Ecobiopsychology. A new discipline in the panorama of complexity

Dr. Diego Frigoli

MATERIA PRIMA Rivista di Psicosomatica Ecobiopsicologica — Luce e Ombra — Numero III — Settembre 2011 — Anno I

Ecobiopsychology represents the modern proposal of a Weltanschauung capable of looking at the world in a perspective of totality, whether it refers to the theme of corporeality, rather than to human attitudes and behaviors, to psychic images as well as to those visions of the world too hastily forgotten because considered out of date. While usually faced with such a vast task it is necessary to prepare the mind through interminable introductions, preambles and tests, ecobiopsychology placing at the center of its work the symbolic function and analogy as tools of thought, gradually brings the mind to silence in the reader’s soul that continuity of rational ideas and those conceptual resonances that constitute the inextricable mazes in which the psyche is trapped, in favor of a new attitude that knots together in every instant numerous simultaneities not immediately accessible to direct observation.
In arguing that science is no longer an end in itself, that art is just as important as literature, and so for philosophy and the other physical and psychological sciences, ecobiopsychology no longer tends to fragment modern consciousness into infinities streams of relative choices, determining the overcoming of that hybris which considers every domain of human thought, and in particular that of science, as absolute. More than the horizontality of the relations between the different scientific fields, ecobiopsychology proposes a verticality of depth or height, given by the ability of the symbol and the analogy to order the relations in a perspective of greater or lesser distance from the archetypal aspects.
As such, it provides the foundations and tools with which everyone can build, modify or demolish their own vision of the world, in favor of a new Weltanschauung that responds in an articulated way to the evolution of modern consciousness in the direction of complexity.
For the image of the world we inhabit to always appear vital to us, it is necessary that in the human complexity, we feel alive both with our heart and our brain never forgetting that the contents of the collective unconscious, the instincts, and the psychic images make us reflect on those questions already asked to our ancestors, on the solutions they found as well as on their limits. This vision of the world going beyond the tendency to propose a single truth about things, can help us to recover the agreement with our historical man, so that his accents are not suffocated by the command of rationality, and allow us to create a new language more responsive to the agreement on the multidimensionality of things and their relationships without the precious light of the individual mind being shipwrecked in the deepest seas of the natural soul of the world.
It seems to me that the fatal error of the current vision of the world consists on the one hand in an excessive trust in the dogmatism of science, where it proposes specific solutions for every human affair, forgetting that the analytical and “corticalized” culture is incapable of providing a serious vital alternative to the deepest needs of the human being, if not through their immediate monotonous satisfaction or at the most their differing in a dimension of perennial utopia; and on the other hand, in an excess of superstition, made up of catastrophic fantasies that announce the end of the world, without adequately underlining that the theory on which the Western mind has built its becoming for some time, can be considered extinct. The real cosmological revolution consists in re-proposing in renewed terms, the possibility of leading the collective consciousness to the archetypal sources, overcoming the fatal removal of the Anima Mundi typical of the modern world, to reconstruct that language that knows how to speak of quality and is able to give a name to things around us without the abstraction from the feelings we experience.
“Then — as James Hillman well remembers — the void of meaning of which our words are made will be filled with concrete images: an animal speech, which echoes the world” (Hillman, 2002, p. 159). “In the old-fashioned world view — adds Carl Gustav Jung — [man] had naively put his spirit in the place of things, and it was legitimate for him to consider his face as the face of the world, to see in himself an image of God “(Jung, 1976), but today the spirit of complexity requires him to consider everything that exists, life itself and all the forms in which it manifests, as an immense enchanted frame, in which everything binds to the whole through synchronic bonds of correspondences determined by the awakening of Eros descended from the Empyrean in which he had been confined by the abstraction of desire. Jung reminds us that “our vision of the world must not serve for the world, but for us” (Jung, 1976), and if we do not create an image of the world structured on its complexity, we do not create an adequate consciousness capable of reproducing it, because it should not be forgotten that it is “only in the mirror of our image of the world that we can see ourselves completely” (Jung, 1976).

*Dr. Diego Frigoli — Founder and promoter of the ecobiopsychological thought. Psychiatrist, Psychotherapist and Director of the ANEB Institute — School of Specialization in Psychotherapy. Innovator in the study of the imaginary focusing on the symbol in relation to its dynamics between the individual and the collective knowledge.

Translated by Dr.ssa Raffaella Restelli — Psychologist, member of the British Psychological Society (UK), Ecobiopsychological Counselor and expert in ANEB Psychosomatic Medicine. Linguist in ANEB Editorial area.