysphoria or, finally, the selfinduced bodily injuries of the borderline aimed at reactivating the perception of themselves. However, it remains true that “the dissociative push from the body is not only considered in relation to pathological distortions, but also seen as an expression of an ontological conflict, which strongly characterises the human animal” (28). iii. Normo-perverse dissociation. The normal-pathological dichotomy which underpins our intellectual research does not preclude the ambiguity of a “grey area”. We refer to that area where dissociation is confused with mala fides (such as when we become indignant and “dissociate” from

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certain behaviours that we continue to perpetrate) up to those extreme situations that recall Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil. Currently, it is possible to identify such personal flaws in the attitudes of doubleness that can occur in daily life and which, not surprisingly, often translate into a failure of a promise or to keep one’s word. According to Ricoeur (2004),2 such behaviours testify to the ability of the self to project itself into the future and, as such, are an essential moment in the ipse/idem articulation. Yet if doubleness is recurrent (and where its outcomes are morally serious), it is perhaps more appropriate to speak of bad faith. We owe Jean-Paul Sartre an examination of this problem, which appears in the first part of L’Etre et le Néant (1943), consecrated to the problem of the Néant. The philosopher starts from a provisional definition of “bad faith as a lie to oneself” (Sartre 1943, 48). In fact, in these cases, unlike the common lie, “it is from myself that I am hiding the truth […] which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived” (49). The author proceeds by proposing that the structure of mala fides is very precarious, although this does not prevent it from constituting, for many people, a normal and recurring aspect of their existence with, at times, “abrupt awakenings to cynicism or to good faith”. Given this status, the philosopher tries to use the unconscious and psychoanalysis to clarify it, but without positive results. It is, in fact, not possible to explain in this way those numerous phenomena of bad faith whose “essence implies that they can appear only in the translucency of consciousness” (54). This is not surprising, precisely to the extent that the psychoanalytic theory which Sartre uses (bearing in mind he is in France after the Second World War) has not yet attributed to the mechanism of dissociation the importance it was destined to assume a few decades later; on the contrary, he gives exclusive relevance to the mechanism of repression. This marks a break between the conscious and the unconscious, but shows a lack of interest in the possibility of a split within consciousness, as happens in the case of dissociation. In the final part of the discourse (§2 and §3), the philosopher, perhaps unknowingly, approaches precisely the problem of dissociation, which he describes as a sort of physiological dissociation; however, it lacks its creative aspects. In fact, he makes bad faith a constant and unavoidable structure of the human being: “If bad faith is possible, it is because it is an immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human being; it is because consciousness conceals in its being a permanent risk of bad faith” (70). Here, then, is the assertion that “in bad faith human reality is 2

See, in particular, Ricoeur 2004, 103–104, 127–134.

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constituted as a being which is what it is not” (63). In fact, “bad faith is not restricted to denying the qualities which I possess, to not seeing the being which I am. It attempts also to constitute myself as being what I am not” (66–67). In short, “the condition of the possibility for bad faith is that human reality, in its most immediate being, in the infrastructure of the prereflective cogito, must be what it is not and not be what it is” (67). Moreover, the relationship between bad faith and dissociation is particularly intriguing insofar as it can perhaps also clarify the dynamic of those extreme situations in which, from high levels of bad faith, one reaches a “zeroing”– when, for example, the banality of evil prevails. In these cases, unlike the more usual and certainly less serious situations mentioned above, bad faith seems to disappear because atrocities are committed in full awareness and with total adherence. This, however, does not prevent those other times, in other contexts and in other relationships, when the person behaves like a “loving father of the family” or expresses exaggerated sensitivity and emotional signs of a tragically grotesque dissociation. In these cases, albeit exceptional, perversion comes into play, and we see the denial of the status of humanity to one’s adversaries and even a congenital absence of empathy. Such situations continue to remind us not only of the complexity of human identity, but perhaps also the “ethical necessity” of reaffirming the importance of the unity of the self and the persistent risk of its eventual conceptual demolition, which a certain relativism has misunderstood as an expression of tolerance and democracy. In the aforementioned eventualities, the dissociation, insidiously similar to that described by Bromberg as physiological (but by now certainly no longer such), enters into action in areas which, if they do not fall within normality, are also usually excluded from psychopathology in the strict sense. However, the impact of these dissociative mechanisms is devastating on a social level. Being distant from both the physiological and the defensive mechanisms that fall within the category of psychopathology, we propose for them the definition of normoperverse dissociative mechanisms. The extreme example of this is provided by the well-known and widely discussed Arendtian category. The banality of evil is used by Hannah Arendt to describe a situation where the person who commits the crime is neither a pervert nor a sadist, nor, we add, someone acting in bad faith–but rather someone “terribly and terrifyingly normal” (1963, 276). “This new type of criminal, who is in actual act hostis generis humani, commits his crime under circumstances that make it wellnigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong” (ibid.). Arendt ventures the hypothesis that where the ability to distinguish good from evil (commonly considered indispensable by jurisprudence for talking about crime) is compromised, the intention to do harm must therefore be

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lacking in some way. However, the elimination of bad faith does not mean the absence of dissociation. Apparently, we place ourselves outside the disturbances of the sameness because our being in evil is not rejected or disguised. Therefore, one is always the same and this sameness is deeply constitutive of the identity of the subject. However, dissociative mechanisms remain in action, allowing such people to tolerate, while recognising it, the enormous wickedness of their behaviour. They can, for example, assume the configuration of an adaptation to the norm in affective, friend or family relationships up to the assumption of the role mentioned above of the caring father and husband who can undoubtedly often be found among political or common criminals. From an anthropological perspective, the structures of dissociation operate even more deeply, in the sense that they act at the roots of intersubjectivity. For those in the grip of such dissociation, the whole of humanity is split into good/bad with typically schizoparanoid mechanisms. This split is radicalised to such a high degree that the usual good/bad bipartition turns into human/non-human. As for the rest of humanity, in these situations we, too, might perceive what appears to be a rupture of the species: we might consider those criminals who deny others the status of person to no longer be part of the same human species we recognise! On the contrary, for those who implement them, these behaviours do not seem to put their own identity into question; rather, they might rightly claim selfconsistency in non-repentance. At a fundamental level, to “justify” such incredible behaviour they resort to the “reduction” of the other to nonhuman status. This conception, often elevated to the rank of “theory”, can derive from a profound intertwining between perverse dissociative modalities and an absolute lack of empathy, on the basis of which, in some cases, sadism and the pleasure of hatred may arise (however not necessarily, as the Eichmann case demonstrates). Yet already the first two are perhaps already enough for us to not consider evil so “trivial”. At this point, what happens to the feeling of guilt (typically connected with the depressive position, but also possible in people who operate in a paranoid-schizoid way)? Appropriately, some authors (Grenberg, Fornari) have distinguished between depressive and persecutory guilt. The latter, however, is deeply imbued with hatred towards the other. We do not show regret for having damaged the loved object, but for having introjected the hated object. The result is a sui generis “sense of guilt” or one which is patently fictitious. Consequently, the relationship that is established in such cases between “guilt” and a “sense of guilt” is different. In the neurotic the sense of guilt is serious, while the guilt is usually minimal if not imaginary. In the normal-perverse dissociative person, it is precisely the guilt that is serious, while the awareness of the enormity of the crimes

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committed is either instrumental or superficial and transitory. It is lived more at a neurovegetative level than at the level of conscious awareness. The path of recognition of the evil committed would be too arduous and its signal would be unequivocal: a transformation so radical of the self that the identity would be truly upset and perhaps would be unable to tolerate it.

4. Between philosophy and psychoanalysis: toward personal identity via delusion We can now go back to reflect on the other cardinal figure of psychopathology delusion taking up the question where we left off. Delusion, it has been said, defines philosophical reflection in all respects by showing itself as an extreme realisation of deconstruction. It is for this very reason that delusion interrogates and perhaps in turn disconfirms that inconsistency of identity that would like to reveal the fallacies of metaphysical thought and derives, almost as an obligatory corollary, from the dissolution of such identity. We begin by addressing the theme of delusion and trying to grasp its interconnections with the question of identity–no longer directly, but through the mediation of the concept of the person. This question enters fully into psychopathology with two somewhat dissimilar but equally essential works dating from 1949 and 1973, both of which make elective reference to schizophrenic psychosis. The first, Jakob Wyrsch’s Die Person des Schizophrenen, is located in the riverbed of phenomenology; the second, Salomon Resnik’s Personne et psychose, in the realm of psychoanalysis, albeit with privileged attention to psychopathology. The basic thesis of Wyrsch’s 1949 work is that the individual, becoming schizophrenic, imposes his/her person on schizophrenia. As previously mentioned, Wyrsch’s area of reference is represented by phenomenology and anthropoanalysis. These fields direct him towards such conclusions as can be reached from observing psychopathological syndromes: the manifestation of particular “ways of being in the world”, not according to a causal link, but according to a relationship of conjugation between disease and existence. However, Wyrsch goes further, pointing out an essential difference between mania and melancholy on the one hand and schizophrenia on the other. Indeed, he affirms that one cannot speak of a schizophrenic way of existence as well as a form of manic existence. From this point on, he declares that personhood should be recognised for schizophrenic patients, although contradictory conclusions can be drawn from observing them. On the one hand, in fact, a dissociation of the personality that derives form a lack of unity and continuity of psychic

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manifestations can easily be highlighted. On the other hand, however, if we take into account the person who pre-existed the disease and the way of being in the disease, we can say we are not witnessing the individual’s disaggregation, but rather a nucleus (covered up with the exterior features of dissociation). It is a nucleus to which all manifestations, which are apparently without unity, can be finally reconducted. By examining this point of view in more detail from a clinical perspective, Wyrsch identifies four kinds of stance with respect to the disease that threaten existence. One type of patient tries to reduce the significance of onset warning signs to simple somatic disorders in order to keep them at a distance; a second type does not offer any resistance and abandons him/herself to the symptoms; a third group engages in a struggle for the preservation of the original person; and a final group agrees to the new element brought by the disease. Wyrsch concludes his dissertation by comparing schizophrenia to organic diseases on the one hand and neuroses on the other. He deduces from this that although organic diseases also affect the person and not just the organs, only occasionally do they impact upon the centre of a person. By contrast, in neuroses and here Wyrsch leans upon Jürg Zutt’s claim–it is the biography of the person that leads to the disease; the subject finds in the disease the adequate expression of his/her biographic situation. So, what happens in schizophrenia? This disease affects the person, but the form and content through which the disease reveals itself to the observer depends precisely on that same person. Hence, Wyrsch goes on to ask the essential question: whether the original person of the future schizophrenic presents typological, constitutional, intellectual or biographical signs that suggest they will develop the disease. Wyrsch seems to recognise a relationship between some aspects of character such as schizoid elements and the disease, but ends up concluding that it is not possible to identify a relationship between the individual’s character and the disease. Conversely, there is correspondence between the character and the psychotic content. All this pushes him to affirm, in the conclusive part of his work, that schizophrenia, as a psychic process, does not pass as a simple maniacal or depressive episode, but rather takes root in the personal biography. Far from always leading to a deterioration, it often provokes only a change of course within the personal biography or the elaboration of the ego. Perhaps this is precisely what allows a part of the ego to be preserved, even if the overall personality is compromised by the disease. This part of the ego maintains a willingness to tune into the world and, in particular, to engage with the therapist, as Resnik says in his Personne et Psychose. On the other hand, Resnik, as a psychoanalyst, is very interested in grasping the alterations of “personalisation” (a word that originates from

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Donald W. Winnicott) not only in terms of individual psychopathology but also in the context of relationships. From this point of view Resnik comes to recognise, in the analyst’s excess of identification with the patient, the risk that even the former may lose “his specific individuum and hence his very existence as a person” (Resnik 1973, 26). He greatly enhances the idea of the mask at the roots of the concept of the person itself, but also signals the presence of a privileged mask represented by the personality, which, more than the other masks, manifests the subject’s own identity. Psychotic pathology, and in particular the psychotic crisis, is then understood as the moment in which “the various masks and roles available to the individual lose contact with one another and find themselves cut adrift, resulting in the loss of unity and the sense of being whole and unique” (26–27). Here, too, we find again a conception that has analogies with that of physiological dissociation. Various masks are possible, depicting different characters who take turns on the stage of the “theatre of the ego”, but if they lose contact with each other, pathology is born. From this perspective, the “acquisition of identity” means the “perception of oneself as existing as an inhabitant of one’s own body”, which also signifies that “a lost world has been reconquered” (42). On the other hand, Resnik speaks of “depersonalization” to indicate the complex of personalisation disorders, that is, of the process of becoming a person. He captures a close correlation, already highlighted by Paul F. Schilder, between hypochondria and depersonalization, with both as expressions of a global distortion of the body image (70). The depersonalisation from which the psychotic patient suffers results in a loss of his/her identity. It arises from the inability to tolerate discontinuity and the passage of time as well as differentiation in space. The patient thus tries to suppress the separation by occupying the body of the other (see 206). Resnik speaks of “spatialization”, meaning by this the process by which the person, instead of relating to objects in the world, goes to live in them, or better, colonise them, implementing a frankly pathological projective identification as he/she transcends the limits of his/her own body (189–190). It follows that the therapeutic path that leads to healing, or at least to the improvement and strengthening of the healthy part of the person with respect to the psychotic part, requires the patient to regain consciousness of his/her own body and his/her own true identity, losing the false one.3 It

3

As Resnik explains, for a psychotic this is a complex and painful process. He states: “In every analysis, neurotic or psychotic, to become oneself means to become aware of who one is and who one is not–one’s true or false self (Winnicott). In the case of psychosis, fragments of ‘archaeological’ value, normal aspects of the self, coexist

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would therefore seem that delusion and schizophrenia may confront us with a perhaps unexpected possibility: the radical breakdown of identity with sufficient personal strength. In short, the person resists the identity collapse and somehow maintains a sense of selfhood for which he/she demands recognition, despite the serious nature of the pathological event. Thus a complex question arises, which can be broken down into two questions. The most serious forms of disorganised schizophrenia lead us to ask the following question: is it possible to be a person without having an identity? This is in contrast with the question which arises from well-structured delusions and paranoia: is it possible to be a person with a new and totally different identity? The question arises to such an extent that it perhaps defines, more than any other, the anguish of the “delusional person” (Resnik 1973): that of the search for meaning and truth. It would seem almost a sort of distorted– but at the same time an extreme and radical–version of the exhortation of the Delphic temple ȖȞ૵șȚ ıĮȣIJȩȞ (know thyself). The delusion is a deviation from the path traced both by social norms and by natural evidence; but above all it is driven by a request for compulsive and coercive research. In short, delusion welds the dual movement of loss and search for identity, but the latter appears with greater arrogance, justified by the fact that its function is precisely to overshadow the first movement, to encrypt its awareness. The construction of the world to which the delusional patient is committed, and which he usually deals with by attributing to it a monochordic colouring in the name of persecution, eroticisation or megalomania, does not take long to reveal itself as an identity construction. For this reason, the relationship that delusion maintains with the interpretation–intended, precisely in a Heideggerian manner, as a way of being-in-the-world–is essential. The delusional person builds a new identity thanks to a new way of interpreting the facts of the world and declining them as facts that directly concern his/her person. However, delusion as an interpretation also presents a disturbing affinity with psychoanalytic interpretation. We know how difficult it still is to give an answer to the provocation launched by Freud at the end of his reflection on the Schreber case: “It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber’s delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe” (Freud 1910, 79).

with pathological remnants, distortions of reality that refuse to die off” (Resnik 1973, 226).

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Delusion represents a powerful intrapsychic organiser that allows a reopening of the possibility of communicating with the world. Of course, it is simultaneously also a limit on communication, which must be subject to the constraint of a rigid and unchangeable theory. This rigidity, in turn, arises from the refusal of the theory to allow itself to be shaped by observation. It is here that a fundamental difference lies between a scientific theory and a delusional theory. The delusional patient, in fact, is moved by the same “vocation” for discovery as a scientist’s, exasperated by the same epistemophilic drive. Like the scientist, he/she could rightly answer anyone who questions the foundations of his/her system that those foundations can never be exhaustively investigated. In fact, in building a system of ideas, one cannot fail to start from a partially unverifiable, wild–and, as such, axiomatic–view. However, the system of ideas of the delusional person develops exclusively according to a hypothetical-deductive procedure and refuses the contribution of induction, not recognising the capacity of observation to modify this system. Even the scientific paradigm, and especially the modern one which has renounced a “strong” concept of reality and objectivity, suffers from an ineliminable ambiguity. Ambiguity arises when a certain theory must be contradicted by the observation that it has itself generated. So, a “good theory” must avoid being killed by observation, but at the same time tolerate being radically modified–which is precisely what the paranoic cannot do. One can appreciate how subtle the difference between the patient and the scientist is, especially where the comparison is with a bad scientist who, in order to ensure their creation survives, might ignore inconvenient observational data or interpret it in a biased way. In this case, the demarcation cannot be explicit in terms of the (almost equivalent) adopted procedure, but rather in terms of emotional adherence to the theory. For the paranoic–unlike the bad scientist who, out of neglect or partisan interests, ignores evidence that would falsify his/her theory–persisting in one’s beliefs is always a matter of psychic survival and is necessary in order to avoid a mental catastrophe. If we take this perspective, delusion appears to us in its defensive or restorative aspect, as Freud (1910) already noted in the case of President Schreber. But defensive against what? In the case of the paranoic, it could be a defence against mental fragmentation and emptiness. From this point of view, the paranoic is firmly placed between the scientist on his/her right and the schizophrenic on his/her left. Federn (1952) has noted that a characteristic of paranoia is false certainty, while schizophrenia is characterised by false reality. In the first, we witness a delusional transformation of judgments about the world; in the second, a delusional transformation of the ego itself. Of course, the question should

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not be examined in watertight compartments: even false certainty can only be based, in turn, on an extremely precarious world, although the ego of the paranoic, and to a lesser extent of the paranoid-schizophrenic, are still strong enough to fictitiously rebuild it. This force, on the other hand, is not given to those schizophrenics who are severely disintegrated. Conversely, in the paranoic syndrome, the delusional thought manages to distance itself from the churning and confusing thoughts which form its germinal ground and instead becomes a kernel, a nucleus around which the ego is rebuilt in an omnipotent and megalomaniac sense. However, with delusion, there is always a pathological hypertrophy of the ego. Delusion, in a certain sense, can be understood as the organisation of a system of lies (Meltzer, 1982). However, if the truth does not always and necessarily need a thinker, a thinker is nevertheless indispensable for the creation of a lie: “the lie gains existence by virtue of the epistemologically prior existence of the liar” (Bion 1970, 102–103). This statement suggests a positioning with a realistic edge, with clear reference to internal reality, or perhaps to reality tout court. In fact, “truth seems to be essential for psychic health” (Bion 1962, 56) and the lack of truth provokes an effect upon the personality which is analogous to that which is provoked in the soma by hunger (see ibid.). The truth has an objectivity (could we understand it as adaequatio rei?) which does not necessarily need interpretative mediation. Conversely, the lie, devoid of self-evidence and objectivity, needs to be thought: that is, it implies a subject who operates a distortion/transformation of the real consciousness (through bad faith or false consciousness) or the unconscious (manifested as neuroses or psychosis). With delusion, therefore, the subject, precisely in that he/she configures him/herself as a liar, returns to existence, returns to thinking. But what was it that caused him/her to disappear? One might think that that same subject was found entangled within a dimension of emptiness and irrepresentability, anguished and overwhelmed by uncontrollable emotions, precisely due to the impossibility of these being translated into an adequate representation, for the lack of an ordering principle. In the paranoic, crushing anxiety is reactively shaped and replaced by an equally radical knowledge anxiety. Faced with the chaos of the internal world and its consequent unknowability, the paranoic abdicates the task of his/her own reorganisation and dedicates him/herself to the reconstruction of the external world, while continuing to draw inspiration from the depiction that is outlining it, precisely from the initial chaos: the threatening atmosphere; the nonsense which, the more it is contested the more it continues to emerge from all sides; and the feeling of an indefinite but imminent catastrophe. From this point of view, the paranoic, and more generally his/her whole existence, is tormented by the anguish of discovery, in order to limit

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the anguish of the dissolution of meaning. It is precisely at this level that the radical and definitive difference lies between the epistemophilia of the paranoic and that of the scientist or researcher. The former was born as a defence from the absurd, that is, from what cannot be represented. This unrepresentability, in the moment in which it emerges in the specific absurdity of a single delusion, can only be mitigated. The scientist’s epistemophilia is instead the expression, at various levels, of a process of sublimation, or at least an elaboration of fantasies and unconscious representations. We also remember Bion’s even more radical provocation in bringing science and delirium closer together, suggesting that the weakness of the scientific method “may be closer to the weakness of psychotic thinking than superficial scrutiny would admit” (Bion 1962, 14). Also in this case, the void of identity and nonsense come back into play, as they do, in a more conspicuous form, in schizophrenia. If we wanted to differentiate the schizophrenic form the paranoic, we could conclude that where the former succumbs to the irrepresentability and deflagration of identity, the latter manages, albeit factiously, to “ride” them, exasperating any narrative plots aimed at clarity and completeness. Regarding the relationship between the anguish of discovery and the anguish of the dissolution of meaning, some pages of Daniel Schreber’s biography (1902) appear significant. In the same moments in which he is most in “contact” with his own delusion, he also manages to grasp its absurdity, making himself aware of the fact that “others” may find his reality absolutely unreal. That is, he recognises that his own narrative is imbued with absurdity, but that this, in his case, and only in his case, is completely apparent! Doubt, amazement, uncertainty, even the ability to correct a hypothesis are not extraneous to the paranoic’s thought, but he/she cannot control them except by solving them within a further refinement and stiffening of his/her creative system. An alternative solution–to tolerate doubt–is not conceivable, not acceptable even for a moment. “I am fully aware–writes Schreber–that other people may be tempted to think that I am pathologically conceited; I know very well that this very tendency to relate everything to oneself, to bring everything that happens into connection with one’s own person, is a common phenomenon among mental patients. But in my case the very reverse [is true]” (Schreber 1902, 233). The initial perplexities cannot be resolved except in the final postulate, according to Schreber’s highly explanatory theory: “Since God entered into nerve-contact with me exclusively, I became in a way for God the only human being, or simply the human being around whom everything turns, to whom everything that happens must be related […]” (ibid.). He adds the clarification that this is a “completely absurd conception, which was at first

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naturally incomprehensible to me but which I was forced to acknowledge as a fact through years of experience” (233–234). In his desperate search for confirmation and proselytes, which are so essential for the paranoic, Schreber declares himself willing at all times to undergo a medical examination in the certainty that it can highlight the presence in his body of those “nerves of voluptuousness” through which his communication with God takes place (and thus prove this experiences to be true). However–and this is the crucial point that should be underlined–the whole organisation of Schreber’s thought is highly rigid and, one might even say, rigorous, yet it is based on a constant comparison with the incomprehensible. Schreber himself cannot deny its significance. When, in a certain way, he must confront himself directly–that is, when he can no longer deny the incomprehensible–then he ends up cancelling it, through a reflection that is a sort of “apex” of his illness, though not without affinity with certain passages of contemporary philosophy: “All this again exemplifies the truth of the saying that every nonsense carried to extremes destroys itself in the end” (273; authors’ italic). This is what the paranoid delusion aims at: a destruction of the initial nonsense that is generating and at the same time generated by the fall of identity. Unable to tolerate the idea of confronting the empty areas of his/her mind with “unthinkable” emotions, the paranoic aims to destroy them by means of the powerful tool he/she has in his hand: hypothetical-deductive reasoning, ultimately devoted to giving an answer to the original and unutterable question: who am I? This question is original in that it is an index of a defeat that has ancient roots, inscribed in the bìos and in the first interpersonal relationships; unutterable because it is precisely the intolerance to the question that generates the search for the delusion by welding together strong identity and emptiness as two sides of a medal. Therefore, paranoia allows the emergence of a grandiose image which, beyond the varying content of the delusions, whether expansive or persecuting, still places itself at the centre of the universe. But it is also true that this grandiose image is given in the antinomic game with a debilitated, impoverished self-image which continually risks anonymity. A patient with a delusional disorder can exist only while he/she is searching, although he/she denies the essence of the search path. The self-destructive game between hypertrophy and identity deficiency that he/she carries out is perhaps his/her most consistent hereditary legacy for philosophical reflection, together with his/her living testimony that the stronger the identity the more it inevitably reveals itself as a false identity. Let us return to the initial reflections of this chapter in its conclusion. The stumbling block of delusion leads to a sort of rethinking: must we retreat towards a strong conception of identity and recognise that asserting

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the end of the subject is only a mystification? Or is it enough to testify to a broken conception of identity? But how then to differentiate it from delusional identity? What relationship does narrative identity have with delusional identity and multiple identities? Can we register such cases in the event of a, however involuntary, narrative abuse? If we assume, with Ricoeur, that the non-subject is (still) a figure of the subject, then the identity crisis that has come to light since the first decades of the last century, finding its foundations in the thought of the second half of the nineteenth century, can be considered to derive, paradoxically, from its hypertrophy. This hypertrophy has distant roots, and has unfolded in its entirety throughout modernity without being affected at all by postmodernity. We can therefore attribute precisely to this augmentative movement, so far from those reductive alterations of the self that mark psychotic pathology and delusion, the elevation to a theoretical status of a crisis that affects a subject who is no longer able to “govern” his/her hypertrophic expansion. But this crisis remains completely different from that of the delusional person. It is the crisis of a strong subject who imagines him/herself fragmented, evanescent – not that of a subject experiencing fragmentation.

CHAPTER 3 THE NARRATIVE RECONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY

1. Narration between psychoanalysis and psychiatry The narrative interest in psychoanalysis and psychiatry is in clear and very close connection with the need to construct and reconstruct identity. This reconstruction is the task that arises both for patients and for therapists during the course of treatment. The most constituent foundations of existence are being undermined by the patient’s psychosis and the most prominent need is for an original meaning, the exploration of which is facilitated by narration. Undoubtedly, oral and written narrative (and, even more, narration through images) are among the oldest and most universally widespread human activities. Narration has an undisputed symbolic and transformative value which electively places it between memory and creation. We can think of it as a more-or-less aesthetically elaborated expression of an elementary need which is intimately inscribed in human nature. In short, narrative is one of the most basic functions of the self, but it is also constitutive of it. From a psychological point of view, narrating is then configurated as a need/desire originating from the need to interpose a space between the impetuosity of emotions and the self that must “live” as well as think and measure, in order to do not remain submerged by those emotions (Martini 1998). From this perspective, narration is an exquisitely reflective operation. It is preceded by an immediate and, in fact, unreflective immersion in the world-life and, with respect to this action, it is an ordering pause for thought. Therefore, there is a constant dialectic between the immediacy of existence and narrative reworking. Identity as an image of the self descends from this dialectic. Narration, like the symbol which finds its natural expression in it, requires the simultaneous activation of three operations: a reunion, albeit momentary, with a magmatic dimension made up of both structured memories and shapeless sensations; a distancing from this conglutinating

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dimension, without which it could not exist; and finally a process of resignification, as an objective which narration already tends towards by its nature, but which can receive modulation and implementation from the relationship in general and from psychotherapy in particular. It may be thought that the constitution of the individual as a separate subject form the surrounding world immediately prompts the need to regain possession of it. What better opportunity than to narrate it? As long as the subject is intimately experiencing the world and its nature, all this is unnecessary, but, once detachment has painfully occurred, it has to be at least partially bridged. A relationship between language and reality of a “dialectical” nature can be derived, such that “language’s power of refiguration is proportional to its power of distanciation in the moment of its self-constitution in the universe of the signifier” (Ricoeur 1998, 86). This leads to the thesis that language “means (veut dire) the world because it has first left the world; in this way it initiates a movement of reconquest of the reality lost by the prior conquest of meaning in itself and for itself” (ibid.). The need to “reconquer the lost real” represents a need for meaning that could be ascribed to the epistemophilic drive. This drive is connected to life and death instincts, and often exercises a mediative function between the two. On the clinical level, the epistemophilic drive is expressed as the need to understand each other, but, above all, to be able to narrate. The combination of these two operations often allows a relief of suffering, which however remains partial if a transformation of the self is not associated with the narration of the self. Ricoeur distinguishes between unbearable and bearable suffering, and grasps the reason for a path of care in the transaction between the two. As he states: “every sadness can be made bearable if it is converted into a story. The ‘storytelling’ transforms the suffering, that suffering which would otherwise slip from mourning towards melancholy” (Ricoeur 2003, 390; authors’ trans.). In the face of the “limit situation” (Jaspers 1919) of psychotic disorganisation, as well as of serious illness, and in response to situations in which the risk may be psychic crushing or death anguish, “storytelling” can represent a “raft” onto which the “shipwrecked” patient and his/her therapist can climb together. If psychiatry and psychoanalysis can be defined as “constitutively” narrative, medicine has, in recent decades, felt the need to emphasise its analogous roots. Perhaps these roots risk oblivion in an era of ever more rampant technological expansion, and in an era too obsessively focused on the “evidence-based” paradigm. Nonetheless, the body-who-I-am/bodywhich-I-have dialectic cannot be ruled out in any of the medical specialities. And between these two polarities, there can only be a narrative mediation: through the language of the patient who tells his/her own story, but also

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through the story written in the body. This dialectic corresponds to that between evidence-based technological medicine (correlated with Korper) and narrative medicine (correlated with Leib). If evidence-based medicine focuses attention on the sick organ, narrative medicine’s perspective focuses on “the human being as immerged within the concreteness of his life” (Marinelli 2008, 11; authors’ trans.). It should not be forgotten how the narrative model comes into play, both in psychiatry and in medicine, even before the story (for example, of anamnestic type) is created. It is, in fact, the moment of listening that inaugurates the doctor-patient relationship. Better still, there could be talk of hospitality– a hospitality and welcome that should result in a “pacte de soins basé sur la confiance” (Ricoeur 1996, 23; italic in original). This agreement implies an active alliance, and at least a partial overcoming of the original dissymmetry between the caregiver and the sufferer. It also requires constant attention not to damage but to strengthen self-esteem in the various phases of the medical act (self-esteem is understood as “le fond éthique de ce qu’on appelle couramment dignité”; 25). The dialogic dimension of listening and response, that is, the dimension of mutual narrative exchange in which one of the two “contractors” listens and the other narrates, is essential for this esteem and for the dignity of the sufferer to be preserved. This is even more true in the final moments of the therapeutic process, even in the most dramatic cases, when the listening at the start of the relationship between the doctor and his/her patient returns as an essential element in a last attestation of the dignity of the person. It is, in fact, in the last listening, the listening dedicated to the dying person or the listening dedicated to the patient who is severely compromised on a cognitive level, that medicine and narrative psychiatry return to join in a commitment that can turn into a kind of “ethical” aggression. At this point, a troublesome question arises. How far can the narrative go? There is probably a limit; however, it is bound to be very variable and subjective. Beyond this limit, the narrative may have to stop, to give way to silence, in respect of that space “beyond” language from which language itself is generated and cannot be completely exhausted. The psyche and the body “cross” these limits. In the film Lightning Over Water (1980), the director Nicholas Ray, who is suffering from advanced lung cancer, is interviewed by Wim Wenders. At a certain point he makes a gesture of disappointment with his hand and stops talking about himself, as if to signal the definitive exhaustion of his need, or simple willingness, to narrate about himself. From the different perspective of trauma–which nevertheless perhaps runs parallel to the suffering caused by a deadly disease–Jorge Semprún, on the threshold

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of old age and now an established author, writes a text with the significant title L’écriture ou la vie (1994). In this book he finally manages to retrace his experiences in a concentration camp, but he reflects on how those memories, of which he can write only now, would have prevented him from living had they not for a long time been repressed, albeit imperfectly, in oblivion. This highlights the first risk posed by narration, with which other risks, perhaps less radical but more common, are associated. If in the above examples, the risk was to access an authenticity that is extreme and, as such, too painful. In other cases, the opposite risk comes into play: that of the “false self”. In the literary field, for example, the reader’s (or the author’s) identification with one or more of the characters in a novel always comes into play. The possibility then arises that instead of expanding one’s identity, we end up enhancing an illusory and fictitious dimension of the self. Unfortunately, this is a frequent experience in a media society which, for various reasons, tends to not favour internalisation processes but imitative processes. This discourse has ethical and clinical values that intertwine with each other. As Domenico Jervolino suggests, “the text is the narrow door through which subjectivity must pass to dismiss its claims of absoluteness” (Jervolino 2003, 55; authors’ trans.). If, on the contrary, this process changes into the attempt to acquire, through the imitation of the “hero”, an absoluteness that confirms the self in its narcissistic and omnipotent aspirations, then this will favour all pathologies based on the construction of a fictitious and imitative identity. For their part, the philosopher and historian can grasp the pitfalls of a certain narrative identity at the level of peoples and nations, where it offers coverage for fear, hatred, violence and self-destruction (Ricoeur 2001a): in a word, at the level of ideology. Finally, for the psychiatrist and the psychoanalyst, the trap (and sometimes the caricature) may consist of building an illusory identity for the other. This can happen when inventing a consoling or ideologically preformed story in which mental illness becomes a “brain disease” or an automatic consequence of social or familiar relationships, or it can be an automatic consequence of the great metapsychological narratives centred on the Oedipus complex, on the false self, on the schizo-paranoid position, and so on. It also happens in the context of psychotherapy, when the patient is invited to recognise himself in stories that represent a personalised version of generic and worn-out leitmotifs which attempt to retrace and retranslate his/her existence in light of a key concept that does not bend to accept any symbolic ambiguity.

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We now come to some reflections more specifically inherent to the relationship between narration and psychoanalysis. In the first instance, it could be said that psychoanalysis and narration are linked by the shared function of re-crossing the loss and re-reflecting on the separation. In The Pleasure of the Text (1973), Roland Barthes claims that “the writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother” (Barthes 1975, 60; authors’ italic). The notion is illuminating, and its explanation can be passed through the Bionian and Winnicottian notion of a container. Thought is created thanks to the accomplishment (by the maternal body) of containing the anxieties that prevent the baby’s development. At the same time, the container can subsequently come to carry contents that again threaten him/her from the inside because they are too disturbing (be they depressive, persecutorial or marked by maniacal euphoria). This can be tackled by the container “writing” (here understood as an elective procedure to materialise a narrative). The narration can come from (1) the other (i.e., a narrator: writer, director, painter, etc.) who bears no relation to the person in question, or (2) from another (a friend or, of course, the therapist) with a direct relation with him/her, or finally (3) from the person him/herself: that is, from the self that observes and reflects. In the last of these cases, the narrator takes the appearance of him/herself as another. In any case, the story takes on the eminently maternal function of restarting a development of thought, just as a mother’s revêrie function once allowed its genesis. The birth and development of thought would therefore both be generated by an ordering of intense emotions which may be initially formless and unspeakable, perhaps precisely because of their complexity. In some cases, this maieutic function of writing becomes particularly evident. For example, the internal monologue or stream of consciousness aims precisely at reproducing (and thus extracting) “thought in the nascent state” (Dujardin, quoted in Bourneuf, Oullet 1972). Although the term “narration” does not occur in Freud’s work, he has been unanimously recognised as a great narrator. In fact, reference to literature is always a constant in his works. Notoriously, he believed poets and novelists to be the precursors of psychoanalysis thanks to their aptitude at exploring the world of feelings. Conversely, narration has gradually taken on the configuration of an alternative paradigm to the traditional psychoanalytic interpretation, especially in the North American context. This has often led to assigning it too “fictional” a value, as if to oppose not only the idea of psychic reality, but also that of historical reality, with the consequent accusation of “creationism” (Ahumada 1994). Unlike the North American approach, the French critical line of narration turned not so much against its distancing from the ideas of history,

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truth and psychic reality, but rather against its claim of coherence and exhaustiveness. Jean Laplanche, for example, addresses these issues by binding the narrative to repression. Moving his criticism against American “narrativist” psychoanalysts, Laplanche assumes the idea of narrative as “une approche de l’être humain qui donne une importance primordiale à la façon dont celui-ci se formule à lui-même son existence sous la forme d’un récit plus ou moins cohérent” (Laplanche 1998, 889). He assumes this line, but radically distances himself from it. Hence, he critically comes to find that “du point de vue de la pratique analytique, l’attitude narrative consiste à privilégier […] la construction d’un récit cohérent, satisfaisant, intégré” (ibid.). However, it is worth asking whether “storytelling” only has a defensive function, or if it also carries creative and transformative ones. Must storytelling and repression necessarily go hand in hand? This is only a possibility, a risk, and moreover one which is common to both American narrativist currents and metapsychology itself (which has always sought to be configured as a “strong” narrative). In this regard, Paul Ricoeur’s position is relevant where he claims that the narrative function can sometimes consist of “épaissir, à augmenter l’opacité, c’est-à-dire à renvoyer au mystère, mais encore une fois à travers le langage” (Ricoeur 2016, 25). Such a definition of narrative also (or, perhaps, above all) implies the fragmented language of poetry and responds indirectly to Laplanche’s objection of coherentism. As Ricoeur still claims (see ibid.), referring to Steiner, the primordial destination of language is not so much communication, as the manifestation of an enigmaticity on the border with the unspeakable. Such a conception is certainly not foreign to psychoanalytic thought. Among the most relevant works, it should be sufficient to recall Loewald’s research on language, which emphasises precisely the original bond between thing and word (see Loewald 1980) and their primal unity. Through them, Loewald brings to the fore the non-semantic dimension of language itself, by reason of which words are indistinguishable ingredients of a global experience of perception. They do not serve to communicate meaning; rather, the sound, the voice, the discursive rhythm are fused together within a global event of perception and learning (see ibid.). A similar position is expressed by Ogden, who invites the reader to grasp in language not only a vehicle to convey meanings and moods but “a medium in which thoughts and feelings are created” (Ogden 1997, 1). It follows that the descriptive use of language should dialectically coexist with a use that leads to an indirect way of creating and communicating meaning that is relatively independent from the semantic content of the language itself (“effects created in language”; 16, italic in original). It is evident that this conception of language

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radically transforms the idea of narration, disengaging it from reductionist limitations. Certain narratological schools have brought about such limitations by binding narration to radical constructionism or coherentism. A fundamental consequence of Loewald’s or Ricoeur’s positions is that narrative can be conceived of as strictly correlated not only with representation, as mentioned above, but also with the unrepresentable. Therefore, with a strong symbolic and psychoanalytic value, this type of narrative aims to connect the patient with the magmatic nature of his/her emotional world and, at the same time, aims to define the appropriate distancing (as he/she does through the instrument of language). Let us turn to discuss how narration is understood and received in a neighbouring, but well distinguished, field: psychiatry. We refer, in particular, to psychiatry of a dynamic, interpersonalist or phenomenological orientation. Regardless of orientation, in the psychiatric field, it is impossible not to put into play a narrative exchange. However, here the term narration takes on a wider significance than in psychoanalysis, and even expresses some conceptual variations. Indeed, one must not forget the multiple influences that come into play in this field, starting with those from phenomenology and social psychiatry. During a discussion with the psychiatrist Yves Pelicier on the relationship between suffering and its impact on the ability “to be able to do” and “to be able to be”, Ricoeur (2000) underlines that psychoanalysts have experienced a very particular incapacity: the incapacity of self-narration when one is overwhelmed by unbearable incomprehensible or traumatic memories (see Ricoeur, Pélicier 1997). Hermeneutically and interpersonally inspired psychiatry, which sees the multiple narratives that can be activated as an essential strength of its field, this assertion is predicated on the assumption that there is no possibility of treatment that does not call the person into question and that does not aim at a reconfiguration of the self. This reconfiguration passes through the narrative channel, as well as through the experiential one, with the aim of hesitating in bringing about an emotional transformation. Beyond the psychiatrist’s orientation, disciplinary school and worldview, it is necessary to reiterate that (any form of) psychiatry is concerned with the person as a whole, and this inevitably requires narrative mediation. As we have seen, while attention to the complexity of the human being is, for medicine, (even in the specialised approach) undoubtedly an indication of good practice, for psychiatry it is a foundational necessity. Yet a fundamental contradiction arises here which requires further consideration. We have understood narrative as the creation of a space between the impetuosity of emotions and the self that must live them, and which must

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also think and define in order not to remain submerged by these emotions Yet the psychotic has already suffered this sinking; he/she is already submerged. How might he/she emerge? Certainly, apart from in some illustrious exceptions, the “shipwreck” does not favour, but rather hinders writing and symbolic production. After all, if art aims, on the one hand, at release from the unrepresentable and from psychosis, but indicates, on the other, a loss of representation, then there is an irreconcilable antinomy. As we will see, this is only the starting point. It is necessary to start form the deployment of this antithesis between psychosis and narration, which runs parallel to the loss of ability to express one’s self symbolically. It is worth trying to determine this in a more detailed and articulated way. First of all, at the basis of the psychotic experience is a dimension of emptiness and incomprehensibility. For the patient, reality has lost its thickness, its consistency. Hence the question which, implicitly or explicitly, those thus afflicted ask of their various interlocutors is: What is happening to me? Why does this transformation of the world (which often takes on a sinister meaning and before that flakes itself into many incongruous fragments) happen? As Wolfgang Blankenburg (1971) underlines, the schizophrenic cannot take advantage of that natural evidence of things that allows us to refrain from continually redefining meaning that has been lost. The loss of natural evidence therefore immediately evokes the loss of any possible narrative identity. Furthermore, this world fragmentation results in the fragmentation of the self (and therefore of the narrating ego). That egoic terrace (Benedetti 1980) from which the subject can lean without risk of falling is missing. On the contrary, when this is missing, the presence of the other becomes terrifying. In such cases, in fact, one feels engulfed by the other, without possibility of maintaining the “membrane” which separates one’s somatopsychic space from that of others. This feeling of falling apart is so strong that, in spite of him/herself, the schizophrenic ends up actively contrasting the therapist’s every attempt to bring him/her back into history, and into his/her history in particular. Here, then, the patient prefers to build another story, accessing it on a narrative but spurious level: that of delusion. In fact, delusion appears to allow an effective organization of the story, attracting psychotic anxieties within it. These anxieties are originally “nameless” and lack a truly persecutory connotation, but are rather related to the sense of dispersion and non-existence. Delusion manages to give them a material (and narrative) consistency by binding them to a canvas, to a plot that, beyond the possible variety, still refers to the great themes of every narration: love, death and, above all, hatred and persecution. For this reason, delusion has a restorative character thanks to which the subject, ensnared in

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a dimension of unthinkability and unrepresentability, returns to existing and thinking. Thanks to their delusion, the patient can request from enemies, persecutors and lovers the attestation of a right to exist; and, indirectly, they allow the reconfiguration of his/her identity. In addition, each delusion holds within it a “wandering” nucleus of a historical truth (as Freud already understood in 1910) and an ontological truth. These are the themes of “Being and Nothing”, the Divine and the Promethean, of transience and of the immortal, which fascinate the psychotic and inform his/her narrative. But at the origin of it, there is a rather bizarre and dangerous belief: the belief, as President Schreber (1902) expresses, that “every nonsense carried to extremes destroys itself in the end”. For this reason, delusion can be understood as the paradoxical outcome of a narration without representation (of the self in the first place). Normally, in fact, narration originates from a need for meaning, and is therefore conveyed and produced through a complex series of mental fantasies and representations (many of which are unconscious). Here, it instead emerges from an absolutisation of nonsense, in the hope that it is precisely in this abyss that one witnesses the spontaneous and sudden germination of events with meaning. However, as Paolo Bertrando states, “to some extent, it is possible transcend schizophrenia through storytelling” (Bertrando 1999, 44; authors’ trans.). Even the most serious patients, by writing “become other than their diagnostic category” can “escape the ‘pathology’ at the same time they report it on the page”, so that “if we share the language (and we share it), we live in the same world. We can find each other” (ibid.). Thus, Illness also has a meaning, an immeasurability, a step. Even illness is the matrix of life. (Merini 1951–1997)4

If so, it is perhaps through the reopening of narrative channels (as alternatives to delusion) that the overflow of psychosis can be stopped. Therefore, from a starting antithesis between narration and psychosis, we can try to propose the possibility of a final reconciliation. We can grasp three progressive stages of this. The first is the delusion itself: as has been said, through the delusional narrative the patient manages to replace the anxiety of Nothing with the more tolerable anguish of the persecutor. The second stage is characterised by the possibility that the psychotic patient may recover an autobiographical ability and manages to “look inside”, as 4 Anche la malattia ha un senso/ una dismisura, un passo/ anche la malattia è matrice di vita.

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one tries to do in psychotherapy or even in the narrative-centred groups that are often active in mental health departments. The third degree of reconciliation usually refers to an advanced phase of the psychotherapeutic process in which the patient can return to relive the anguish that had previously generated the delusion, but in a form that has been transformed by the presence of the therapist’s narration (that is, in a bearable form; see Martini 2011). Ultimately, reconciliation passes through the transformation of a strong and rigid narration into a weak narration that tolerates limitation and doubt. Only when the psychotic takes note of the fact that no delusional story can “explain” and neutralise anxiety, thus becoming aware of the fragility of one’s human condition, can the shipwreck be avoided and identity reconfigured.

2. Narrative identity between substantialism and the theatre of self-representation In recent decades, the theme of narrative identity and the problems connected to it have undergone exponential development in various research areas. This has brought about significant rapprochement, support and intertwining between various disciplines, both at the theoreticalreflective level and at the level of applied research. It is true that, in addition to the fields of narratology and the science of culture, narrative identity is mainly dealt with in the psychological field. Within this field, it is a concern in areas ranging from personality psychology to social psychology and from dynamic to clinical psychology and beyond. Jerome Bruner noted the profound significance of the narrative dimension in the context of human experience, by virtue of man’s historicity (i.e. his/her identity) and his/her mode of organisation and cognitive management of the world.5 Several psychological and clinical research projects have furthered this intertwining with the philosophical dimension. For example, authors such as Juan Balbi do not merely recall Bruner’s assertion that the form of organisation that takes self-knowledge of one’s own time is narrative, nor simply remark on his incalculable contribution to the understanding of the processes of identity, but also underline the great congruence of his work with studies such as Ricoeur’s (see Balbi 2004). As Balbi explains that, according to Ricoeur, Bruner claims that narrative is based on concern for the human condition. The imaginative application of the narrative modality of thought involves placing its timeless miracles in the succession of experiences and 5

As known, Bruner takes narrative thinking in parallel with paradigmatic or logicalscientific thinking (see Bruner 1956).

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situating experiences in time and space (ibid.). This discourse is linked to the vast amount of research that articulates the relationships between mind and language and, more strictly, interpretations such as, for example, Humberto Maturana’s, which places particular emphasis on the structuring force of language with subordination of the mental: that is language as a coontogenetic component (see, for example, Maturana 1993). However, the interest within psychological research goes beyond this general level of the functioning of the mind, as narration forms the actual lived experience of man and offers a means to embrace, interpret and understand one’s existence, one’s self and one’s relationships with others, as well as one’s values and reasons. Narrating is an expression of a psychological reality and is generative of a psychological reality. Consequently, it reflects a representation of oneself, of human relationships, of the sense of things and of the world–both in accordance with one’s choices, dispositions and interests, and with deeper dynamisms such as drives, “topical” experiences or traumas. This broader spectrum of therapeutic and clinical proposals is connected to narration. In one way or another, it “acts” by leveraging the reflective function of narrative writing, oral expression or various other forms of fictional representation. If Freud, and authors related to Freud, saw in the tool of reconstruction or narrative representation a “provisional” function of therapeutic practice as a theoretical and diagnostic reconnaissance through the narration of clinical cases, other psychotherapists have identified and defined narrative activity as a process that is effective in a therapeutic situation. On the one hand, this kind of interpretation has once again leveraged speculative research on methodology and theory around Freudism; on the other hand, in theoretical contexts more detached from paradigmatic reference to the hard sciences, as in the case of Jungism, narration has become a true all-encompassing fulcrum of the care relationship and the therapeutic process. In this regard, one can consider the models expressed in works such as James Hillman’s Healing Fiction (1983). For Hillman, “therapy is one way to revivify the imagination and exercise it. The entire therapeutic business is this sort of imaginative exercise. It picks up again the oral tradition of telling stories; therapy restories life” (Hillman 1983, 57). Other specialist theorists and psychotherapists have moved along the same lines, starting from different paths. Some of them are more radically and arguably philosophical, as is the case with Roy Schafer. Beyond the issue of scientific questionability (both in terms of theoretical elaboration and of the technical-procedural efficacy of the method) it is undeniable that this internationally renowned psychoanalyst has focused on some important aspects of narrative functions in therapy. For example, in Retelling a life (1992), there is a deepening of

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the concept of “narrative plot” in correlation with the representation of the self, the unconscious fantasy, and the metaphor. It is an in-depth analysis that tries to take into account both the analyst’s and the patient’s perspectives. Schafer conceives of the storyline as an axis of personal identity. For him, in fact, personal identity is formed and structured around self-representation and psychoanalysts must apply this in their work. As he explains: By “storyline” I refer to whatever it is that can be used to establish a set of guidelines and constraints for telling a story that conveys what convention would certify as having a certain general kind of content. These guidelines and constraints may be derived from one or more symbols, metaphors, similes, images, themes, or dramatic scenes, or some combination of these. This storyline serves as a tool for working out ways to retell other stories in its terms, and so it makes it possible for narrators both to generate many versions of what is conventionally regarded as the same basic story and, through reduction, to create faithful repetitions of these versions out of apparently diverse narrative materials. In one respect, for example, we have the storylines of imprisonment, rebirth, and odyssey that are commonly developed in the course of analytic work. (Schafer 1992, 29–30)

Additional correlated elements can be found in the context of certain theoretical and methodological sub-fields in cognitive psychotherapy, as is well documented in Storie di vita (1999), edited by Fabio Veglia. This volume subsumes much of the richness and complexity of the issue of narrative representation in the processes related to the transformation of personal identity, both from the side of individuals in the first person and from the perspective of psychotherapists. Equally important in this regard is the socio-constructivist approach in theoretical and clinical psychology. Authors like Maria Francesca Freda reveal how significant the constructive and transforming dimension of narration is in this approach. In her 2008 book, Narrazione e intervento in psicologia clinica, she puts the theme of narration at the centre of her study, referring to the narrative turning point of the 1980s. Narrative identity is an object of wide and varied interest among the psychological sciences. However, both the deepest theoretical-problematic root and the true interdisciplinary fulcrum are found not in the scientific but in the speculative field. The notion of narrative identity does not simply identify a given conception but refers to a vast problem concerning the nature of human identity. This is a problem which goes back to the origins of modern philosophical-scientific thought and which recalls and raises

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dilemmas about the essence of human nature, the mind-body relationship, the dialectic of causes-reasons, the aporias of free will, and so on. Furthermore, while it is true that the notion of “narrative identity” has only recently taken on authentic speculative significance, thanks to Ricoeur’s hermeneutical-phenomenological work, it is also true that his philosophical research goes back to a centuries-old discursive line and is revealing of the deep connections that correlate the study of the narrative dimension of human identity with more traditional issues of gnoseology, philosophy of mind and anthropological philosophy. The question of the subject represents a common thread throughout Ricoeur’s entire research, and his book Oneself as Another (1990) summarises the topic by reflecting its central function. As Domenico Jervolino explains, the question of the subject is thematised “in all its depth as a radical questioning of the subject and as the exploration of multiple forms to speak, in a non-subjectivist way, of that being oneself that we are, through what the Author calls ‘a hermeneutic phenomenology of the self’” (Jervolino 2003, 66; authors’ trans.). On the one hand, this important work defines a further space for comparison between Ricoeur’s philosophy of the human being and Freud’s lesson (in Ricoeur’s work Freud is a significant non-philosophical perpetual reference; see Busacchi 2016). On the other hand, the notion of narrative identity becomes the fulcrum of this philosophy of the human being, but according to a formulation that is only partially framed in the problematic and thematic areas of narrative hermeneutics and narratology. It is in the context of the discussion of the first aporia of temporality (within the general conclusions of the trilogy of Time and Narrative [1983–1985]) that the discourse of narrative identity develops this “fragile offshoot issuing from the union of history and fiction” which represents “the assignment to an individual or a community of a specific identity” (Ricoeur 1988, 246). However, the deeper aim concerns the dialectic between substantial and non-substantial conceptions of identity, that is, a kind of discourse belonging to the theory of narration. The articulation of identity in identity-idem and identity-ipse is taken up in Oneself as Another in the context of the question ipseity, while in this passage the theme of ipseity is immediately connected to narrative identity to mark the difference between the self of self-knowledge and the ego that is known through interpretative work. Ricoeur is interested in focusing precisely on the modern problem of personal identity. In Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, the critique of personal identity is intertwined with an examination of the nature of consciousness. Hume explains that a unified human self depends, for the most part, on its perceptual functions. The experience of identity is an experience of the mind, and the mind is like a

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kind of theatre whose essence resides in temporality, or in the flow or temporal succession of impressions and ideas, of unconnected and nonconstitutive perceptions of a unitary phenomenon (identity, self etc.). He states: Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very experience, which is pleaded for them, nor have we any idea of self, after the manner it is here explain’d. For from what impression cou’d this idea be deriv’d? This question ’tis impossible to answer without a manifest contradiction and absurdity; and yet ’tis a question, which must necessarily be answer’d, if we wou’d have the idea of self pass for clear and intelligible. It must be some one impression, that gives rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any one impression, but that to which our several impressions and ideas are suppos’d to have a reference. If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same, thro’ the whole course of our lives; since self is suppos’d to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is deriv’d; and consequently there is no such idea. (Hume 1739, Part IV, Sec. VI)

On the one hand, Hume’s thesis also constitutes an attack against Locke’s historical-empiricist solution. On the other hand, the latter fits into the same framework of non-substantial conceptions. Among the various authors and interpreters tacking this area, Shaun Gallagher shows the productivity of the Humean problematic through the subsequent Kantian reception within Husserl’s critical revision. It is interesting to note the breadth of impact and the variety of uses of Husserl’s phenomenological approach on the problem of personal identity in contemporary philosophy and in interdisciplinary scientific contexts attentive to speculative contributions. The vast neurophenomenological project of Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch is an example of interdisciplinary, scientific and speculative research of this kind. A similar direction is followed in Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi’s research into phenomenology and cognitive science developed in their book Phenomenological Mind (2008), which represents another example of phenomenological development of a fundamentally speculative kind. For his part, Ricoeur operates in a transversal way between phenomenology and hermeneutics, in parallel with these series of phenomenological “variations”; however, his work is deeper and more rigorously articulated and developed.

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Among the most recent developments in neurophenomenology is Alva Noë’s attack on the theoretical cognitivist paradigm, to which he opposes enactivism, that is, the conception according to which the functions of consciousness are closely related to the motory interactions with the environment. But under Ricoeur’s theoretically flexible approach, this attack results in an enrichment and an articulation of phenomenological, hermeneutical and scientific-cognitivist points of view. Indeed, it is precisely the “dialectic” that is established between phenomenology and enactivism which seems to show the usefulness of the theoreticalconceptual heritage offered (for the philosophy of mind) by Ricoeur’s research. To be precise, they are the two thematic-problematic areas which have the most evident impact in Ricoeur’s investigations. The first is related to the question of the relationship between mind, identity and the body. The second is related to the question of the nature of emotions, their psychosomatic genesis and their impact on an experiential level and in the formation of the self. Basically, phenomenological hermeneutics applied to the study of personal identity, memory and self operates in dialectic with the analytic tradition, psychoanalysis and neuroscience. But in some ways, starting from the mid-1990s, it intercepts the problematic lines of reasoning between philosophy and cognitive science related to the debate on consciousness. Authors such as David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett and Johan Searle are related to this line. Searle, who advances a biological model, somehow updates the substantialist perspective, speaking of the properties of the brain. Ricoeur’s point of view is an alternative to Searle’s, positing the ontological dimension as the dimension of a dynamic strength and sense, of natural causalism and of the expressive and creative power of intentionality, meaning, motivations and values. Ricoeur’s conception of man, summarised in Oneself as Another, reabsorbs issues already investigated in his previous works, with close reference to the modern debate connected to Descartes and Husserl’s thoughts about the entity of the subject or Cogito, that is, the element that concretely governs voluntary and involuntary functions. Even then, the phenomenological approach reveals the enigma of an experience of the integral Cogito and the split of corporeality between an objective dimension and a subjective experience of one’s own body. The subsequent philosophy of the capable human being overcomes these enigmas and fractures, in a hermeneutical-phenomenological speculative synthesis which absorbs scientific, analytic and naturalistic lessons into a comprehensive model, and which, at the same time, outlines an answer to the ancient anti-substantialist challenge of modern empiricism and scepticism. The difference and correlation between the biological-substantial and the historical-narrative

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identity of the subject within which the theory of narrative identity is framed responds precisely to this need for comprehensive synthesis. It is through this differentiation that we try to contrast the idea of the ego as a social fiction, making the narrative dimension the real “hinge of mediation” to which bodily functioning and the unconscious, passivity or non-will, drive and character etc. are re-conducted. As already mentioned, in fact, Ricoeur writes: “Without the recourse to narration, the problem of personal identity would in fact be condemned to an antinomy with no solution” (Ricoeur 1988, 246). It is at this point that we can appreciate the breadth, significance and scientific-speculative and practical “range” of Ricoeur’s philosophy of narrative identity. This is a philosophy that we can now examine more closely. Ricoeur has repeatedly highlighted the characterisation of narrative identity as a specific form of human identity that an individual or a community experiences through the narrative “function” or “mediation” generated by the fusion of history and fiction (see ibid.). We have an intuitive pre-understanding of this possibility in that we know how to reach a better understanding of human life in its natural and existential condition, precisely through the narrative expressions that individuals and peoples share with each other via talking and representing things. In addition, we capture, with a greater sense of intelligibility, “exactness” and “depth” in a life history when it is reproposed following narrative models (drama, novel, fiction etc.) and using narrative elements and structures (a main character, an antagonist, a plot etc.) which are typical of the historical account or the fictional tale. For Ricoeur, the epistemological status of the autobiography– that is, its truthfulness and its status as a form of knowledge–not only confirms the plausibility of this pre-philosophical and commonsense position, but gives strength to two theses: first, that self-knowledge fundamentally takes the form of an interrelational and historical-cultural self-interpretation and interpretative exercise; and second, that this interpretative practice takes productive root in the mediating field of oral and written narration, transmitted by individuals or peoples, relating to real or invented events. With this, an alternative to the notion of personal identity is not outlined; rather its rich and multidimensional physiognomy is articulated. This physiognomy is partly reflected by the different uses of the notion of identity, in particular by the two major meanings that Ricoeur expresses with the Latin words idem and ipse. For Ricoeur, it is “the problem of personal identity” to constitute “a privileged place of confrontation between the two major uses of the concept of identity” (Ricoeur 1990, 115): identity as sameness (identity-idem) and identity as selfhood (identity-ipse). In Oneself as Another, the difference in conception

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and constitution behind these two uses is made by the thematisation of the specific mode of permanence over time, which varies significantly in both and which refers to two dimensions of experience and of the human condition, that is, the “character” and the “keeping of one’s word” (118). A clear tension between the bio-psychological dimension and the voluntary and moral dimensions of subjectivity is produced, that is, between the same character and the maintenance of the given word. This tension can only be smoothed out and harmonised by virtue of a continuous mediation function. This function is exercised precisely by the narrative identity, which therefore is not attributed to the historical-cultural dimension of the individual identity or the identity of a people. In fact, narrative identity operates by oscillating “between two limits: a lower limit, where permanence in time expresses the confusion of idem and ipse; and an upper limit, where the ipse poses the question of its identity without the aid and support of the idem” (124). This oscillating and tensional operation of narrative identity is the perpetual solution to the perpetual antinomy of the substantialist and non-substantialist dimensions of personal identity, which is not a mere theoretical-scientific matter or one of linguistic use. The common, daily human experience of change over time and, at the same time, the permanence of something equal, unique and unchanging in the person reveal the concreteness and actuality of this aporia. Specifically, it is the narratological category of the character that constitutes the way to intelligibility, a knowledge of identity on the dialectic side of permanence and change over time. The individual is understood and finds him/herself as the one who performs the action in the story and becomes the object of the plot, according to a formulation in which the story does not only structure the action and the context of action, but the very identity of the character. The identity is now precisely understood as a narrative identity. The following passage presents the theoretical-conceptual articulation proper to a theory of narrative identity in the context of narratological study, but providing a close connection with the experiential and practical sphere, that is, with the world of the life of the real individual (who is nourished as much with experience as with imagination, in both the psychic and cultural life). The person, understood as a character in a story, is not an entity distinct from his or her “experiences”. Quite the opposite: the person shares the condition of dynamic identity peculiar to the story recounted. The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character. (147–148)

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I can identify myself with the character of a story and transform the “world of text” into a reflective and imaginative laboratory of interpretation, reconfiguration and personal renewal. This is not only possible because, as in a game of mirrors, I can reconstitute myself as a narrator of my own story, but because making myself a “character” opens the way to a possible reconfiguration and redefinition of my own personality and experience of life. The semantic innovation and new congruence of meaning determined in the context of narrative elaboration or creation has to do with the elaboration and re-elaboration of one’s own identity and life experience. The act of reading, of narrating and self-narrating, allows individuals to understand each other differently and better, to rethink, to create new perspectives of meaning and to change. Narration is the creation of meaning and understanding; narration is creation, articulation and development of the self. It is not Ricoeur who originally conceived of the idea of the character as the result of coordination between the story told and the plot: this is Aristotle’s thesis, as exposed in his Poetics. In fact, Aristotle’s work is seen as one of the guiding axes of Ricoeur’s trilogy of Time and Narrative. It is in this trilogy that Ricoeur develops this idea of coordination, or rather of “coordination by subordination”, as Aristotle already said. The identity of the character is maintained from the beginning to the end of the story, or within the story, and the unity that determines it derives from the construction of the plot. Before the character itself, it is the elaboration or construction of the plot which constitutes the ground within which mediation between the two aforementioned dimensions of identity–that is, between permanence and change–can be sought and identified. It may seem almost paradoxical but, in itself, the character cannot carry, represent or express its identity through its unity and integrity. In Time and Narrative, the deepening of this discourse is given through the treatment of Aristotle’s tragic model, but according to a formulation aimed at generalisation. In fact, the dynamism of the identity implemented in the tragic narrative expresses a “dialectics” between instances of concordance and elements of discordance that do not only concern the case of concrete and specific dangers of loss, alteration, drama or tragedy, but rather any experiential dialectics. In his trilogy, Ricoeur deepens another important foundation in the art of narrative composition: the configuration, which in Aristotle finds reference in the case of the effect on the viewer of catharsis determined by the tragic story. The configuration is understood by Ricoeur not only as a property or quality of a successful narrative composition, but as a property of human psychology itself (to enter the world of the text and to reconsider one’s self, the others and the world in a new imaginative formula within a new framework of possibilities for action). In this broad sense, the

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functioning of the configuration must be understood as the dynamism of the narrative construction that articulates concordance and discordance–a dynamism that forms discordant concordance and synthesis of the heterogeneous. The latter discursive development seems to us particularly full of meaning and practical implications around the question and experience of the self (see Ricoeur 1988, 246–247). In short, both self-knowledge and self-development as a human can mature in the mirror of narrative experiences, in the reflective and selfcritical examination aroused by narration, hearing narrating and oneselfnarrating. Greater argumentative force and reasonableness is given to this discourse–which closely links imaginative functions and cultural life on the one hand, and concrete personal experience and human psychology on the other–by the important analysis that Ricoeur consecrates to the question of proof in psychoanalysis, set out in one of his important papers on Freud. The Question of Proof in Freud’s Psychoanalytic Writings (1977) constitutes a contribution that goes beyond the narrow epistemological question of psychoanalysis (and the controversy with Adolf Grünbaum’s critical neo-empiricism). In it, Ricoeur does not simply bring the topic of clinical cases closer to the notion of narrative identity (with its disposition between history and fiction), but assigns to narrative identity a function of mediation between factuality and representation, and between truth and falsity. The criterion of narrativity must resolve the serious aporia of the loss of anchoring to the reality of the “psychoanalytic fact”; in psychoanalysis, the pertinent factor is not what the patient has actually experienced, but “what a subject makes of his fantasies” (Ricoeur 1977, 20). The narrative criterion helps to smooth out the difficulty that arises from the fictional criterion. It allows a recognition of the effectiveness and truthfulness of the “reasoned mythology” beyond the game of pure symbolic-representational identification, since narrativity somehow reconciles Dichtung and Wahrheit. But it is a reconciliation not by substitution: there is no way to substitute “doing true” or “making-believe-true” for “saying-true”. Rather, “saying-true and making-true [are] reconciled in the idea of constructing or reconstructing a coherent history from the scattered debris of our experience” (40). Ricoeur takes us far beyond the lesson of Aristotle, who “did not hesitate to say that every well-told story teaches something. Furthermore, he said that stories reveal universal aspects of the human condition and that, in this sense, poetry is more philosophical than the history of historians, which is overly dependent on life’s anecdotal aspects” (Ricoeur 1984, 190).

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The narrative dimension is the most comprehensive and true-truthful synthetic and dynamic form of personal identity. It subsumes the sphere of psychic life, through intuition of the instinctual and hidden drives, desires and emotions, and through the tendencies and dispositions of the character. In addition, it makes itself expressive of the capacities and possibilities of the individual in the redefinition of perspectives, meanings, values and plans of action. Ricoeur’s discourse can be criticised by recalling that while the story is told, life is lived, and that the act of reading (or of storytelling or writing) is a “suspension” in an interregnum that is, however, provisional: either one is a character in a story or a person in a lifetime. However, this interregnum is not simply a temporary suspension from world affairs, an alienation from concrete circumstances, or a dereistic flight or “game”; in other words, it is not a purely imaginative operation. It is the very substance of our psychic reality, which is different from the empirical reality, and also different from the abstract or ideal reality, the purely imaginative. It is precisely on this point that the philosophical hermeneutics of narration intercepts the gnoseological, ontological and anthropological question of the dialectic between world and experience, between reality and representation, and tightens it in a unique problematic node, recognising the triple value of mediation in the narrative function. The effect of identification and catharsis, of configuration and reconfiguration, which generates the character, feeds and defines our psychic reality. And this psychic reality is an effective, concrete and true reference, both in reference to worldly facts and to intersubjective relationships, and in reference to the historical experience and the planning horizon both of a single individual and of a people. Due to the profound implications that our two-pronged investigation entails along its entire path, at the front of the conception of the human and, therefore, of philosophical anthropology, we cannot yet at this stage trace the presentation of a complete synthesis. Certainly, we take advantage of the parallel that has been established with Ricoeur’s philosophy and that refers, in one way or another, to his philosophy of the capable human being. This anthropological-philosophical conception places the notion of narrative identity at the centre. However, in this research we do not entirely embrace and follow Ricoeur’s perspective and philosophy. We can summarise our position and problematically restart the discourse from the following findings: I am not my brain. I am not my mind or my body: they are not spirit or relationship. I am neither individual nor

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subject: they are neither organism nor system; they are not a machine or a structure; they are not function or field or language. In a more-or-less partial and metaphorical form, each of these determinations summarises some aspect of the reality of the human being in general. Depending on the theoretical-doctrinal orientations at the root of a specific disciplinary approach or study, one or the other term, or one or the other thematic group will emerge and assert itself with a heuristic function. If, on the one hand, it is true that today most scientists and philosophers tend to embrace a naturalistic conception (or at least privilege an objectifying treatment and approach), on the other hand, in many areas there is a growing interest in and attention on the subjectivistic and lived aspects that are internal in the sense of self-reflection, self-representation or auto-biographism, testimony and self-narration. Philosophy on the one hand, and psychoanalysis on the other, reflect all this, tending increasingly to reject polarised or polarising anthropological models. We are neither only body nor only existence. It is from this point of view that critical philosophical hermeneutics is in the running to act as a procedure and field of connection between dimensions of different and difficult correlations, both with regards to contents and cognitive forms, and also in terms of methodologies and theoretical syntheses.

CHAPTER 4 CORPORAL IDENTITY

1. Mind-body models The question of the body has been treated in a form of dialectics with the “interior life”, or soul, since the beginning of Western civilization, long before the advent of Christianity. Plato already qualified the body in this way, defining it as a prison or grave of the soul (Phaedo, 66 b). By doing this he effectively contributed by laying the very first ontological and gnoseological roots of future dualistic models. Conversely, Aristotle stands in an antithetical position. For him, body and soul are separable dimensions of a unique substance, not two distinct substances. The first is one with matter, understood as power; the latter is form as act. The body is subordinate to the soul. As Aristotle explains: every natural body which has life in it is a substance in the sense of a composite. But since it is also a body of such and such a kind, viz. having life, the body cannot be soul; the body is the subject or matter, not what is attributed to it. Hence the soul must be a substance in the sense of the form of a natural body having life potentially within it. […] It is substance in the sense which corresponds to the definitive formula of a thing’s essence. That means that it is “the essential whatness” of a body of the character just assigned. (The Soul, B 1, 412a, 15–20; 412b, 10–11)

Aristotle underlines that there a significant difference between animate and inanimate bodies: Suppose that what is literally an “organ”, like an axe, were a natural body, its “essential whatness”, would have been its essence, and so its soul; if this disappeared from it, it would have ceased to be an axe, except in name. As it is, it is just an axe; it wants the character which is required to make its whatness or formulable essence a soul; for that, it would have had to be a natural body of a particular kind, viz. one having in itself the power of setting itself in movement and arresting itself. Next, apply this doctrine in the case of the “part” of

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the living body. Suppose that the eye were an animal–sight would have been its soul, for sight is the substance or essence of the eye which corresponds to the formula, the eye being merely the matter of seeing; when seeing is removed the eye is no longer an eye, except in name–it is no more a real eye than the eye of a statue or of a painted figure. (B 1, 412 b, 10–22)

This idea of the body as matter or instrument becomes dominant in Scholastics. For Thomas Aquinas, the end of the body is the rational soul, exactly as the end of matter is form (see Summa theologiae, I, q. 91 a, 3). In one way or in another, this idea was destined to persist all the way up to the modern era. With René Descartes, for example, we find a differentiation between bodily and thinking substances; this constitutes a new kind of differentiation, but at the same time it mirrors the way of defining body and soul (or mind) with a form of reciprocal distinction or determination. Descartes’s view and meditation was to become the paradigmatic reference of the modern and contemporary problematisation of the mind-body relationship. This problematisation arises within Descartes’s writings, on the one hand by virtue of his dualistic distinction of substances, and on the other as the recognised radical distinction between body and soul as absorbed in philosophy thanks to Christian theology. It is in this context that explaining how the interaction of corporal, material or mechanical events with immaterial events–as in the case of the human body as a machine moved by will or motivation–becomes a challenging and complex dilemma for Descartes. Even today, his book The Passions of the Soul (1649) represents a reference work for studies concerning the mind-body relationship, offering important and critical-reflective points which still remain challenging. Its importance goes, somehow, beyond the mind-body problem and the dilemmas concerning philosophy of mind. We can go so far as to say that it is with the understanding of the body as a machine that the question of identity bursts into philosophical research as a transversal, theoretical-practical problem. The mechanistic and physicalistic dimension–that is, of causalism and continuous change over time–links identity to bodily transformation and destruction. Does the very end come with the physical decline and destruction of the body? This is a difficult bond to understand and recognise, not only because it requires adherence to the belief in annihilation and nihilism, but also because such a view overloads the value of every bodily change. The body-machine supports the individual but can no longer offer itself as a principle of unity of identity. Thus, the very concept of the body as body-machine imposes the existence of another dimension generating

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unity: the mind or the soul.6 With the idea of a soul in a modern speculative key, a discourse different from pure material and biological purposes is reintroduced. At the same time, a different discourse regarding both temporality as a lived experience and identity as an existential, historical and cultural fact is thematised and developed. By the modern epoch, we observe new interpretative variations and new theoretical-critical positions to counterpoise dualism and substantialism. Directly or indirectly, the long series of perspectives and models developed over the following centuries, and with particular intensity in recent decades, all come back to Descartes’s investigations, redefining and reconfiguring aspects, points and terms as well as methodologies, disciplinary and interdisciplinary domains of investigation. All recent philosophical studies have to work with the scientific concepts and results that have emerged in neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, neurology and similar disciplines. Hence, we have the rich flowering of dualist, monist, correspondentist, emergentist and reductionist approaches to the mind-body problem, with consequent repercussions on identity models and on anthropological, psychological and psychosocial theories. Even speculative investigations on cognitive processes in psychic phenomena and on (inter)relational approaches to studying personal development refer constantly to this vast range of scientific disciplines. In particular, a series of scientific discoveries in the fields of neurobiology and biochemistry have contributed to re-actualising, resetting and reinterpreting the mind-body problem and the joint question of human identity in a more markedly naturalising key. Thus, in the course of the twentieth century, the mind-body problem was progressively reduced to the problem of the location of consciousness in nature. 6

As Charles Ramond explains: “Dès que le corps humain est conçu comme une machine, l’identité de l’individu fait problème. Si on définit, en effet, l’identité d’un individu, conformément à l’esprit du mécanisme, par une certaine disposition de ses parties, toute autre disposition définira un autre individu. Mais comme il est manifeste que la disposition des parties de notre corps se modifie sans cesse dans le temps, une conception mécaniste de l’individualité conduira à un véritable éclatement, dans le temps, de l’individualité, contraire semble-t-il au plus élémentaire bon sens: car certaines modifications de notre corps peuvent sans doute, et dans certaines circonstances, être déterminantes (par exemple, une circoncision); mais la plupart sont au fond négligeables (par exemple, changer de coupe de cheveux). L’identité d’un individu, autrement dit ce par quoi il demeure le même malgré les modifications qui peuvent l’affecter, ne peut donc pas, par définition, être déterminée par référence à son corps sans cesse changer. Le mécanisme est alors obligé de supposer une âme s’il veut pouvoir continuer à parler d’identité ou d’individualité” (see Ramond 1992, 119).

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David Chalmers (Chalmers 1966), Donald Davidson (Davidson 1970), Thomas Nagel and Galen Strawson (Strawson 1994) are key authors in contemporary philosophical research on the mind-body, consciousness, intentionality, volition, the linguistic act and so on. All of them have cultivated scientific and interdisciplinary studies, reaching a significant degree of expertise. Their work and theoretical-speculative advancements have had repercussions in various areas–from the philosophy of mind to cognitive science, from neuro-phenomenology to psychoanalytic theory, and in various psychiatric and clinical theories connected to phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches. In this context, Ricoeur’s theoreticalspeculative work reveals a particular usefulness and significance, primarily by virtue of the methodology of investigation, which is structurally interdisciplinary and has a flexible and transversal epistemological articulation which can operate both theoretically and practically between description and explanation, analysis and interpretation. Its particular usefulness is by virtue of the breadth and articulation of traditions and theoretical perspectives that Ricoeur uses and applies: from existential to reflective philosophy, from phenomenology to philosophical hermeneutics, from structuralism to analytical philosophy and so on. Another particular character of this philosophy can be recognised in its argumentative strength and the deep and holistic dimension of Ricoeur’s views and ideas. In short, there are a range of theoretical, methodological and scientific factors that allow us to productively use Ricoeur’s philosophy, beyond his particular philosophy, as a new kind of procedural model. In fact, all of its major characteristics are of strategic importance for current theoretical studies on the mind-brain relationship, on cause-reason, on instinct and intentionality and others. Ricoeur’s techniques for interdisciplinary comparison and his theoretical-speculative assumption of scientific material are strategic, as is his search for connections with other theoretical-critical discourses (such as phenomenology, hermeneutics and analytical philosophy). Also strategic are his interpretation of philosophy and science as having a similar theoretical practical structure and his discursive development as articulated in different plans, reflective degrees and thematic registers. All this has contributed to making Ricoeur’s speculative approach particularly productive, as a proposal that indicates a route to a unified approach to the study and understanding of the human being without unilateralising themes and solutions. Due to the fact that materialist and reductionist paradigms are predominant and pervasive, avoiding the risk of an ideological orientation toward ontological monism or eliminative reductionism is currently a high priority. Ricoeur’s approach forces one to work with complex, differentiated

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and counterpoising data and theoretical-speculative content, without simplification resulting in discursive hybridism. This aspect emerges with evidence in his dialogue with the molecular neurobiologist, Jean-Pierre Changeux, in their book La Nature et la Règle (1998; see Changeux, Ricoeur 2008). In this book, Changeux presents a perspective of eliminative materialism or reductionism. He proposes this perspective by embracing Spinoza’s ideal of a comprehensive mixed discourse in which quality and spiritual aspects are connected and reconducted to their measurable, physical structure. Ricoeur rejects this hybridism by proposing a multileveled approach to the human being as a biological and historical subject. He had earlier introduced this alternative in his 1950 work on the philosophy of the will (Le volontaire et l’involontaire), reflecting on the possibility of a poetical discourse–that is, one which operates in a sort of unifying (but not fully rational, scientific or philosophical) way–facilitating an embrace between a discourse related to the objective sphere and a discourse related to the subjective sphere. In fact, in his Freedom and Nature (1950), Ricoeur had already worked through a phenomenology of the “integral Cogito” (or integral cognitive experience of subjectivity), elaborating a strategy for coordinating scientific contributions (from empirical psychology and psychoanalysis) with phenomenological investigations. In particular, he refers to science as fulfilling the need for a safe cognitive tool capable of guiding the diagnostic correlation between the knowledge and experience of corporeal phenomena as organic facts and the phenomenological-experiential knowledge of the body as a lived (experienced) body. Edmund Husserl’s problematic dualism of subjective body and objective body returns as a new dimension and a kind of problematisation of the mind-body issue. Variously treated in the philosophy of mind, in neuroscience and, more generally, in neuroscientific investigations focused on phenomenology and hermeneutics, this problem now requires a synthetical approach which can summarise and harmoniously coordinate data and theoretical contributions from both philosophy and science. Ricoeur enters the field of contemporary research on the mind-body relationship and on the question of identity, placing himself in the area of– and in the phenomenological(-hermeneutical) perspective of–cognitive science. In recent years, cognitive science has gradually been opening up to the contributions of phenomenology thanks, first of all, to that abovementioned debate on consciousness (a debate animated by Daniel C. Dennett [1991], Owen J. Flanagan [1992] and others in the field of “phenomenological-analytical philosophy” and also by Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch in the field of neurophenomenological

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studies). Both the phenomenologists of the mind and the neurophenomenologists make significant reference to the procedural perspectives and models offered by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and (increasingly) by Paul Ricoeur’s critical hermeneutics. To better clarify Ricoeur’s collocation in the context of the debates on mind-body and identity, it is useful to deepen the dialectic that occurs in his dialogue with Changeux, because it clearly reveals his position. First, in analytical-cognitive sciences, Changeux’s perspective is framed among the ontologies of the mental, alongside reductionist physicalists such as Dennett, Edelman and Flanagan. More precisely, Changeux’s approach and perspective is oriented to eliminativism, which is Paul and Patricia Churchland’s approach and perspective. To a certain degree, Changeux accepts and uses the explanatory model of interactionist dualists (such as John C. Eccles and Wilder Penfield). He tries to overcome metaphysical aporias by affirming the logical-ontological identity of mind and brain; in this sense, his book L’homme neuronal (1983) is highly eloquent, starting from its title.7 This position is confirmed both argumentatively and scientifically within the dialogue in La Nature et la Règle, in which Ricoeur opposes this attempt at reductionist synthesis. The phenomenologicalhermeneutical point of view maintains the importance of the problematic inherent in the difference between the discourse concerning human identity as expressed through corporality as an organism, and the discourse concerning human identity as an existential experience also lived through the body, as a subjective body.8 Thus, Ricoeur harmonises his view with the 7

In fact, in this book Changeux is clear in defining the essence of his position, writing: “Les possibilités combinatoires liées au nombre et à la diversité des connexions du cerveau de l’homme paraissent effectivement suffisantes pour rendre compte des capacités humaines. Le clivage entre activités mentales et neuronales ne se justifie pas. Désormais, à quoi bon parler d’‘Esprit’ ? Il n’y a plus que deux ‘aspects’ d’un seul et même événement que l’on pourra décrire avec des termes empruntés soit au langage du psychologue (ou de l’introspection), soit à celui du neurobiologiste” (Changeux 1983, 364). 8 As Ricoeur explains: “C’est d’un dualisme sémantique, exprimant une dualité de perspectives, que je pars. Ce qui incline à glisser d’un dualisme des discours à un dualisme des substances, c’est que chaque domaine d’étude tend à se définir par rapport à ce qu’on peut appeler un référent dernier, c’est-à-dire un quelque chose à quoi on se rapporte en dernier ressort dans ce domaine. Mais ce référent n’est dernier que dans ce domaine et se définit en même temps que celui-ci. Il faut donc s’interdire de transformer un dualisme de référents en un dualisme de substances. L’interdiction de cette extrapolation du sémantique à l’ontologique a pour conséquence que, au plan phénoménologique où je me tiens, le terme mental ne s’égale pas au terme

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phenomenological research of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, which has reached Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among others. In fact, in his phenomenology of the voluntary and involuntary, Ricoeur follows MerleauPonty’s approach. At the same time, as we have seen, he develops an original theoretical and procedural way of tackling the difficult problem of a comprehensive (sort of) unification of the discourses concerning the human being. These discourses are many and are internally and externally highly differentiated: there are speculative and scientific discourses, literary and cultural discourses, mythological and religious discourses and so on. This is a solution in radical contrast with Changeux’s “Spinozian” ideal, an ideal which (as already mentioned) Ricoeur considers to be problematically hybrid and, in essence, not capable of solving the problem of semantic dualism. It is within this search for a correlation between the organic and existential dimensions that correspondentist models find meaning and consistency. Conversely, the discourse relating to the transformational dimension concerns more deeply the anthropological conception and the ontological dilemma, that is, the resolution of the problem of mind-body dualism. Ricoeur’s solution to this problem lies in his philosophy of the capable human being. Within this conception, human identity is seen, in a dialectical sense, as a procedural relationship between organic growth and development on the one side, and psychological and existential maturation and emancipation on the other. At the same time, this dialectic also summarises aspects concerning the dialectic between character and moral dilemmas, desires, values and so on. In Ricoeur’s philosophy of the human being we find a general vision that can be summarised as follows: we are born as individuals, while to become a person is a cultural, moral and social process. The person does not indicate a status; rather, it is an ontological predicate. To integrate this ontological perspective on the person, which further articulates the problem of mind-body dualism, Ricoeur uses Aristotle’s view, placing the idea of matter and form as a dialectic of power and act. In this way, the emergence of the person within individuality is interpreted as a process of liberation, expression and realisation of the potential inherent in subjectivity. To become a person, or rather to become the person we potentially are, is equal to transforming ourselves into this person through that rich and complex process that intertwines, from birth, organic with psychic

immatériel, c’est-à-dire non corporel. Bien au contraire. Le mental vécu implique le corporel, mais en un sens du mot corps irréducible au corps objectif tel qu’il est connu des sciences de la nature” (Ricoeur, in Changeux, Ricoeur 2008, 23).

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development, cultural (educational) with social development, and existential with moral development. In many ways, the transformational correspondentist model finds evidence within a certain framework of theoretical-clinical research in the psychoanalytic and psychiatric field, which is what we propose in the following section, and which we think is strongly correlated with Ricoeur’s conception of the capable human being.

2. Others’ inscription within the self and mind inscription within the body At the intersection of neuroscience and psychoanalysis, Gaetano Benedetti’s pioneering work cannot be neglected. Benedetti is one of the leading authors in the field of the psychotherapy of psychosis, and also devoted to the study of neuropsychology. He laid the foundation for the mind-body relationship according to which each phenomenon is structured in different levels of which none is the “real” one […] The concept of level of autonomy is a modern concept, which seems to me characteristic of the scientific thought of this century, because it faces, simultaneously, different fields of science that have no relationship with each other […] The “process of reduction”, that is, the attempt to establish a real, fundamental level to which others can compare themselves, was a characteristic of the science of the last century. (Benedetti 1973, 618; authors’ trans.)

This position appears methodologically still valid on a clinical level and is a healthy antidote to all those reductionist currents with a prevalent biological direction that seem to have regained a hegemonic position today. However, in recent decades there have been significant changes and new acquisitions, especially in the field of neuroscience. On this level, the most interesting contributions derive on the one hand from epigenetics, and on the other from the currents in neuroscience that have allowed themselves to be questioned by affects and the interpersonal dimension. As for epigenetics, it in turn can be compared with a broader reflection inherent in the transindividual aspect of human identity. We have seen how the decisive contribution of others, starting from parental figures, in the construction of identity can has, for a very long time, been seen as central by psychoanalysis, developmental psychology and philosophy itself. However, the terms of the discourse have taken on a

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particular weight and configuration in more recent times. It seems to be sufficient to think about the ever-increasing importance in the psychoanalytic field of transgenerational concerns. This term primarily refers to the possibility that the unresolved psychic conflicts of one generation are passed down to subsequent generations and settle into the transgenerational unconscious of the children and grandchildren. In recent decades, a similar process has been described at the genomic level through epigenetics, a discipline that has upset certain conceptions related to genetic fixity and shown the genotype-phenotype model to be overly simplistic. Epigenetics inaugurates a model according to which DNA, is considered as a kind of hardware, “creates software for its own functioning. DNA learns simply by living” (Di Mauro 2016, 9). In short, “epigenetics is the use we make of our DNA” (43). It can also produce changes partially inheritable by later generations. Epigenetics teaches us that genetic transcription is subject to the effect of other nucleotide sequences that have a regulatory function, and that this regulation is largely determined by interactions with the environment. This makes the mind-body problem extremely complex and dualist positions weaker. In summary, epigenetics refers to the “individual and potentially divergent way of using the same genetic Text” (110). This can also happen with reference to the individual and his/her psychic configuration. In this way, experiences, and especially stressful situations, can be passed on to future generations. For example, in animal experimentation it has been observed that premature separation from the mother can provoke alterations to the hormonal metabolism and atypical behaviours comparable to human anxiety and depression, even in subsequent generations that do not undergo such early separation (see ibid., 69–75, and in particular, 70). Because of this, new individuals can learn “the memory of events they have never experienced” (112). Thus, the possibility takes form of a somatic unconscious, inscribed in the body (or rather in the genome), which joins the dynamic unconscious. But what happens over the short time period of the transgenerational passage can also happen in the very short timescale of the history of the individual, hence the phrase “relational mind”, adopted by Daniel J. Siegel to refer to the fact that the mind is the product of interactions between experiences and the functions of the brain (see Siegel 1999). The question can therefore be posed in this way: once it has been acknowledged that human identity is generated from matter (and electively from the central nervous system) and that it will continually return to confront it, can identity then be traced back (that is, is it reducible) to the neurophysiological mechanisms that subtend it? Or does the transformative effect of experience and interpersonal relationships generate an

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irreducibility of identity to matter, that is to say, a process of transcendence that is configured as untranslatable? This is the position that we choose to support and that leads us to deepen the meaning of the term “untranslatable”, which, as we have seen, we find in various areas ranging from Benedetti’s neuropsychology, to the psychoanalysis of Marshall Edelson (who considers the distinction between mind and body to be a logical necessity that the development of neuroscience cannot mitigate; see Edelson 1984), up to Ricoeur’s philosophy. If, on the one hand, “untranslatability” is closely related to “incommensurability”, on the other it urges a connection with the translatability paradigm that we explore in the continuation of this book. Transformational correspondence assumes precisely the fulcrum of the possibility that the incommensurability or untranslatability between mind and body on a gnoseological level coexists with the bidirectional transformative interaction of one on the other.

3. Material-body and symbolic-body in the genesis of identity In the previous chapters, it has often been highlighted how our identity is marked by irreducibility and difference–in a word, by otherness: we are others with respect to others, with respect to our body and, in some ways, also with respect to ourselves. At the same time, contributions to the transgenerational question from epigenetics, interpersonal neurobiology and psychoanalysis derive an idea of identity as the product of a double inscription: of the others in the self and of the mind in the body. The body, therefore, is connected with identity both because it is generative of identity and because it can speak to it beforehand as an alterity. The complexity of this movement has caused a distinction to be made in the phenomenological field between Korper and Leib, which, in a certain sense, enhances the priority of living and being compared to mere objectification, but also implies the acknowledgment of a factuality that faces us. In a similar way, psychoanalysis takes the relationship between the psychic and the somatic as its foundation. Hence Freud derives the “second fundamental assumption” of psychoanalysis which “explains the supposed somatic accessory processes as being what is essentially mental and disregards for the moment the quality of consciousness” (Freud 1938, 38). Moreover, the dependence of psychic phenomena on bodily influences had already been confirmed in The Ego and the Id, where Freud identified in the body a factor that acts on the formation of the ego. He concludes that ego “is first and foremost a body-ego” (Freud 1922, 364). Hence the belief, embraced by various psychoanalytic theories, albeit in conflict with each

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other, that the self is essentially and originally a bodily self. This term has been part of the psychoanalytic vocabulary for some time (see, for example, Kafka 1971). It subsequently took on relevance in the fields of neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis, which conceptualised it in light of mirror neuron theory as a “primitive bodily awareness of oneself that precedes and subtends any reflexive awareness of oneself” (Gallese 2014, 693; authors’ trans.). At the same time, Vittorio Gallese proposes the more specific articulation of intentional bodily self as “our openness to the world and the intentionality of our mental processes […] constituted and made possible by a primitive motor intention” (695). Psychoanalysis can therefore easily lead to the assumption that incorporation shapes the mind and that the mind is inconceivable without some form of incarnation (Lemma 2015, 19). The transition from the concept of corporal self, as defined by neuroscience and psychoanalytic theories of development, to that of bodily identity is likely to require a comparison with the idea of the phenomenological nature of the body that I am. It is not by chance that it is a psychoanalyst, Salomon Resnik, who is particularly attentive to phenomenological thought and who puts particular emphasis in his writings on the theme of the body, especially with reference to psychosis. For this author, the self has a presence; it exists in the shadow of the body, without form, but gradually acquires a phantasmatic or real form which becomes corporal (corp vecu) (see Resnik 1993, 13; authors’ trans.). Comparing the original discourse of psychoanalysis with that of Resnik, a circularity emerges which from leads the somatic unconscious and from bodily matter to the genesis of the self. This, in turn, returns to investing a body that now, as experienced, lends itself particularly well to the function of a place for the symbolic. However, if the corporal self is at the basis of the genesis of the self, what constraints arise for the self? Ricoeur’s reflection, which conceptualises the body in the context of the involuntary, even more radically than in the context of the character, is useful in this regard. This, in fact, is intended as a sort of “absolutely involuntary” process (Ricoeur 1990, 119). It follows that, “ontologically, the flesh precedes the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary. […] The flesh is the place of all the passive syntheses on which the active syntheses are constructed” (324). Ricoeur concludes that “if there is an existential category especially appropriate to an investigation of the self as flesh, it would be that of thrownness, thrownthere”. It is therefore legitimate to call the incarnation a “primary otherness, in order to distinguish it from the otherness of the foreign” (327).

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Corporal identity is therefore an identity that is experienced and, at the same time, a constructed identity. If we start from the first side, we have to deal with the paradox of a passivity in continuous, incessant transformation–first and foremost due to the passage of time, but also, of course, by the impending disease and its more violently mutative effects. By radicalizing the constructive aspect, even if it is intentionally and consciously constructive, we risk psychic omnipotence. As Alessandra Lemma argues, many people who conspicuously modify their body with tattoos and piercings emphasise the importance of taking control of it and may feel that there is nothing more liberating than being able to alter it (Lemma 2014, 709). But what ethical problems arise with this?

4. The postmodern body: between omnipotence and dislocation In a seminar at the end of the last century, on the topic of a postmodern solution to the problems of psychoanalysis, Sergio Bordi pointed out some critical outcomes of an enhancement of the multiple conception of the self operated by postmodernity in sometimes indiscriminate forms. According to the author, “the analytical work shows us that this multiplicity of selves, which is not coordinated by a stable organisation of the self, is fragmented into a multitude of identities which obstruct the sense of oneself and one’s being with the others” (Bordi 1996, 32; authors’ trans.). The main difference lies in the fact that in the postmodern perspective, “there is a great absence, our body, which was the point from which Freud started the Ego” (ibid.). Although the limits of self-expression are very wide, there is nevertheless a barrier that cannot be overcome: “the bond represented by the body, beyond which the mind of others cannot go” (33). Perhaps, concluded the author, “it is precisely this limit that postmodern thought is not capable of recognising enough” (ibid.). However, in disregarding the limit, postmodernism goes further. Judith Butler’s wide-ranging position is emblematic. The author assumes that the body is in itself an abstraction and that gender is a function of the discourse. The author is therefore clear in rejecting sex “as the prediscursive as well as the priority of sexuality to culture” (Butler 1990, 148) and in asserting, rather, the body as a construction, sex as a function of the discourse and sexual facticity as a phantasmatic construction (see 146). Here we take the typical path of postmodern thought which, starting from a critique of ontology and metaphysics, as well as from a (shareable) contestation of the use of these categories by power and institutions, denies any possible limit to the discourse. Following this line, it ends totally

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relativising the real, also conceived as a phantasmatic construction, denying the human itself any possible limit. Thus, matter, life and existence are reduced to cultural categories. Obviously, the question of gender identity as posed in the psychoanalytic context is quite different. A presupposition of the psychoanalytic position is the assumption of an “original bisexuality” (Freud 1920, 171), which however also represents a “tragedy” (Campbell 2015), to the extent that it is an incomplete state; therefore, to reach congruence between our body and the image of ourselves is a tumultuous process. For William W. Meissner (2005, 1–11), for example, sexual identity (understood by the author as an extrinsic designation of the self) must be distinguished from gender identity (i.e., internal experience of the self). The latter, in turn, can be divided into core gender identity and gender role identity. Reviewing several authors, Meissner highlights how many of them tend to see gender as dynamic and situationally determined, while others see the core gender identity as a permanent and unchangeable component of the self, correlated above all with biological factors. The body self becomes a dynamic entity, and consequently the gender identity is not static, although once the core gender is formed it remains perhaps unchanging and persistent. Personal identity, of which gender identity is an essential component, is at the same time constant and changeable (see Meissner 2005a, 49–53). These issues take on particular relevance if one considers that among the most dramatic identity upheavals, the ones relating to the body can certainly enumerated, both in physiological and pathological terms. Among the former it is necessary to include those correlated with the passage of time and the bodily transformations imposed by it. Among the latter, contexts belonging to full-fledged psychopathology, such as Cotard syndrome9 and, above all, gender dysphoria should be considered. Gender dysphoria, definable as the “distress that accompanies the incongruence between one’s experienced and expressed gender and one’s assigned or natural gender” (DSM 5, 822), perhaps represents one of the most radical identity disturbances with which a person may have to deal. It generates an uncertainty which can, in extreme cases, lead to suicide and which not infrequently persists even after surgery-induced change. Many transsexuals fell themselves trapped in what is experienced as a “wrong” body and, for this reason, try to obtain, through the intervention of an SRS (Surgical Reconstruction of Sex), a congruence with their subjective experience (see 9

This is a form of depressive delusion implying the denial of the body or its transformation into something inorganic: to have a heart of glass, a petrified bowel, etc.

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Lemma 2015). Transsexualism in fact often implies an experience of incongruity and is thus configurated as a disruption, or a destruction, of identity coherence. However, there are other less dramatic identity upheavals that have to do with the spatial-temporal positioning of the body. The naturalness of the transformations induced by time corresponds to a sort of artificiality of those that are spatially characterised. Today, the discourse has taken on much more complex values, especially if we consider the dislocation in space expressed through the radical–and, up to a few decades ago, completely unusual–concept of an avatar. The avatar allows one to move away from one’s physical body and relocate to cyberspace, as in telematic role-playing games, often with the possibility of denying and transforming one’s sexual and/or bodily identity as well. Of course, if we refer to cyberspace and the transformative movements that can take place in its enormous variegation and in the even more varied use that can be made of it, every single judgment, both ethical and clinical, must be suspended. Certainly, contrasting aspects may emerge, all of which are closely related to identity processes. In fact, the watershed seems to cross again the meshes of imitation, partial identification and internalisation and find its pivot in the idea of the game. This is what videogames or virtual worlds such as Second Life have in common with much older customs. The rather disturbing novelty that emerges from the Web is perhaps due to the fact that the increase in reality that it facilitates in effect restricts the symbolic space. This space is often mediated by a rather approximate narrative and a staging of traditional childhood games that certainly do not conform to the “original” (such as playing “cops and robbers”). On the contrary, it is possible that the excess of realism proffered in cyberspace favours–in personalities who are predisposed to it and in a different phase of life (adolescence or adulthood instead of childhood)–a stable identification instead of transitional identifications. This inscribes the identification more deeply on the self and creates greater difficulties for the return to everyday reality. It is necessary to remember that virtual worlds have always been built to decrease or even eliminate the experience of mental pain (see Johns 2013). As Johns reminds us, most of the time we can live these temporary identities. However, we must also be aware that we are not very far from the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde duality, and we must be sure we can preserve a healthy capacity to come back to reality from imagination (see ibid.). Certainly, this statement, dictated by common sense cannot be ignored. Of course, the “return” is but a minor issue for most players, for whom the transit to a Second Life expresses only a temporary physiological dissociation. It can translate, as for most children who play (or played) “cops and robbers”, into an increase

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in the self. But what happens when the internal criminal gang takes over, when identity saboteurs manage to sneakily achieve their aim? Here, then, we can situate that the apocalyptic scenario proposed at the end of the century by David Cronenberg in eXistenz (1999) when one of the protagonists, grappling with a totally immersive game, asks, in a moment of deep anguish: “Where are our real bodies? Are they alright? What if they’re hungry? What if there’s danger?... I’m feeling a little disconnected from my real life… The game can be paused, can’t it?”

CHAPTER 5 IDENTITY AND TIME

1. An evanescent and substantial theme Any research on human identity requires the thematization of the question of temporality. This is a an essential as well as evanescent question. Augustin’s statement still resounds with its touching and challenging intrinsic enigma: quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio: fidenter tamen dico scire me, quod, si nihil praeteriret, non esset praeteritum tempus, et si nihil esset, non esset praesens tempus. (Conf., L. XI, Chap. XIV)

Philosophy, in its reflections and investigations on the question of time, has historically recognised the intertwining dimensions of its problematic: an “ontological” or “metaphysical” dimension concerning the reality or entity of time in itself; and an “existential” one concerning a different problematic range related to everyday human experience. Philosophy has historically recognised this intertwining, but at the same time it has tended to focus on the physical and metaphysical side of the dilemma. Above all, it has been doing so throughout modern times with empiricist philosophers (from John Locke to Hans Reichenbach) and scientists (from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein and beyond). Recent developments in theoretical physics are attracting the attention of scholars and philosophers. Currently, the so-called philosophy of time is a wellrecognised academic discipline. Conversely, philosophy has traditionally entered into a dialectics with theology and psychology in exploring the dilemmas of time as it relates to the meaning of human life, the mystery of the inner human world, the various characters and aspects of its lived experience, the functioning of human psychic life, and so on. This second line has become more evident and important since the nineteenth century in terms of a concurrence of trends: the development of neuro-psychological research, the ever growing

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scientific and philosophical interest in the reality of human consciousness and the spread of reflective, spiritual and existential philosophies. For our interests, it is meaningful to underline how particular and productive existentialist research on time has been in relation to identity. Obviously, the aim is to bring out that specific position that emerges when one dialectically connects this research with psychoanalysis via philosophical hermeneutics. Søren Kierkegaard was the first to investigate, in a new way, the phenomenon of human experience in relation to the sense of change and the search for meaning. For him, the search for personal emancipation and liberation was one with the search for an eternal experience of time which is not something external to or transcendent from human life. As he explains: “only in existing do I become eternal” (Kierkegaard 1968, 506). Does it make me less “temporal”? No, because “the existing individual in time […] comes into relation with the eternal in time” (ibid.). Kierkegaard reflected on the human condition and its meaning and destiny by meditating on the concept of possibility. He reached an idea of intrinsic uncertainty about the possible and blew up any distinction between past and future, between the concretisation and non-concretisation of possibility. The line of philosophical research developed several decades later by Martin Heidegger is connected to this. Heidegger not only returns to exploring the relationship between time and existence through the concept of possibility, but identifies the structure of possibility itself over time. It is in connection with this speculative line that Heidegger’s innovative perspective is grafted. He identifies time as the structure of possibility itself, revisiting the relationship between time and existence from a new perspective. Time structures the human existence. As John B. Brough and William Blattner explain: For Heidegger the life of Dasein is not primarily the life of consciousness, but rather, the life of a concrete social agent. It is on this basis that Heidegger rejects the language of subject and object and replaces it with Dasein and world. We (Dasein) are primarily and usually at work in the world being who we are, and in this regard, the future is primary. We are who we are in so far as we understand ourselves thus, but to “understand ourselves” is not to grasp, imagine, or know ourselves cognitively or reflectively. Rather, to understand ourselves is to be capable of being who we are. (Brough and Blattner, in Dreyfus, Wrathall 2006, 132)

Heidegger’s philosophy of time has existential, ontological and metaphysical implications. Some are in direct connection with Husserl’s

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phenomenological view, but the existential implications are new. For example, the primacy of the future in the understanding of time which, Heidegger establishes, has to do both with the metaphysical idea of a temporal circularity and with an ontologically rooted anthropological view. But, according to Heidegger, it is the latter which dominates the knowledge and understanding of time. Time as the horizon of object-consciousness is focused on the now and diffuses into the indefiniteness of past and future. For Heidegger, time as the horizon of self-understanding is aimed toward a future into which I press, a future for the sake of which I act as I do. My self-understanding for the sake of which I act is not for the sake of anything further, however. My self-understanding is an ultimate or final horizon, beyond which I cannot see, beyond which it makes no sense to inquire. Unlike the infinite temporal sequence in which objects present themselves, the future of my selfunderstanding is finite. By finite here Heidegger does not mean that the time in which I understand myself stops. Rather, he means that it is limited, that it has an uttermost horizon. There is no reference point beyond my self-understanding. Indeed, the mathematical question whether time is infinite or finite gets no grip on primordial temporality, for primordial temporality is not a sequence of knows, but rather our self-constituting openness to our own existence. (Ibid.)

Furthermore, the primacy of the future is connected with the existential project, that is, with the choice between authentic and inauthentic time, or between realisation in an authentic existence and the descent into inauthenticity. Heidegger places the phenomenology of time and temporality at the heart of his work, underlining how time needs to be explained, above all, in the horizon of understanding of the Being and, jointly, as temporality, which is the essence of Dasein. Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s speculative work are located along the same line of reasoning. Merleau-Ponty, in particular, brings significant innovations, focusing on the discourse of action, and on the dialectic between the past, present and future on the one hand, and the project of existence and freedom on the other. If the present and future swung free of the past, then every decision we make would have to be made over again in every instant. No decision or resolution could count as an achievement on which we could rely as we press forward into being who we are. This means, in turn, we would never make decisions or form resolutions. To decide or resolve is to commit oneself in one’s future. If the decision

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Chapter 5 had to be remade in every instant, however, then one could never commit oneself. The decision I make now could not limit and commit my future, because in the next moment, I would be “free” to take it back. Such illusory “freedom” […] is no freedom at all. It is chaos and discontinuity. Freedom, the possession of the future by an act of resolution, requires that I be able to commit, bind, and limit my future, and this requires in turn that the now be grounded in the past. Decisions I have already made must remain controlling in the present. (133–134)

As Merleau-Ponty explains, freedom is the possession of one’s future through a resolute act that limits that future but, at the same time, allows the individual to guide his/her present existence, to realise it over time. If we continue in deepening and articulating this discourse, we would undoubtedly find many additional aspects concerning the human condition, its realisation over time and the dialectics of freedom, temporality and projection. Conversely, we would lose the true focus of our investigation: to develop an interdisciplinary and holistic study of the question of human identity. This question is not only a question of consciousness and existence but also of brain and mind, not only a question concerning human subjectivity but also corporal reality. According to this comprehensive position, it is impossible not to also find in time the same problem that Descartes established with the contrast between res extensa and res cogitans. This is concerned with dilemmas concerning time as measured time on the one hand, and time as experienced time on the other hand. The first dilemma is prevalently connected to and dependent upon material aspects and dimensions, while the second is prevalently connected to and dependent upon experiential inner dimensions. From the following, one can grasp the productive dialectics that takes place between philosophy and psychoanalysis. This dialectics offers new scenarios, including metaphysical ones, for the study of time and temporality and their relationship with personal identity. By expanding this discourse with philosophy, we arrive at a deeper ontological conception than the purely existentialist one. Both the theme of possibility and that of action and projection are traced back to the dynamism proper to the capable human being, and to the intertwined processes of individual development and personal emancipation. It is within this theme, these intertwined processes, that the differentiation between time as physical time and temporality as existence are unified and overcome.

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2. Body and time As we previously saw, we find in the philosophical model of the capable human being the counterpart of the transformational correspondentist perspective that we are tracing here. In particular, the philosophy of the capable human being conceives of personal identity as a process that is at once corporal, psycho-social, historical-cultural and moral. The treatment of the issues of epigenetics and gender identity has shown the stratified and complex dialectics between life and existence, between self-representation and the reality of the human physiognomy, and has demonstrated the close correlation between and mutual dependence of mind and body, of the body “which one has” and of the body “which one is”, between the corporal dimension and psychic realisation, and so on. This pushes us to accept and reactualise Ricoeur’s philosophy of the human being, confirming the framework of our analyses within the theoretical-conceptual coordinates of this anthropological conception. Ricoeur presents a holistic view, sometimes even overcoming specific differences, such as those, for example, between physical and psychic or psychic and motivational aspects. Essentially, Ricoeur’s capable human being is an existential being; from this perspective, his view runs in parallel with Heidegger’s. In fact, the existential perspective is the very key to his holistic approach. All of this seems well summarised in the following passage: Only a being that is a self is in the world; correlatively, the world in which this being is, is not the sum of beings composing the universe of subsisting things or things ready-to-hand. The being of the self presupposes the totality of a world that is the horizon of its thinking, acting, feeling–in short, of its care. (Ricoeur 1990, 310)

The philosophy of the capable human being is an anthropological conception that is articulated in four fundamental human powers or capacities: to speak, to act, to tell and to be responsible. This is its very core and, for Ricoeur, it is through these powers that the individual is able to feel and experience his/her uniqueness. I am assured that I am a unique persisting self through the actions of speaking, doing, telling stories and responding as a moral agent; and all of these actions come from inner, constitutive human powers. To reach this unifying vision, Ricoeur’s research follows both a tripled methodology–descriptive, interpretative and reflective–and a tripled line of study: the first concerning the integration of the “diverses procédures objectivantes concernant le discours et l’action à l’opération réflexive” (Ricoeur 1995, 76); the second concerning “la nature de l’identité assignable

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à un tel sujet de discours et d’action”; and finally a third one concerning “la composante de passivité ou d’altérité que l’identité-ipséité devait assumer en contrepartie de la fière initiative qui […] [est] la marque distinctive d’un sujet parlant, agissant et se racontant” (76–77). The first line refers to the question of the harmonisation of different disciplinary discourses around the human being. The second takes us to the central point of the conception of narrative identity, which works as a perpetual dynamism mediating between the material and the existential dimension of human life. Finally, the third takes up questions relating to the involuntary, the body and the unconscious, that is, the passive side of human nature and experience. Ricoeur distinguishes between ipse and idem identities as two different realities coordinated or mediated under the role of narrative identity. He suggests an intervention of narrative identity in the conceptual constitution of personal identity in the manner of a specific mediator between the pole of character, where idem and ipse tend to coincide, and the pole of self-maintenance, where selfhood frees itself from sameness. (Ricoeur 1990, 118–119)

Identity-idem represents and mirrors the subject’s objective features the bodily and organic reality, genetic code, fingerprints and so on. Conversely, identity-ipse represents and mirrors all aspects connected to and depending on the experiential, motivational and moral spheres. While identity-idem is connected to the subject’s character–that is, a person’s physical dimensions–identity-ipse is related to the cultural, moral and social reality as well as to the inner reality. Identity-idem has a specific connection with time, that is permanence, which differs from that of identity-ipse, that is, maintenance.10 Mark S. Muldoon analytically summarises these differences and particularities as follows: 10 “When we speak of ourselves, we in fact have available to us two models of permanence in time which can be summed up in two expressions that are at once descriptive and emblematic: character and keeping one’s word. In both of these, we easily recognize a permanence which we say belongs to us. My hypothesis is that the polarity of these two models of permanence with respect to persons results from the fact that the permanence of character expresses the almost complete mutual overlapping of the problematic of idem and ipse, while faithfulness to oneself in keeping one’s word marks the extreme gap between the permanence of the self and that of the same and so attests fully to the irreducibility of the two problematics on to the other […] [T]he polarity I am going to examine suggests an intervention of narrative identity in the conceptual constitution of personal identity in the manner of a specific mediator between the pole of character, where idem and ipse tend to

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There are normally four possible criteria to define identity-assameness. First, numerical identity is when two occurrences of a thing are designed by the very same term in ordinary language. […] Second, qualitative identity arises in the case where two items are identical in appearance such that they can be mutually substituted. […] Third, identity through developmental change is the uninterrupted continuity of a being between the first and last stages of its evolution. […] Last, positing some principle of permanence through time is where we look for an invariable structure unaffected by time. […] Ipseity (ipse), on the other hand, implies the capacity of an agent to initiate an imputable action. It is not reducible to the determination of a substrate or invariant. (Muldoon 2006, 218–219)

Narrative identity provides a kind of third dialectic function of mediation between identity-idem and identity-ipse. It is by virtue of this function that the temporality that I live is not just the passing time but the temporality that I am. Nothing has passed until I live, act and narrate. To relate my past experiences is to tell something about me today, and it can even contribute to changing my understanding by reorienting futureoriented motifs, projects and the experience and meaning of life itself. This is a lesson that we draw on in a particular way by meditating on the psychoanalytic procedure as a transformational and spoken dialectic therapy.11

3. The enigma of time The above discussion highlights how temporality decisively crosses the identity question and all the paradigms by which it can be grasped: corporeity, first of all, but certainly also the unconscious, intersubjectivity and the social imagination. Among these paradigms, narration takes on particular importance. In this regard, it is worth remembering how Paul Ricoeur introduces his trilogy Time and Narrative: coincide, and the pole of self maintenance, where selfhood frees itself from sameness” (Ricoeur 1990, 118–119). 11 Actually, in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics we already find all the prerequisites for understanding personal identity as a hermeneutic-emancipative process founded on historicity and temporality. In this process, language plays a mediating function between fact and experience, between what happens and what we make it mean; and the encounter with the other determines, by experiencing a fusion of horizons, a new moment and way of understanding (see Gadamer 1960, 390).

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Chapter 5 What is ultimately at stake in the case of the structural identity of the narrative function as well as in that of the truth claim of every narrative work, is the temporal character of human experience. […] Time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience. (Ricoeur 1984a, 3)

Among the dimensions we discussed, there is one that is strongly opposed to temporality: that of identity-foundation. In fact, we can ascribe to temporality the most radical role in the transformation of identity, both on the level of its external visibility and on that of its psychic perception. Time, however, is in turn closely tied to another dimension which is, so to speak, on the side of identity-foundation: memory. We capture and live the passage of time through memory or, one might say, we capture and live the transformation through the identical. The implicit memory, eloquently described by Mauro Mancia as an “archive that does not allow recovery” (2003), has the task of keeping alive the sense of self–that is to say, an immediate and underivable yet profound impression of what we are and of how we “persist” through time, not conveyed by a defined memory content. It is a memory made of sensations, not of memories (neither conscious nor unconscious), activated by specific subcortical circuits. It is a memory of primordial origin (albeit always active), strictly linked to the sensorial datum. This memory, although distinct from explicit memories and from the actual memory, may perhaps nevertheless favour its emergence. In any case it comes to deeply mark the identity. Episodic memory, on the other hand, has the task of reactivating selfremembering, that is the chain of events in which we recognise ourselves as protagonists, even if we now repudiate what were then our choices and our behaviour. We can thus affirm that the sense and the memory of the self go together and configure the image of the self. It can be understood as the foundation of our identity (albeit unstable and changing due to the effect of Nachträglichkeit, or “retroaction”). This foundation is inscribed in the body (the sense of self) and, at the same time, is an operation that requires the work of remembrance against the barriers of repression and amnesia. One could define it with a paradox: an invariant subject to incessant transformations. From this perspective, the “invariant” (Bion would put it), to which memory in one way or another brings us back, is what remains of the former in the later. But can this simply result in a traditional linear conception of time?

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It is, in particular, Nachträglichkeit (Freud 1896) that marks the relevant distance of psychoanalysis from a linear conception of temporality. The result is an accent shift from the search for the past to the attempt to bring it up to date, with an attribution of meaning no longer confined to the pastĺpresent direction but which can also operate in the presentĺpast direction. It is not only the past that gives meaning to the present; it is also thanks to the present that we re-signify the past. Thus we come to a dialectical relationship between the two temporal ecstasies. This is undoubtedly consistent with the timeless conception of the unconscious: “The processes of the system Ucs. are timeless; i.e. they are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all” (Freud 1915a, 187).12 For André Green, the timelessness of the unconscious results in an exploded time (see Green 2002, 181 ff). However, it is also necessary to recognise a more “anthropological” configuration of the atemporal which clearly emerges in certain Eastern cosmogonies that foresee the exit from time, taken up in the West by Mircea Eliade with his Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949). In commenting on them, the author makes explicit reference to the will of man to return to a primordial time outside of history. But the problem of cancelling time can also lead to thinking of time without limits. The Buddhist cosmological doctrine of time enjoys a certain notoriety, according to which the temporal limits of the universe are not determinable as they are connected to the non-static dimension of the cosmos as a whole. All living beings are seen as being able to introduce new creative actions and generate new creative combinations, such as to affect positively or negatively the quality of the cosmos, determining happier or less happy vital-existential experiences, favouring a longer or shorter, richer or poorer temporal cycle of life-existence. We could thus maintain that the enigma of identity and the enigma of time find their connection point both for the philosophical and psychoanalytic question in the “belonging-together of the human being’s unfolding essence and time” posed by Heidegger (1959-69, 37), albeit revised in the light of the timelessness of the unconscious and the definitive abandonment of the logic of linear time that follows. This co-belonging had, moreover, previously been intuited by Augustine. He came to solve the

12

Later, when the structural model of id-ego-superego became central, atemporality would become an attribute of the id: “There is nothing in the id that could be compared with negation; and we perceive with surprise an exception to the philosophical theorem that space and time are necessary forms of our mental acts”. (Freud 1932, 73)

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measurement of interior time, thus inaugurating a concept of a purely psychological nature: In te, anime meus, tempora metior. [...] Sed quomodo minuitur aut consumitur futurum, quod nondum est, aut quomodo crescit praeteritum, quod iam non est, nisi quia in animo, qui illud agit, tria sunt? [...] non igitur longum tempus futurum, quod non est, sed longum futurum longa expectatio futuri est, neque longum praeteritum tempus, quod non est, sed longum praeteritum longa memoria praeteriti est. (Conf., L. XI, Chap. XXVII and Chap. XXVIII)

From the tendency of time to “not exist” and from the timelessness of the unconscious, one can arrive at an even more radical conception, such as that which arises from the encounter of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which suggests that “at a fundamental level there is no time. This impression of time passing is just an approximation that only has value for our macroscopic scales; it derives from the fact that we observe the world only in an approximate way” (Rovelli 2004, 49; authors’ trans.). What would become of identity if compared with such a conception of time? Would identity not dissolve, just as time does? Despite the atemporality of the universe implied by Einstein’s theory, for neuropsychologists “time is real, one of the realities closest to the heart of nature” (Benini 2017, 16–17; authors’ trans.). Time is not perceived “as an event of the external world”, but rather feels as if it were “an event of self-awareness and of the world” as “it is created by nervous mechanisms independent of experience” (47). These mechanisms reside in the parietal lobes, in the right frontal cortex, in the additional motor area and in the hippocampus (72). Understanding this, we see that “time is not an attribute of the Universe that we perceive, but it is in us” (13). The neuropsychological conception that binds time and subjectivity is certainly more coherent in psychoanalytic investigations on time than is possible in the theorisations of contemporary physics. At the same time, it is better combined with Eugène Minkowski’s “lived time”. For the French psychopathologist and philosopher, the movement of time occurs in the close intertwining of the three dimensions. The first, the “no longer being” of the past, is characterised above all by the “lived memory”, but in such a way that “il ne fait pas seulement que de reproduire le passé, il influence encore le rythme du temps” (Minkowski, 1935, 68). The second is the path towards the future, thanks to which the concept of direction and meaning penetrates time through the vital movement (i.e. “[une] série vivante de

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successions”; 70). The third is finally represented by the present, which is added to the previous ones with its own characteristics. The present does not flee or advance, but lasts. Only the present can do this. Its essential character is the “lived duration” (durée vécue; see 88, 92–93). Minkowski can thus conclude: Trois courants puissants traversent ainsi le temps : la fuite vers le passé, la marche vers l’avenir et la durée du présent. Chacun d’eux présente un mode particulier de vivre le temps, et, sans que nous vivions jamais directement le passage de l’un à l’autre, appartiennent tous au même temps. Ces modes se superposent plus qu’ils ne se touchent. Le présent de plus vient se situer “entre” l’avenir et le passé. (90)

This vision can undoubtedly be paralleled by the interpretation of Henri Bergson, according to which “la conscience est un trait d’union entre ce qui a été et ce qui sera, un pont jeté entre le passé et l’avenir” (Bergson 1959, 819). This is a vision not far, however, from a certain Buddhist conception linked to the MahƗyƗna tradition (see Busacchi 2014, 149).

4. Time and identitarian transformations From these reflections, which derive from such disparate fields, the observation certainly emerges that the passage of time generates an identity upheaval that is perhaps less dramatic than those previously described, but relentless in its silent and daily progression. It conspicuously summons both the body I have and the body I am. Thus, transformations due to growth and aging come to be reflected immediately on “I am”, but with the possibility of a difference in perception which accounts for the frequent experiences of an inconsistent self with respect to one’s personal age. Time, we could say, is the most powerful glue, destined to weld together the identity transformations experienced by the self and “undergone” by the body. The identity turbulences that bring into play the alterity of the person generated by time clearly have a close correlation with those generated by the alterity of the unconscious, which instead has its character of timelessness. These movements, which affect the “somatopsychic totality” of the self, can take place with unusual violence in adolescence, given the conflict with one’s childhood self, which is repudiated and sought after at the same time. But even in adults, identity transformations, which are more progressive but inexorable, tend to generate a sense of suffered instability. The “Me” of now and the “Me” of then can be incongruous and foreign both in one’s own and in others’ eyes. Indeed, it is necessary to take note of an

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alterity inscribed in the human condition and in the bìos. Time can be considered as a factor which, by exercising an antagonistic and destructive function with respect to the identity, naturally threatens self-recognition, both on a physical and a psychic level. Of course, due to its slowness, such a process is usually inadvertent, but this does not exclude a sudden and abrupt acknowledgment at certain moments, perhaps with intense emotional charge. This “attestation” may be first observed in the face, and might be immediately mirrored in the body, these corporeal changes bearing witness to the passage of time. And this is not necessarily evidence from our face or body: the signs of the passage of time in the faces of others can testify to an identity transformation that pushes us to take note of similar alterations that involve us first hand. We have an eminent example of this in Marcel Proust’s Time Regained (1927), where the narrator, invited for one last time to a reception in the house of the Guermantes family, many long years since he first attended that place in his youth, on seeing people he met many years ago, is caught by the impression of being in the middle of a masked ball. Many of those characters appear to him as “puppets bathed in the immaterial colours of years, puppets which exteriorised Time” (1927, 132). But these transformations are not only corporeal: “Kindness and tenderness, formerly undreamed of became possible with those cheeks. […] These new facial features implied altered traits of character; the hard, scraggy girl had become a buxom, generous dowager. It was […] in the social and moral sense that one could say she had become a different person” (133). In these situations, the physical transformations that impose themselves on sight immediately invoke psychological changes. This explains the strength of the sense of Unheimlich (the uncanny) induced by the relationship that binds identity and time. Unheimlich is not explicitly related to temporality in Freud, but the etymological reference to the two cardinal dimensions of identity–the familiar and the foreigner–of which time can be considered the modulator, remains clear. Due to the passage of time, the self, while retaining a familiar aspect, turns into a stranger. Physical estrangement, whether it is abrupt (as in adolescence) or slowly progressive (as in aging), in turn reveals those psychic transformations that, even more than the somatic ones, attest to the change. Thus, somatic and psychic transformations jointly generate the perception of an estrangement in the heart of the sameness that can now be referred to the past self, now to the present self. The full recognition of what I am now can make me misknow the past “Me”, but also a close emotional bond with the “Me” of the past can lead to the mis-knowledge of the current “Me”.

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Returning to Proust’s text, a few dozen pages ahead of where we left it, we find that the transformations of identity, observed with dismay in the Guermantes’s guests, end up implying the narrator himself. The latter becomes aware of how time has transformed him not only through the looks of others addressed to him, but also in perceiving how the feelings of love that in the past had characterised him so intensely have changed: “Had I not cared more for Albertine than for my life? Could I then have conceived my existence without my love for her? And yet I no longer loved her, I was no longer the being who loved her but a different one who did not love her and I had ceased to love her when I became that other being” (195). Yet in the face of this multitude of selves that the physical and moral changes of others, as well as their own feelings, present to the narrator, a contrast is provided in an indelible sense of identity. It makes its way in the very last pages of the book, with the exhortation to remember “the metallic, shrill, fresh echo of the little bell which announced […] the coming of my mother up the stairs” (200). The narrator continues: “So that ringing must always be there and with it, between it and the present, all that indefinable past unrolled itself which I did not know I had within me” (ibid.). It is precisely the acknowledgment of this absence of discontinuity, of this absence of interruption that leads the narrator to the purpose of putting his hand to work. His declared intent is to describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the, contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through–between which so many days have ranged themselves–they stand like giants immersed in Time. (201)

Confirming the timelessness of the unconscious, the shattering of time, its absence of linearity and, finally, the universal aspiration out of time, the final words of Proustian research apply. The narrator relives, in a sudden and casual way, sensations (such as the tinkling of the bell) intensely similar to those felt when so many years before he had dipped his madeleine into his tea. And he discovers that what unites all of them, past and present, is their power to impose “the past upon the present”. In this way, he can finally feel in himself “a being which only appeared when through the medium of the identity of present and past, it found itself in the only setting in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things that is, outside Time” (102–103). Hence the apodictic conclusion: “An instant liberated from the order of time has recreated in us man liberated from the same order, so that he should be conscious of it” (103). Thus, it seems that the last Proustian

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reflections move in the grip of this “contradiction”–the same one that the enigma of identity can never get rid of. It can never be rid of the contradiction because it is fundamental. We refer to the contradiction between becoming another person, a different being, another, and contemplating the memory that requires that there is no discontinuity. The attempt to cope with this perturbating perception generates the image of men as giants immersed in the years. But it can also push us to annul time (and with it the anguish of death) in the ecstatic contemplation of the moment, the only modality that can, albeit in a fugitive way, free man from the order of time. Yet, just as he tends towards such an unfeasible release, man finds himself totally immersed in time in such a way that the discontinuities perceived by him, the multiplicity of his moods and his selves, which are no longer mutually recognisable, are brought back and reconstructed, by time and memory, within a feeling of identity. If the unconscious is timeless, then the desire that animates it (and which also animates the conscious self) could be understood, as with Proust and Eliade, as a desire for release from the order of time. Inevitably it combines with a (transient) cancellation of the identity that can rightly be defined as ecstatic. We have its most obvious expression in dreams, in the form of a discordant multiplicity of identities. The dynamic in these last pages of Proust’s work–and more generally the dynamic between conscious and unconscious–moves between the dimension of the Dionysian drive, expressed by contemplation removed from the order of time, and the tragic dimension, which is expressed in the figure of the giant immersed in time. The giant, although fleetingly reassured by contemplative ecstasy, is nevertheless condemned to recognise the temporality of existence and, at the same time, challenged to keep together the different selves that have followed one another. From this point of view, the psychoanalytic path, always with reference to the dissolution-reconstruction of identity, can be understood as an attempt to reconcile the multiple selves that have succeeded one another over time and have characterised the various eras of the individual’s existential path. The analysis should take note of both the thread that binds them (the familiar) and the tears (the stranger) that time has caused. From this point of view, the therapeutic value of the analysis is undoubtedly favoured by the institution within it of a circular, rather than a linear, conception of time, for which the renaming allowed by Nachträglichkeit is crucial. Re-signifying the past in the light of the present is a way to allow our identities to pass through time, but it is also what makes us aware of the temporary nature and the limits of an operation that still takes place après

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coup, after the otherness, the inconsistency, the intentional or unconscious changes have occurred in multiple ways. Time, through Nachträglichkeit, thus comes to cure that disidentity that the individual him/herself has generated and together they can reconfigure an inevitably partial coherence marked by incompleteness.

CHAPTER 6 TO TRANSLATE THE SUFFERING

1. Beyond Ricoeur Apart from a few sporadic and secondary references in works from his young and mature periods, it was only in later age that Paul Ricoeur began to take an interest in the problem of translation between languages, with some minor and occasional contributions looking at the applicative possibility of reflection and research on translation in the hermeneutic field. This line of inquiry came after his investigations on symbol and myth, metaphor and text, and on narrative and personal identity. The issue of translation would appear, at first, to speculatively parallel the narrative question of temporality and the historiographic question of knowledge and representation of the past. Ultimately, it emerges and asserts itself as a specific paradigm of hermeneutics. It is true that the ambition to give life to a science of translation only became a matter of discussion (and contestation) in the second half of the last century and that only recently has such a prospective idea been able to break through the barriers between academic disciplines and technical-linguistic and hermeneutic practices. Yet, the philosophical audacity of Ricoeur’s work came in the happy moment of a certain maturation of the time, thanks to the work of authors such as George Steiner and Jean-René Ladmiral (Ladmiral 1994). In addition, Ricoeur closely linked philosophical study with the technicalscientific study of the practice of translation. It is this latter aspect, in particular, that gives his work a topical value, superior even to Gadamer’s studies on the same subject. It is, in particular, Ricoeur’s short but intense paper Le paradigme de la traduction (1999) that explicitly elevates the translation of philosophical hermeneutics to a paradigm. Translation does not impose itself only as a metaphor and image of the interhuman dialectic given by the intersubjective relationship, by the encounter with the other, by interculturality, by interpretative and communicative challenges. It becomes a hermeneutic and ethical “field”, a theoretical-speculative correlate for those issues of recognition interpreted by some as questions of political philosophy (Taylor 1994, Frazer 1997, Thompson 2006), cultural

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policy (Basalamah 2009) or critical sociology (Habermas 1981, Honneth 2002). Conversely, Ricoeur, passing through the ethical question, absorbs it into an anthropological-philosophical conception (see Ricoeur 2004). As Domenico Jervolino (who, unlike authors such as Olivier Abel and Jérôme Porée, goes beyond the interpretation of an “ethics of translation” in Ricoeur) explains: In translation, a concept of humanity that is plural and yet one is at work. It is not reducible to one [that can be expressed] in terms of a unified science, absolute knowledge or a single language, but unifiable on the model of hospitality and coexistence, of cohabitation in a world made habitable by the practice of conviviality. (Jervolino 2001, 34; authors’ trans.)

The source of Ricoeur’s first ethical then anthropological development of the hermeneutics of translation is constituted by a methodological question, or by the “work of translation” itself. It is analysed through Freud’s metapsychological dialectics of the “work of memory / work of mourning”. Following Franz Rosenzweig’s ideas in his paper on “Translation as Challenge and Source of Happiness” (1997), Ricoeur explains that to translate “is to serve two masters: the foreigner with his work, the reader with his desire for appropriation” (Ricoeur 2006, 4). The criticality that is generated is as “procedural” as it is “ethical”, since two practical instances of different brands end up coexisting in reciprocal tension: “a vow of faithfulness” and “a suspicion of betrayal”. They are somehow implicated in the resistance (or Widerstand) to translation work. This “resistance” is not only given by the “presumption of non-translatability” (5) for technical, cognitive or linguistic limits. It is also a reflection of the intersubjective challenges, of the recognition/misunderstanding of the other as a foreigner, as a bearer of other values or of an otherness/extraneousness which is difficult to understand or accept, which is untranslatable. In short, the practical aporia is not only determined by reasons of procedural ethics: the “ethical challenge” of translation becomes as much an “internal” question of the work of the translator as it is a civic, social or political question. It is along this argumentative axis that the articulation of the question of translation develops speculatively, between the philosophy of recognition and the philosophy of the human being. If, from a certain point of view, it is true that the comparison with Axel Honneth and other philosophical models of recognition (especially Hegel’s) is at the centre of the architecture of Ricoeur’s The Course of Recognition (2004), from another point of view this discourse of recognition is incorporated into the specific philosophy of the capable human being.

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In turn, this conception of the human has amplified the scope of the understanding of translation as a philosophical paradigm, since it did not become so only for hermeneutics and for certain areas of philosophical interest (knowledge theory, epistemology, ethics and political philosophy) but for all philosophical hermeneutics. The interpretative and theoretical development operation carried out by Jervolino further widens the spaces and possibilities of such a discourse to marry even wider points of view. These are, of course, points of view that are not particularly cohesive in philosophical terms or in terms of systematic representation/construction. It is not by chance that Jervolino himself titles his book For a Philosophy of Translation and not Philosophy of Translation (see Jervolino 2008). The front has widened and embraces concrete frameworks related to general contexts and perspectives of interest and, more generally, of politics and cultural policy. This is the case with the important work by Salah Basalamah, Le droit de traduire (2009), which reflects on translation as a cultural policy in the context of globalization; it also applies to Jervolino, who remains in the vein of a dialectics between philosophy and religion, cultural policy and humanism. Basalamah is pursuing multiple objectives: on the one hand, through an approach based on “archaeological analysis”, he aims to detect the historical emergence of the other as a subject of law in parallel with the translator’s counterpart as the subject of the normative discourse; on the other hand, he undertakes an investigation into identity. This latter aspect is articulated following Antoine Berman (see Berman 1984), with the idea that the relationship with others, and in particular with foreigners, is constitutive of the identity of peoples. Thus, for Basalamah, the translation process not only reflects the strong need for cultural and literary enrichment, a vocation or desire for “openness to the other”, but represents and constitutes an answer, in some way, to the question of owning linguistic and cultural amplification. Add to this the ethical motif (both of fidelity and of recognition) and finally we have the author’s proper reading of the idea (or ideal) of a widespread cultural policy of globalisation built argumentatively and reflexively around the translation paradigm. Jervolino, on the other hand, defines more firmly the philosophical coordinates of the idea/ideal of translation as a paradigm, resulting in a way of speaking that is free from the inevitable constraints of historicity and the cultural and political trends of the time. Jervolino anchors his ethicaltheoretical proposal between philosophical anthropology and a humanism of ethical-religious inspiration, resulting in a more comprehensive and universalistic look. His 2008 book, Per una filosofia della traduzione, gathers together certain ideas that had emerged previously, especially “the

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concept of linguistic hospitality, which highlights the specificity and dignity of translation as a new type of knowledge and as a translating practice which has its own relationship with the truth of the world and of things” (Jervolino 2008, 109; authors’ trans., here and in following quotations). The philosophical proposal that he sketches in the third chapter opens up a new ethical-religious and speculative perspective. Clearly, where Jervolino speaks of the “gift” of languages, the “gift” of life and “gratuitousness”, the reference is not only to the “occasionality” or “usefulness” of to the mythical-literary representation, nor only to the choice of a vocabulary in a “modest” and “conversational” tone. At the same time, the ethical-religious element should not be over-emphasised, so to speak, as the substantiality of his humanism, as expressed in the book, rests on an argumentative construction. On the one hand, in fact, passages such as the following can prove to carry both philosophical and non-philosophical meaning: The gift of language and languages becomes a paradigm of an element of gratuitousness that corrects the contemporary obsession with the generalised commodification of the vital worlds and reveals a possible foundation of the social bond in a perspective of solidarity and concern for people in their concreteness. (125)

On the other hand, the following pages reveal that the notion of “gift” derives, on the line of Ricoeur’s philosophical reasoning and Marcel Hénaff’s anthropological lesson, from the reversal of the Hegelian interpretative perspective on the dialectics of recognition as a struggle for recognition. As Jervolino explains, “Ricoeur’s wing stroke consists of linking the theme of the conflict between the subjectivities for recognition with a different and by definition nonviolent source of recognition: the experience of the gift, with its elements of gratuitousness and festivity” (131). Precisely on this fulcrum Jervolino offers an additional articulation: Our philosophy of translation can therefore develop in the direction of an ethics, a pedagogy and a policy of intercultural confrontation between languages, cultures, religions and worldviews, a confrontation-encounter in which the attention and respect for differences do not let you lose sight of the prospect of a possible and militant universalism, of a cosmo-political horizon to be conquered as an immanent telos to the dynamism of history made, narrated, thought by men. This story certainly is not resigned to any pre-guaranteed happy end. In it, the pain of the victims and the tragedy of the evils suffered and committed can find at least the answer of compassion and hope, felt as a debt by those who survive towards past (and future) generations. (140–141)

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The ideas summarised here in the framework of ethics, pedagogy and politics are undoubtedly fertile and, in the text, argumentatively persuasive. Nevertheless, what has been said above about the humanistic and religious reference remains true. Ultimately, to better check the deeper speculative core of this proposal on the philosophy of translation, we are still pushed back to the territory of the theme of recognition and human philosophy. In short, the question of human identity and its foundation rises again at the centre of the question on the act of translating and on the phenomenon of translation. However, if this is the case, the question inevitably arises: What does such a translation philosophy bring to the philosophy of the human being and the problem of identity? The present research, as a whole, shows not simply the usefulness of linking the paradigms of translation, narrative and hermeneutical-interpretation in general, but a specificity capable of overcoming many limits inherent in a tout court narrative approach to the reality of human identity, especially on the front of the relationship between the corporeal and mental dimensions or causal and motivational dimensions. In the following section, we focus on the internal lived experience, specifically on suffering and its links to the issue of translation. Further on, we will focus more clearly on the characterisation advanced here for translation and its deep connection to the concept of transformation.

2. To translate the suffering The orientation we cultivate obliges us to place Ricoeur’s two major reference works on these issues–Oneself as Another (1990) and The Course of Recognition (2004)–at the centre of the reasoning on the conception of identity and on the identity-recognition dialectic. The “hermeneutical phenomenology of the self” set out in the 1990 book expresses in a new synthesis, the philosophy of the human being which has been developing by thematic stages decade after decade. These stages are progressive, but Ricoeur sets them out as if according to a spiral movement of questioning and deepening, where new configurations appear from time to time: the existential reality of the human, fallibility, symbolic life, identity as a hermeneutic process, narrative identity and the capable human being (see Busacchi 2011). The philosophy of the capable human being represents the most comprehensive summary–the new summary, to be precise. Human identity is represented as never immediately transparent to itself, as a reality in perpetual conflict, in tension between natural and moral instances, or in perpetual tensional movement: vertically, between the risks and temptations of natural alterity and the possibilities of emancipation; and horizontally,

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between the struggle for recognition and responses of recognition, between the “desire for the desire of the other” and endless regression in the maze of individuality, masking and illusion. At work, there is always a process of interpretation and reinterpretation, of narration and renarration, of translation and retranslation. The last of these (translation and retranslation) seems to elect itself as the key mechanism and movement of the representational, emotional and motivational dialectics that underlines the development of personal identity and maturation as a person. This perpetual, always different and ever new absence of oneself to oneself, in the sense of the absence of complete self-intelligibility, is the main reason for the centralization of hermeneutics as a “main road” to selfknowledge (interpretation), self-expression (symbolic life, narrative identity), self-maturation (attestation, responsibility, dialectics of recognition) and selfrealisation (in “aiming at the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions”; Ricoeur 1990, 172 [Ricoeur’s italic]). The “darkness”, or inner non-transparency, remains in any case indeterminable or invincible: even the perspective of human identity as narrative identity does not represent, in this regard, a final and decisive answer. Of course, it corrects the ideological and hermeneutical idea of human identity, of the indefinite “power”, and the equally ideological and hermeneutical idea of vagueness, that is, the nihilist view of the human being. These ideas are contrasted by the data on the historical and cultural dimension of the human and the development of identity, of which narrative identity acts as a mirror, as content and as a way. Like translation, this notion of narrative identity also develops from textual hermeneutics, and therefore it shares not only a degree of familiarity and closeness, but a strong connecting element. Jervolino recalls a passage from Ricoeur’s Du texte à l’action (1986), in which the author defines the text as the “paradigm of distance in communication” (le paradigme de la distanciation dans la communication). Ricoeur explains that it is for this reason that the text reveals a fundamental character of the historicity of human experience itself, that is to say, human experience is a communication in and through distance (see Ricoeur 1986, 102). As Jervolino explains: “For Ricoeur, taking text theory as the axis of hermeneutics means radically questioning the primacy of subjectivity. Indeed, subjectivity is located not so much at the origin (the subject as a foundation), but rather at the end of a path of understanding. We understand each other “in front of the text” thanks to the work of interpretation” (Jervolino 2001, 24–25). The text not only offers content that enters “the theatre of our mind” and generates reflection for the sake of simple entertainment, pure thinking or knowing: it offers a new “arena”, a new imaginative context for thinking about possible worlds, for thinking about

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possibilities of meaning, of choice, of understanding and of action. The “text” can be said to be as much a literary passage as a communicative one, as much a lyrical verse as a personal dream. Even Freud speaks of the “text of a dream”. The reference to Freud’s psychoanalysis is particularly apt here because it illustrates, with great argumentative and persuasive power, the correlation and connection between interpretation and translation; and Freud pursues this theoretical approach of interpreting and translating dreams as if they were text, as he sets out in Interpretation of Dreams, rather than seeking to play a game of analogy with the content of dreams. In his psychoanalytic works, the idea of “text” is recalled in various ways, to indicate not only the dream dreamed but also a pathological experience (told in the therapeutic context, which becomes a clinical case), where translation in The Interpretation of Dreams is closely matched to interpretation. This approach indicates the hermeneutical enigmatic nature of the dream, which is contained and produced by the unconscious, that is, another form of consciousness or, at least, a diversity and otherness that can make the interpretative operation much the same as deciphering an enigma or hieroglyph or translating from one language to another. Certainly, Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, speaks in a broad sense of a “dream language” and a “translation” from manifest content to latent content. The dynamics of the dream and the mechanisms that come into play, as well as the neurobiological conception of the unconscious itself, clearly highlight Freud’s use of “translation” and “language” in the analogical sense. In Freud, the idea of a “dream language” certainly does not imply the existence of a grammar, a semantics or any unconscious ideational content. Yet Ricoeur, since the time of his early Philosophie de la volonté (1950–1960), presents a phenomenological-spiritualist interpretation of Freudism already prefiguratively in line with the hermeneutical perspective. Thus, he can say that Freud “comes to institute a relation of ‘translation’ between the apparent and the latent meaning, as between two different languages. The thoughts of the dream would be ‘translated’ in the coded language of the conscious” (Ricoeur 1950, 394). The interpretative analysis that Ricoeur dedicates, in Book II: Analytic of Freud and Philosophy ([1965] 1970), to the question of the relationship between instinct and representation in Freud’s metapsychological writings is particularly interesting. In it, Ricoeur goes beyond the idea of a possible relationality by correlation or correspondence or coincidence between sense and force, and speaks of a reintegration of the unconscious in the sphere of meaning. Concepts such as sémantique du désir and langage du désir further strengthen the general decline in conscious-unconscious dynamism under the aegis of meaning, consequently amplifying the

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theoretical-heuristic significance of translation and text ideas, as opposed to the original understanding of Freud. Beyond specific and determined analyses around the issue of drive representation, here it is sufficient to understand how (or how much) the position taken assumes valence and speculative significance in the field of the mind-body problem, or rather, the neuro-biological and psycho-cultural dimensions of personal identity. If, as previously seen, the function of narrative identity acts as a mediator between the corporality and the culturality-experientiality of human identity, then the hermeneutics of interpretation and translation becomes the key to the intrapsychic processuality of expression of the drives in the direction of the symbolic, representational, ideational and conceptual manifestation of the self. Furthermore, interpretation and translation come into play as the main axes of all the aforementioned dialectics: between regressive and progressive drives, between natural and motivational pushes or moral constructs, between struggles for affirmation and struggles for recognition. Finally, interpretation and action are implicated in every existential and behavioural sphere of the human being–a human being which can be understood as an acting and suffering subject. To translate means to translate understanding, thought and will into action; to translate means to translate, free and transform suffering. Ricoeur has frequently referred to the human being as an “acting and suffering” individual. He does so both in essentially fortuitous contexts and in important contexts, such as in The Course of Recognition, where he states: “The road to recognition is long, for the ‘acting and suffering’ human being, that leads to the recognition that he or she is in truth a person ‘capable’ of different accomplishments” (Ricoeur 2004, 69). In conclusion, the return to the question of identity, after our diversion on the path of the philosophy of translation, seems to bring a new understanding: human interiority can be related to a dimension of feeling that can be freed in expression, in meaning, via the operations of interpretation and translation. The meaning, at the same time, is a translation of this kind of feeling as well as of reasons, interests action plans and, finally, of suffering. Acting and suffering are the new polarities on which to rearrange research on the relationship between human identity and its foundation on the one hand, and on the enigmas of personal identity on the other.

3. The three phases of translation in psychoanalysis With its emergence, disintegration and reappearance in the course of the analytic process, the identity question, considered from a psychoanalytic perspective, has led us to take the notion of narrative identity as a temporary

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point of arrival. It acts as a source of mediation between the fluidity of identity and its tenacious persistence. The notion of narrative identity, moreover, is the one that best lends itself to grasping the procedural aspects of psychoanalysis and putting at its centre not the substance so much as the process of becoming a person. Yet in considering narrative identity, we must not fail to highlight those aspects that are characterised by an underlying ambiguity. These concern the possibility of a relativist drift here, an ethical uncertainty there, or elsewhere the risk of traps and abuses (see Ricoeur). There is also the possibility that the subject and his/her unconscious dynamisms are only superficially mirrored by the narrative identity that is constructed in the course of the psychoanalytical process. Narrative identity can become an “ally” of dissociative or repressive mechanisms of a false self (which try to use analysis as a confirmation tool). Hence the need to better link narrative identity to the historicalbiographical and, above all, the psychic reality of the subject, including it within a new paradigm, similar and at the same time different. Could translation, precisely for the task that already etymologically engages it, perhaps ensure this bond of loyalty to the subject? A translational rather than a narrative identity could, at least as a programmatic wish, strengthen the link between being and becoming, between the past and the future, between the psychic reality and the transformations towards which it is pressing. At the same time, could translation prove to be a paradigm capable of referring to the whole psychoanalytic process without limiting itself to a simple and reductive equivalence with interpretation? In response to such questions, a reference to Steiner seems appropriate. The author hypothesised a “four-stroke model” which is not without relevance to the work of the psychoanalyst. Translation, suggests Steiner, starts from a movement of trust (in the meaningfulness of the text we have before us) and from an initial push towards its deepening (first move). This is followed by an aggression (second move) which “is incursive and extractive” (Steiner 1998, 313): “the translator invades, extracts, and brings home” (314). Hence, there is an incorporative move (third move): the importing of meaning and form into a pre-existing semantic field (314– 315). The fourth move is the most important: reciprocity or restitution. With it, the true translation could even exceed the original. In this way, it comes to highlight the fact that “the source-text possesses potentialities, elemental reserves as yet unrealised by itself” (318). In this way, the translation restores the equilibrium between itself and the original, between source-language and receptor-language which

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had been disrupted by the translator’s interpretative attack and appropriation. The paradigm of translation stays incomplete until reciprocity has been achieved, until the original has regained as much as it had lost (415).

In these words, we can hear the involuntary echo of Piera Aulagnier’s idea of violence of interpretation (see Aulagnier 1975–1992). By this, Aulagnier refers to the primary translator, the mother, who, however, works strictly in the terrain of the intersemiotic (from the body to verbal language) and not yet of the intralinguistic. Perhaps it is precisely the difficulty of this passage of register, from the sensory to the linguistic, which in some cases can favour that excess of interpretative violence, which could later also decline in psychopathological terms. To allow for a balance, the construction of a sort of “interlanguage” is also necessary here, and this is a topic which we will shortly discuss. In this case, it is expressed as a synthesis between the infant’s body language and the adult’s body language, the lallation of the one and the semantic competence of the other. The ongoing dialogical dimension of the analytical relationship allows us to transform Steiner’s four-stroke linear model into a three-phase spiral model, the last phase of which activates the first phase of the next cycle. The first phase, which is characterised in an eye-catching way by the intersemiotic aspect (from the code of the unconscious to the code of language), pertains to the patient and is realised when he/she puts into words, narrates and communicates his/her experience, dream or even delusion. The second phase is more complex. It consists of the passage from the analysand’s communication to the analyst’s interpretation (or narration). It would therefore appear to be an intralinguistic translation. In reality, this movement, apparently unique, is in turn composed of two strokes, both with the characteristics of intersemiotics. At first, the transition is from the analysand’s words to the analyst’s unconscious; later on from the analyst’s unconscious to his/her verbal message (interpretation). As the second belongs to the analyst, so the third phase–the most important, although also the one which tends to be underestimated–is of full relevance to the analysand. The latter must first understand the analyst’s message (comprendre c’est traduire), and then “transform” it into emotional matter. This phase sees the patient at work as the analyst’s translator. We can thus affirm that the transformation into emotional matter is the specific functioning of psychoanalytic translation. Transforming the word into emotions means activating dynamics that affect both the removed

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and unremoved unconscious. All the “technical” tools of analysis ultimately serve to configure the specific and peculiar “environment” in which the translation occurs, to allow it to take on a transformative value that could not be achieved in the absence of the aforementioned environment. In fact, in the absence of an adequate setting, the translation would remain confined to the intrasemiotic realm, thus producing little more than rationalisation, or at best understanding, rather than transformation. This setting is configured, thanks to transference and countertransference, to the processes of identification, disidentification and projective identification, to free associations, to emotional containment and also to silences. For this reason (see Martini 2011), psychoanalysis, and more generally psychotherapy, cannot be understood as therapies conducted through the word, but as therapies crossed by the word. In fact, language represents the medium, or rather the starting point, of a transformative process that, once grafted, ends up no longer (or barely) affecting it. The “errors” and the “freedoms” of translation that can be created in this phase are essential for the success of the process. They explain to us the extent to which our models can be subverted by this operation, which is difficult to control, as it pertains to the patient and his/her unconscious dynamisms. If our interpretations can be understood as intersemiotic translations of the experiences, actions and, above all, of the analysand’s unconscious, it is clearly not at this level that the analytical process should stop. It is the translation operation–which the analysand him/herself exercises, again adopting a procedure that apparently is limited to the intralinguistic–that is needed to complete the process. And it crosses into the intersemiotic. This relativises the truth, relevance and coherence of the interpretation and theory. On the one hand, the analysand tries to understand our discourse and makes a mainly intralinguistic translation effort to integrate it into his/her way of self-understanding. On the other hand, his/her (intersemiotic) translation should result in an affective (unconscious) transformation. Without this, the analytical work remains inert. From this perspective, the clarity of language, although useful for cognitive understanding, can be an obstacle, while interpretation–which although exact and punctual can be too assertive–can “close” rather than “open” to the symbolic and affective transformation. For this reason, Ogden (1997a) hopes for a language that is also maddening. The point that needs to be highlighted is that we cannot, however, have control of this decisive phase of the psychoanalytic process. This appears to us in all its evidence when, for example, the patient takes up what the analyst has said in a totally new and (for the latter) surprising way. The first impulse would be to interrupt it to clarify: “That is not what

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I meant; I am afraid you have misunderstood”. But is it really so? Did the patient really misunderstand? On an intralinguistic level, of course he/she did; but is that the case on an intersemiotic level? The question to ask, however, remains: Will this “misunderstanding” lead to a slowdown, or will it favour the emergence of new directions in the analytical process? Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all answer: that would ignore the resistance put into play, but also the quality of the new emotional fields that misunderstanding may have generated.

4. The question of interlanguage within a psychoanalytic setting How can misunderstanding open up to resignification? And, above all, how can language derive from emotional processes and be able, in turn, to reactivate them? In this regard, the concept of interlanguage can be useful. We again owe George Steiner for the introduction of this term, with which he highlights (with reference to the most authoritative literary translations) the significant forcing of the target language into the structures of the source language. Steiner defines it as “a no-man’s-land in psychological and linguistic space” (Steiner 1998, 332) “in which the dialectic of impenetrability and ingress, of intractable alienness and felt ‘athomeness’ remains unresolved, but expressive” (413). This “confluence of opposites” causes the interlanguage to show an interesting affinity with the Unheimlich as described by Freud. In the analytical context, interlanguage can be understood as the analyst’s language radically transformed (and even subverted in its “grammatical” structures) by the patient’s unconscious. In short, it represents a place in which to meet, but that is not owned by anyone. The question of the construction of an interlanguage arises, first of all (1) on an intersubjective level, between analyst and patient, where a new language that should belong to neither offers a new way to communicate. However, it can also refer (2) to the intrapsychic dialectic between image representation and word representation. Finally, in a third sense, it can be used to refer (3) to the search for a language shared between therapists of different theoretical orientations and with different kinds of emotional involvement who work with the same patient (for example, within a hospital or a mental health department). The interlanguage, which exists in the relationship between the analysand and the analyst, is created above all through transference, and primarily concerns communication between the unconscious and the

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conscious. The creation of an unconscious interlanguage, rather than semantic language, refers perhaps to Lev Vygotskij’s implicit language. It implies a communicative possibility that escapes the linguistic level and provides for preverbal regressive aspects which are also destined to find expression and transformation in verbal language. In its emergence, language proves to be an indicator and instrument of the reconstitution of distinct identities, which have passed through a process of identification, and are also of a “fusional” type, without remaining “entangled” within identifications. In the end, the interlanguage is substantiated by being able to speak the language of the other, or rather take it within one’s own self, in recognition of the I-You difference. In short, it reflects, on the level of language, the complex path that leads from identification to identity (see Loewald, chap. 2). Above all, the constitution of an interlanguage is consistent with a psychoanalysis that aims to move to the borders of language and representation, that is, an approach that tries not to saturate but to give symbolic-evocative depth to the discourse. An interlanguage that aspires to confront the untranslatability of the unconscious is itself generative of unconscious processes. Its goal becomes to give voice to the unformulated (Stern 1997) or the unexpressed and “open” a pathway, finally, to the untranslatable.

5. The paradigm of translation and the challenge of psychoses The problem of translation and untranslatability is found, in a robust form, in therapy with the psychotic patient (see Martini 2011). Here it is necessary to recognise how misunderstanding constitutes the patient’s mental life and the relationship itself. In fact, psychosis always originates from a misunderstanding relating to feelings and emotions that are no longer in dialogue with the magmatic and unrepresentable background of the unconscious (see ibid.). Rather, they become sclerotic through the improper use of mechanisms such as, for example, projection or projective identification. The translation of the patient’s feelings and formless sensoriality becomes profoundly misunderstood, especially where it has managed to unfold in narrative form. This causes the patient to somehow overcome, via delusion, the “loss of natural evidence” (Blankenburg 1971) and the fall into “nonsense” (Grotstein 1991) and into the “unrepresentable” (Martini 2005). Delusion and narration are linked by a very tight bond, as Binswanger reminds us (Binswanger 1965). In fact, one should not underestimate how delusion also moves between untranslatability and translatability. The former brings to mind the Wahnstimmung and the incomprehensible, the

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latter psychotic insight and a delusional “enlightenment”. Where the untranslatable combines with the unspeakable and the unrepresentable, translation, in turn, results in a narrative. The delusional narrative is characterised by being particularly rigid, unchangeable and alien, bending to the natural variations of emotional experiences. At this point, at the moment in which the delusional narrative reaches us, it is probable that the psychotic imagines the analysis (misunderstanding it again) as a useful way to strengthen his (delusional) translation. This should make us aware of the risk that a series of further misunderstandings can be unleashed in the wild. If, therefore, with other patients, further misunderstandings can represent an opportunity for the unfolding of symbolic thought, here they can have highly critical results. In fact, the patient can bend the verbal content of analyst’s interpretations within a delusional horizon. For this reason, it is often appropriate for the analyst’s translation to move with that of the psychotic and limit itself to the level of sensoriality, emotions and empathic-understanding sharing, without substantiating it in a narrative interpretation. If misunderstandings threaten interpretation in psychotherapeutic work with psychotics, consider how much greater the impact of misunderstandings can be when induced in an institutional setting by communications that more directly concern the register of reality or value judgments. This also holds true for a number of routine operations: communicating a diagnosis, providing an “explanation” of the causes of the disorder, illustrating to the family the reasons for the behaviour of their relative. Avoiding the risk of exposing the patient to excessively contradictory representations of their self and their emotional experiences involves reaching a shared translation of that which can be observed by the therapeutic team: the patient’s person, symptoms, experiences, overall environment, interpersonal relationships and family. This circularity of representations in the institutional group is configured, in analogy with the hermeneutical circle, as an incessant passage from the representation of the whole to the representation of the part. Further, it expands to the entire therapeutic team during clinical discussion (case-working), because it brings fantasies and institutional dynamisms strongly into play. Tracing periodically, at these different levels, and in particular in meetings to discuss the case, the history of a given patient (and of his/her therapeutic relationships) can then become a very profitable working style. From a blurred image, from a series of symptoms, from a set of theoretical hypotheses and fantasies, a representation gradually emerges in which the

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patient can hopefully recognise him/herself. Just thinking about the patient– when it is possible to do so collectively, without the various points-of-view being so diverse as to generate images that are too distanced or incompatible–can be a way to curb eclecticism and reunite different opinions and different languages, based on the concrete experiential data. The term provisional translation is relevant to this working approach. It is, at its origin, a hypothetical construction of a story, of experiences, family and relational dynamics, that derives from the comparison of the therapist (as an individual or as a group) with the more or less formless and chaotic story of the patient (or someone who takes charge of narrating it in his place). The result is an initial and provisional formulation which awaits further confrontation with other characters or events of that story before it can more closely approach understanding. In summary, it is intended as a potential succession of narrations-translations that can lead from the imaginary patient to the real patient. The therapeutic potential of this process is beyond question: building some image of the patient within the therapeutic working group is essential in order to be able to help the patient make his/her own self-image. This means being able to take advantage of a process of restitution which can contribute to initiating a psychic reconfiguration. This last phase of the work is the one that corresponds, in Steiner’s terms, to the stage of reciprocity or, in fact, of restitution. It is a stage aimed not simply at interpreting, but at highlighting how “the source-text possesses potentialities, elemental reserves as yet unrealised by itself” (Steiner 1998, 318). Here the construction of an interlanguage emerges in its third meaning: the construction of a “group inter-language” among the therapists as a preliminary step for the even more difficult construction of an interlanguage shared with the patient. A consideration of the late work of Ricoeur is useful in this regard. Continuing the reflection on the happiness of translating, the philosopher asks himself if Babel must necessarily be characterised as an “irremediable linguistic catastrophe” or if it is instead possible to interpret the myth as “the nonjudgemental acknowledgement of an original separation” (Ricoeur 2006, 12 and 18). The babble of languages, marked precisely by untranslatability and mourning for the perfect translation, but also by the happiness of translating, accompanies two essential and irreducible moments in each therapeutic process, both within the analytical and the institutional setting: (1) the discourse on the patient, who sees the various theoretical and affective dialects of the operators, and (2) the discourse with the patient that takes place in analysis or psychotherapy sessions, psychiatric counselling or rehabilitation work.

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6. Some notes on psychoanalysis and the ethics of translation There is another short passage in Ricoeur’s text on translation which, when considered in the context of psychoanalysis, is truly valuable: “To understand is to translate” closes, then, on the one to oneself relationship in the secret where we rediscover the untranslatable, which we had thought we had moved away from in favour of the faithfulness/betrayal pair. We rediscover it on the vow of the utmost faithfulness route. But faithfulness to whom and to what? Faithfulness to language’s capacity for safeguarding the secret contrary to its proclivity to betray it. (Ricoeur 2006, 28)

The result is a two-stroke movement that is more demanding than initially expected. At first, the philosopher invites us to put in brackets the translatable-untranslatable alternative in an attempt to remain faithful to the other’s discourse (in an analytical relationship, this would be the patient’s discourse). One can avoid becoming lost in the dilemma between the understandable and the incomprehensible and demonstrate this loyalty by trying to move “empathically” and become close to the patient’s experience, beyond the barrier of the incomprehensible. However, this attempt to understand the patient’s discourse, to grasp his/her emotional experiences, is not enough. Into this first stage of the analyst’s movement towards the patient, a second stage is inserted, which is that of extreme loyalty. Just when we try to apply the equation “to understand is to translate”, we find ourselves dealing with the untranslatable that we thought we had eliminated in favour of the loyalty-betrayal dualism. The untranslatable remains, it persists, it has not been completely eliminated by our attempt to understand, by our adherence to the parameter of loyalty. Where do we find it? In the hope of extreme loyalty: just when we want to be faithful to the end of the patient’s experience, it is there and then that we find the untranslatable (and we recognise the need for respect). Our attitude of “respect” can therefore be translated into a path that can thus be simplified. We can begin from Steiner and Ricoeur’s “ethical” imperative: “to understand is to translate”. Once we have taken note of the barrier of the untranslatable and the unrepresentable, we must however recognise that, in the face of this ethical imperative, it is also necessary to strive to avoid both absolute untranslatability and total translatability. In fact, the first involves a reduction of otherness to alienity, the second implies a denial of otherness and therefore a lack of respect for the difference and the “secret” that separates me from the other. This happens

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even more radically and painfully if the other is a psychotic patient, hence the importance of what has been called elsewhere the sharing of the incomprehensible (see Martini 2011). Therefore, the “ethical imperative” to understand the other must be able to stop before the recognition of an incomprehensible (or rather unrepresentable) background which, before delusion or psychosis, is correlated with existence. Returning once again to the aphorism “il y a un intraduisible devant la traduction et il y a un intraduisible produit et révelé par la traduction”, we feel that this is precisely the essence of the psychoanalytic process: interpretating not exclusively for the purpose of clarifying and thus concluding, but also to increase the untranslatable, to strengthen the unrepresentable foundation of the unconscious. In summary, five factors highlight the appropriateness of the term “translation” in the context of psychoanalysis. (1) Referring to translation allows the therapist to underline a greater commitment to understanding the patient’s “text”, and therefore his/her “psychic reality”. (2) The analyst’s intervention in this way is more configured as saying otherwise, as renarrating and reconfiguring. (3) There are no true or false translations unlike interpretations, which can be true or false rather, there are faithful and unfaithful translations. (4) While it is questionable to speak of the “uninterpretable”, it is perfectly legitimate to speak (philosophically) of the incomprehensible and (psychoanalytically) of the unrepresentable. (5) With respect to interpretation, the link between translation and transformation appears to be closer, since the former implies the latter as a necessity.13 The transformation of identity into psychoanalysis therefore makes use of the translation of emotional experiences into language and of language into emotional experiences. Its function is to put the analysand’s unconscious to work, while remaining tied to the starting emotional material. At the end of the identity deconstruction that prompted the need for analysis, the reconstructive dynamic can emerge so that now, subtracting identity from the ambiguities of a narrative identity, we finally feel entitled to grasp it as a translational-transformative identity.

13

We come back to the comparison with literature: translation inevitably transforms the text. Interpretation can only go beyond the text, pushing it away, perhaps to territories that are foreign to it.

CONCLUSION A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON PERSONAL IDENTITY BETWEEN TRANSLATION AND TRANSFORMATION

In this book, the problem of personal identity is tackled by rejecting, for lack of argumentative strength or scientific evidence, any rigid and unilateralising model, be it monist or reductionist, dualist or nihilist. The reader will certainly have grasped the non-unitary or non-uniform nature of the research itinerary that has been developed in these pages. We have rather aimed to generate a sort of hybrid discourse between philosophy and psychoanalysis. Despite moments of mutual contamination and with a similar theoretical-speculative fund, we have kept our competences distinct, in order to maintain a kind of dialectical tension within the chapters and between sections of different content and disciplinary tone. To us, this seemed the only way to discipline ourselves and limit the temptation to declare a “conclusive theory”, a “total explanation” that has been “pacified”, and “fully, definitively” unified. If the problem of personal identity has spanned the millennia, resulting in a flourishing of theories, notions and knowledges, it is certainly no coincidence. It is precisely this richness and complexity that paradoxically leads to the realisation that the more complex, imprecise and dialectically open a perspective is, the closer it is to the truth. With this open and tensional book, we have not reached a final theoretical conclusion. Yet everything supports the hypothesis that the union of the translational-transformative psychoanalytic paradigm with the dialectical-processual philosophical paradigm can indicate or favour the constitution of a model capable of accounting for permanence and change within the human identity. In addition, this approach seems to have been able to grasp the substantial trait of human identity without slipping into substantialism, and to account for identity’s perpetual transformation without falling into the nihilistic trap of vagueness or meaninglessness. Sharing a common theoretical-speculative reference to the thought of Paul Ricoeur, we have updated his philosophy of the capable human

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being, rethinking, in particular, the relationship between the narrative dimension and the translation dimension. Identity is also built through narration and self-narration, but it would be completely untenable to think that this is the only key factor, that personal identity can be constituted freely, without constraints. The first and most notable constraint is given by the body and corporality. The body must be understood as at least partially, if not totally, inclusive of psychic life. Psychic life is largely made up of the instinctive and emotional life, but also motivational, cultural, moral and spiritual. Within a certain communitarian reality, social-cultural conditioning, historicity, the dominant world view– even ideology–constitute so many constraints that personal identity cannot be thought of as a simple game of narration and self-narration. Personal identity is not self-founded, nor can it be called a socially useful fiction. Ricoeur himself places narrative identity in a bridging position, between bodily life and cultural life, as a mediating function that collects instinctual, dispositional and characteristic aspects of the deeper psychic life and connects them with the symbolic, representational and motivational functions typical of the life of consciousness. It is when, and only when, this dialectic between the concrete and truthful aspects of psychic dynamism and its existential vicissitudes is alive and authentic that the story of oneself assumes a unifying, transformative and truthful value. And it is here, it seems to us, that the paradigm of translation performs an essential descriptive and synthetic function. It does not promote a fluidity of meaning, but explains the why and the how of a work of transformation and potential emancipation that always puts the individual under question. The individual remains him/herself, always, inevitably. But he/she is always urged to return to him/herself, to his/her experience, to his/her life project, to the meaning of an event, of a choice, and so on. It is always a new return of the same individual, but in a different moment, according to a different disposition of psychic life and according to a different motivation and condition of existence. There is a potentially infinite indefiniteness in identity. For the analyst, his destiny appears so marked by an incompleteness that it can be understood as an untranslatable final point of arrival. For the philosopher, it is precisely the perceptible, lived expression of the substantial dynamic that lies at the basis of the identity of the human being, between power and act; between nature, disposition and character; and between choice, decision and freedom. This approach, of Aristotelian origin, leads to the rejection of a oneway emergentist perspective. Narration and translation are not the central nor the final “mechanisms”. Rather, we are pushed in the direction of a

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holistic view wherein each part has equal value. We are pushed to support the thesis of the simultaneous correlation of body and psyche with a continuous and reciprocal readiness for transformation. Not simple correspondence but consubstantiality and autopoietic reciprocity. This conception of transformation, with reference to an unknowable reality and the establishment of a contrast (which crosses the analytic field but not only between “being aware of O” and “becoming O”) can perhaps be compared, on a philosophical level, with a conception of the unconscious that escapes the active function that belongs to repressed unconscious thoughts, in order to assume a more passive one. Thus, a different relationship arises between consciousness and the unconscious–something that Ricoeur already grasped in Freedom and Nature, in which he proposed that consciousness “never perfectly penetrates a certain principally affective matter which presents it with an indefinite possibility for self-questioning and for giving meaning and form to itself. The unconscious certainly does not think, but it is the indefinite matter, revolting against the light which all thought bears with it” (Ricoeur 1950, 378; italic in original). The notion of “affective matter” seems to indicate a sort of median, hybrid dimension of the unconscious as a “sphere of the unreflective” and as a “sphere of the instinctual”; that is, a formula for rejecting Freud’s realism of the unconscious without denying the instinctual and transformative reality underlying the life of consciousness. This idea is also suggested by the reference to the Greek term: it is known that both in Plato and Aristotle the concept of “matter” oscillates between the idea of a given reality, or of matter-subject, and the idea of receptivity, or of matter-power. And we can further strengthen this perspective by referring to a notion of “form” in line with Aristotle’s perspective, according to which form is a more fundamental expression of the nature of the thing than (potential) matter itself. The problem to be solved is how the idea of transformation can be applied to the domain of identity transformation. So far, we have tackled transformation starting from its general reference to the process of the symbolic appropriation of reality (the painter who paints a landscape). Then we addressed, following Bion, its application to the psychoanalytic process, with related references to the transformative power of interpretation and to the contrast between interpretations that limit themselves to producing knowledge and those that favour change. We then arrived, referring to Ricoeur, at the idea of an affectivité puissante that presses on the boundary between soma and psyche (and is therefore affective matter) and is constituted, like Freud’s Rapräsentanz, as a link between the unreflective and the intentional (both conscious and unconscious). Finally, moving to the level of neuropsychology, we explored the transformative function

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exercised by the cerebral cortex on perceptions and the unconscious to bring them to consciousness (a transformative function that obviously also influences the dialectic of memory and temporality). This research thus advances the transformational relationship between the neurobiological dimension and the psychic-representationallinguistic dimension. Mind and body are two aspects or realities of the same entity: they are dual manifestations of a non-duality. Rejecting, therefore, the idea of a foundation does not mean closing every theoretical and reflective possibility to unitary and solid models of personal identity. It is true that individuals are born, that people become people, and this implies a considerable malleability of the reality of what we have been, of what we are, and of what we will become, whether through vicissitudes, choices or other competing factors. But we remain in this body, with this memory, with this face, with this character and within these historical-cultural circumstances that determine the language we speak, the possibilities of our value choices and ideas, and so on. The forms of this permanence vary, differing according to the specific logic of the change which is proper to them. The body changes according to the natural life-cycle of birth, aging, disease and death (though these are certainly also influenced by circumstantial, social and historicalcultural factors). It should be added that the body is not only encapsulated by the psychic form but by the dimension of the corporeal that lies at the base of the psychic dimension and is the anchor of the dimension of affective matter, and therefore of those translational-transformational processes connected both to the life of the brain and to the life of the mind, and therefore of the self. Memory changes: on the one hand, following the natural process of neuronal life (though certainly also influenced by experiential factors), and on the other, in relation to the personal history of existence within which the emotional dimension and the narrative dimension are one. The face changes with age but also due to feelings and the quality of life experiences, marked both by time and by existence. The face also changes in relation to that profound magmatic movement of emotions, representations and motifs that characterise the interior and relational life. Character changes in a different way, with less margin for strong change, according to the complex dialectics between natural-personal dispositions or tendencies and relational circumstances, between transformative educational experiences and choices of will. Historical-cultural circumstances can also change according to a completely different logic, with changes that are sometimes sudden and stormy (revolutions, wars and so on), sometimes

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slow, and sometimes of minimal or only partial importance, acting over entire decades if not over generations. Ergo, change is perpetual and occurs on many levels. Yet, we remain the person we are (thanks to this body, this face, this memory and so on). At the same time, we become “a person” in a processual manner, so the foundation is somehow in the process itself. This is a process that we have framed, in this work, within the coordinates of translation and transformation. The rich dialectic of translation and transformation is not simply due to a game within the subject’s abilities. It is not just a matter of liberating the inner “expressive power” of each individual. Obviously, we are not only capable human beings in a “vertical” sense, so to speak, but also “horizontally”, in relation to the others. It follows that without relationality there would be neither translation nor transformation. Personal identity constitutively and perpetually fails to be immediately transparent to itself, because it is a reality in perpetual movement between instinctual instances and voluntary instances, between the solicitations of others and dilemmas of the will. At the same time, it continuously remains in a context of struggle for recognition, of a question addressed to the other and fear of misrecognition, between masking and the search for authenticity. This representation and reconfiguration of the self, which is always different and new, is the fundamental context of the reflective, narrative and translational game. However, the inner non-transparency persists (albeit in a new form) and the dimension of anchoring to the body, of the almost identical permanence of the face, of historicity or cultural belonging, of the permanence of human relationships are not an antidote. Rather, they are implications, fundamental parts of processuality, of that psychic and relational processuality that makes us a person.

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