Abstracts
The Tiger and the Wind. The Magic Element of the Body in Therapy
Since time immemorial, man has intuited the infinite resources of unused energy in the remotest meanders of his own interior world. In the more primitive practices of psychic healing, appeal was made to the instinctive and spiritual potential of the body and the soul of the one attempting – through dreams, the pulsating rhythm of drums, dance, breathing exercises, magic gestures … in the attempt to free energy and enrich his own live -- to draw from that “something else” permeating every ritual gesture as well as each everyday action.
Ceremony and ritual, body, movement, sound and breathing, points of juncture between body and soul. All are present in this description of the analytical and existential process of Laura. Through the impressive flow of her dreams, the messages which the unconscious reveals through the body, and the experience of “Holotropic Breathing”, forgotten and vindictive gods emerge, through suffering, from the obscure depths of the soul towards the light, are given attention, nurtured and venerated, thus entering onto the stage of life.
Pentesilea lays down her bow. The Emergency of the Feminine in Communication
The unconscious is nourished by images -- images captured in the external world during the waking state, digested and transformed through dreams and consequently expelled to the exterior, in another form of images (art, cinema…) and in their turn catalyze interior images (dreams, fantasies). Those external images therefore exert the same influence as internal ones. Broadening the imaginal context, whether in art or in the therapeutic environment, implies “producing” consciousness, awareness.
The task of the psychologist in this here, similar to that of the artist, is therefore a “flowing” together with the one to whom aid is offered, of dancing the eternal dance of a concealing/revealing of the unconscious by means of the imaginal-symbolic and corporeal language, and capturing and freeing images and thoughts in order to imprison them once more in the “new word”. New-born words with the vital and evolutional drive of the spirit of time is expressed. In what way do words, thoughts, inspiration come to mind? The space of consciousness is perceived as analogous to “pulmonary void”. The experience of “inspiration” is one of breathlessness, a being put into contact with one’s own non verbal being. Void”, or emptiness and non-verbal essence are then the beginning of self-determination and constitute the necessary condition for the “complete” or “full” word, which is then the expression of any personal thought. Contact with that “interior void”, makes possible access to the origin, the “birth”, of words, as well as their “absence”, the essential passage of meditation. Only from the “emptiness of consciousness”, the “verbal vacuity”, therefore does the new and the true word emerge.
The Eclipse. Fragments of a Therapeutic Process.
The Medusa who “turns to stone” anyone venturing to gaze directly upon it, is an eloquent image for the paralyzing potential of the drug which traps and retains everything the dreamer struggles desperately to confront and destroy. The power of the interior universe of the dreamer, that female universe activated by the substance, is represented by the witch’s head with serpents for hair, which in dreams is reunited with the rest of the body. The divided female, turned evil, like the Gorgon, with tresses transformed into horrible serpents and teeth into terrifying fangs.
When we identify with our biographical Ego, life appears to us as arid and empty, lacking any meaning or contact with universal values. The resulting symptom is the natural response to the failure of the existential project centred on the Ego, “separateness”. The transpersonal psychological approach, which has its roots in the humanist model, directs attention in particular to the fragility and insignificance of human existence resulting from the separation from the Ego and the “self”, the interior spiritual centre which transcends the individual.
The transcending of temporal and spatial confines experienced in holotropic states leads to dis-identification with the body, the indispensable acquisition and essential stage for any spiritual process. This new perception of oneself, which is actually an overcoming of “limits”, carries along with it a deep sensation of freedom and the awareness (emotion, not rational) of a self no longer within the confines of one’s skin. No longer “separated”, a Self extended beyond the usual roles, embracing the totality of existence, a self perhaps for the first time “entire”, whole. And at the same time, paradoxically, “beyond the confines”.
This type of experience produces a sensation of “revelation” and is often charged with a “numinous” and sacred quality, and is perhaps (also) one of the more transformative phases of the interior journey. Once elaborated and integrated into the total personality, it remains one of those events after which one can truly say to “no longer be the same”, or to have become “inexplicably new”. The “truth” which ensures as a result o this new awareness is a profoundly “ecological” one, and as such would justify speaking of the creation of a new way of being which we might describe as being “ecological”. The experience of transcending spatial/temporal confines brings about awareness and meaning, rendering the person more capable of being in tune with nature and with his fellow human beings, as well as assuming his own existential task in that, once discarded and transcended the confines, the person will know and feel that he belongs to the totality.
Body Merchants, Soul Spoilers
The analogy between the essence of the prostitution which excludes any personal involvement in the relationship between the sexes and the essence of money is inevitable. As regards money, the question is never asked as to “what” actually “it is worth”, its quality is related exclusively to the quantity, just as a prostitute is never asked “who are you?”. And this is the most tragic aspect of prostitution: a body reduced to a means, flesh to merchandise, equivalent to any body. Love of objects which can be obtained with money is gradually transformed into the perpetual effort to control events, to the denial of the inevitability of death; it is transformed into the flight of persons and into that which “separates”: the contrary of eros -- that is, its perversion. Money subsequently becomes a substitute for something which does not belong to the material world, a substitute for the relationship: a pseudo-falling in love, a false love story. Money and sex have always been, since the dawn of history, intimately bound, and sexuality in its most elevated expression is spirituality. Eros is at the root of all that which is creation and beauty, of all that which is divine: the Samadhi is the supreme expression of sexual energy. In the spiritual literature of the Orient, --in the Tantra, for example, -- the divine is considered something extremely erotic and sexuality is rehabilitated within a sacred dimension, analogously to what had already occurred in many primitive civilisations. The practice of the Tantra, the philosophy of which expresses an unconditional assent to life in all its manifestations, has as its basic principle the belief in something considerably more elevated in human nature, the full realization of which is beatitude.
In recent years, there has been generally a tendency to recover, to re-appropriate in the religious sphere a feminine metaphysical figure endowed with sexuality, a figure which emerges in our dreams but also in art and literature. The figure of Mary Magdalene, for example, as she appears in the film, “The Da Vinci Code”, adapted from the author Dan Brown’s book of the same title. I consider these attempts -- at times clumsy or even grotesque -- extremely significant from the psychological point of view in that they reveal the need and a straining towards a profound transformation of the symbols of our times (“a metamorphosis of the gods”, as it were); a transformation, in this case, of the archetypical unconscious woman in us and the advent of her new metaphysical image. All this should obviously be of great interest to psychoanalysts. Could it be that this new image of Mary Magdalene as a more modern archetypical image of the divine woman be elected to unite with the trinity to complete the divine foursome? A Mary Magdalene no longer a “prostitute”, but in anew guise as a “bride of Christ”, a new female icon, one more adequate to represent the new emerging woman, sexually more complete, a woman tending to liberate the serpent underfoot.
The Art of Psychotherapy. The Therapeutic Space as a Sacred Space in which the Mysteries of the Soul are revealed
Before a work of art, or at the entrance of a sacred place -- for example a sanctuary which has been frequented for centuries --, many experience common sensations: almost palpable feelings of inner peace and harmony, reverence, fear and trembling as though the very air were impregnated, not only with artistic beauty, but also all the projections, emotions, intuitions, prayers and values of generations of visitors who have contemplated that beauty and “breathed” in that atmosphere. However, what enchants at the same time confuses estranges, shakes the soul to its foundation and alienates. Rarely does one observe a masterpiece remaining unchanged, detached or indifferent. Apprehension, panic, terror, or else feelings of unity, expansion, which favour the access to an interior source of vital forces --for better or worse, something happens. The emotion and the joy which result from the contemplation of beauty lead us back to an ecstatic, expansive dimension and loss of confines, to that dimension of pleasure, union and fascination of the primitive fusion with Mother–Nature which is rooted in the prenatal experience. This sentiment of completeness which belongs to the boundless territories of the experience in the womb has its origin in that never completely cancelled remote past, when we were Everything and there was no lack from which any desire could be formed.
The aesthetic experience presents an intermediate space where our thirst for completeness and the nostalgia of that place of the soul pervaded with Pleasure, Beauty and Harmony can be ritualized. Paradisiacal ecstasy, fusion with the maternal body. In fact, the more famous a work of art is, the more it will have absorbed generations of projections of desires, aspirations, exaltations, becoming a living symbol and container of the divinities which from the collective unconscious tend to emerge and demand attention. Before the enchantment and the beauty of a place or a centuries-old work of art, we cannot avoid contact with the other reality underlying our common, consensual reality, or heeding its requests, and opening the door to its divinity, to its symbols and archetypes.
From Blood to the Rose. Human Evolution beyond the Family
What is the role of the family today, in this difficult and controversial world? Is it still possible to speak of “advantages of evolution” bestowed on human beings by virtue of their belonging to a family group? In an attempt to respond to that question, the author -- through a comparison of the various psychological, philosophical and anthropological currents of thought, as well as a passing glance at esotericism and the examples of clinical cases --, offers a description and an interpretation in an evolutional key of the family and love in our times.