Marta Tibaldi
The unconscious mind, the emperor’s new clothes and intersubjectivity
I am
reading a review on a famous
criminologist who, as a professional,
came across the Italian camorra and mafia
during the eighties and who was eventually murdered by the same organized criminality. The review brings back a personal memory, as
if it is still fresh: I am six, I am with my father in a
room which seems to me huge and very long; it has a window at its
bottom, in front of which a man is
sitting, against the light, on his desk: he is the famous criminologist .
Why are we there? I do not know. I am sitting in front of him. I look around
but something is wrong: the office is sumptuous, but something
bothers me, what is it?
The Emperor's New
Clothes is a story
by Hans Christian Andersen about an emperor who loves beautiful clothes. Two vendors came one day to his kingdom and
they pretended they had a
wonderful new material, light and thin but invisible to unworthy people and
fools. No one at court can see this
cloth, not even the emperor, but fearing this
as a sign of their unworthiness and
foolishness, all praise the quality of the cloth that is not there. The emperor
orders his new clothes from the two
salesmen and once they are delivered
he wears them to parade through the
city with the deceitful compliance
of all. A child in the crowd looks at the emperor and shouts: "The king is
naked!". The Emperor immediately realizes the truth but continues to go
forward. The chamberlains in his wake keep on holding up the train that does
not exist. (H.C. Andersen , The Emperor's
New Clothes , Nuages, Milan, 2013).
(photo noinonni.it)
In their
book The Birth of Intersubjectivity
Massimo Ammaniti and Vittorio Gallese enquire
into the human interactions that develop from the early days of life and describe the process that leads human
beings to understand each other’s
minds (Cortina , Milan in 2014). They
maintain that the human ability to recognize and to comprehend each other
reciprocally takes its form since the early childhood through the first
human interactions and their style (“primary intersubjective matrix").
According to the authors the
conscious and unconscious mind have
a relational source and they think of intersubjectivity as rooted in the ego’s interbodily experience - that is, the other mapped as a bodily self. This concept is
in the line with Allan Schore’s
researchs on affective communications between right brains (A. Shore, La regolazione degli affetti e la
riparazione del sé, Astrolabio, Roma 2008): "When we expose ourselves
to others’ expressive behaviors, reactions and inclinations, we experience simultaneously
their goals and their intentionality, in the same manner in which we experience
ourselves as agents of our actions;
subjects of our affections, feelings
and emotions; subjects of our
thoughts, fantasies, imaginations and dreams" (M. Ammaniti - V. Gallese,
cit, p. 17). The intersubjective truth is built both upon the information to which we
are exposed or on the unconscious ability of discrimination, based on our mirror-neurons
functioning: "the empathic resonance with perceived emotions takes place
unconsciously and seems to be activated through the bodies, as well as through
the minds "(M. Ammaniti – V. Gallese, ivi, p. 194).
After many years now I can clearly understand the cognitive dissonance perceived by that six years old little girl, which was reporting, unequivocally, the intersubjective truth of that strange meeting and its unconscious truth.
Copyright 2014
(photo scienzaesalute.blogsfere.it)
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento