The pandemic and the pathology of the in-formation. Interview to Dr. Diego Frigoli.
MATERIA PRIMA Rivista di Psicosomatica Ecobiopsicologica — La Pandemia e il sonno della ragione — Numero IXX — Ottobre 2020 — Anno X
The evolution is the history of the self-organization of the matter in increasingly complex systems, the history of a process referring to the prebiotic evolution, the biological evolution, that of the human society to the most extreme dimensions of the consciousness, the projectuality and the spirituality. That means that the most common mechanisms used to explain the biological evolution, the fight for life or the natural selection for example, are not enough anymore and need to be integrated with new paradigms applied not only to the biological systems, but also to the social systems and the collective psyche as to give new answers to the perennial questions related to the spiritual dimension embodied in the web of life.
In this sense, the methods of the ecobiopsychology, an area of research among the most advanced in the field of the science of complexity, express the capability to be part of an overview not only in the web of life but also in the images of the collective consciousness. And it is in these difficult times of profound crisis concerning Man and his relationship with the environment, with Nature in general, as well as with his own system of values, those values that have populated life on our planet, that is necessary to open up to a completely new concept of life where the new developments of the evolutionary biology and the most recent studies of the quantum physics on the physic world and Man himself in a network of inseparable relationships as well as on the planet that is a self-regulating system, might converge. The immediate consequence of this new paradigm is that Man is not anymore to be considered a “machine”, where mind and body interact between themselves separated from the environment and the psycho-socio-economic context where they live, but Man and Nature are to be thought as the epiphonema of a same “dance” inspired according to the physicists by the Akashic in-formation and according to the ecobiopsychology by the archetypical field of the Self.
It is in this research field that we meet Dr. Diego Frigoli — the founder and promoter of the ecobiopsychological thought, psychiatrist, psychotherapist and director of the ANEB Institute School of Specialization in Psychotherapy, an innovator in the study of the imaginary with particular emphasis on the symbol in relation to its dynamics between the individual and the collective consciousness — to ask him some of the many questions arising in these difficult times for a better reading not only of the present and the immediately visible of the reality we are living, but also to make us better orientate along the pathway of a broader comprehension moving beyond the cause-effect or space-time logic, permitting the ordinary consciousness of the Self to relate with the totipotentiality of the archetype of the Self.
During the pandemic scientists, virologists and politicians have often used the expression “we are at war” as to underline the criticality of the urgency. But is it really so?
No, we are not at war, we are in the middle of a sanitary emergency and a dramatic socio-economic crisis comparable to a war, but substantially different on the horizon. The term “war” represents a sort of lexical simplification, a way to include the news, to name something “unconceivable” with apparently no official explanation for the obligations imposed and the creation of scary categories without giving an appropriate basis for reflection and information.
In this sense, the ecobiopsychological model constantly recalls the importance of the words because often it is forgotten that they condition the behaviour and risk distorting the meanings they hide. Every word has in itself a sort of “spectral” cloud and specifically the term “war” opens to a series of questions: who is the enemy? Where is hidden the theme of authoritarianism and dictatorship that is linked to the concept of war? Where are our suspended rights? A continuous reference to the past implies the risk of comparing this moment to the time of the last World War awakening “demons” that would be better to leave in the background avoiding easy and inappropriate allusions.
Indeed, this insidious virus has reached the most subtle alveolar ramifications of our lungs, this “unthinkable” virus has broken in our life manifesting in every crease of our everyday life, we would never have expected for example, to produce a justification to go out for a walk or to organize our activities on the basis of the civil protection bulletin, or that someone could die without the comfort of the dearest and that the funerals themselves would have been silent and deserted, or that in the hospitals it was possible to come to discriminate who to cure. But let us take a step back and trace a brief historical excursus: on 21st February 2020 the first positive tampon at Codogno from where the virus would have spread in the Lombardy region. Before an uncertain diffusion that had seen the presence of the virus in China, cases in Germany, and from Germany to Italy, to reach in a very short time Spain and widespread throughout Europe and all over the world.
At the beginning this “unthinkable” has moved around with a furtive modality leaving everyone stunned: quite common were the expressions “No problem for Italy, it is happening in China and there it will remain”. Then we have seen some politicians who following the approach of the “politically correct”, came to consider as discriminatory the restrictive measures put in place in other Nations creating in the population a dangerous waving, decisions or better indecisions with terrible consequences as if in the political correctness a cautious attitude could maintain the control of the pandemic. Someone else, maybe more conscious or maybe more frightened, proposed that whoever came from abroad had to stay isolated, but also in this case someone cried out to “racism”. Afterwards we were forced to stay confined at home and print modules to present to the authorities to go shopping, to desperately accept the masks, to maintain the security distance avoiding the contacts, to disinfect the spaces, the rooms, the clothes and the shoes. Then the increasing number of dead people and the sacrifice of the medical staff, of the nurses and of the doctors working without sufficient protection and most of all the consequence of all that: an uncertain future.
We do not have to think that this “unthinkable and unpredictable” dimension will finish tomorrow or in a near future because the pandemic will continue under other forms and will remain for long, probably it will characterize our age. But in front of this great darkness that seems to fall, we must always look for the point where the “light” hides and as much as possible put ourselves in contact with the truths that even if clouded, once put in order and made clear will give a suggestion of priority to the present and the immediate future.
It is evident that because of the pandemic our society is on the “x-rays” and we all make reflections giving rise to a number of questions that only some months ago would have made us smile for their ingenuity. One of them is: all that over, would we replicate a world identical to the one we had before, or would we face the diversity and give a precise direction to our new social and human dimension?
Personally, I am making a list of things I would not like to forget and I think that we all should write down a reminder of personal reflections so that once the quietness returned, we could compare them and see which are the voices we have in common and if we might do something in this regard.
For example, I do not want to forget about the obedience to the rules, the rules I saw around me and their meaning, the sacrifice of whom dedicated to the patients and the sufferers, of whom that in front of the first timid measures said “that is crazy” looking out of the windows singing songs of liberation from the war. But which war?! This is a pandemic! There is no oppressor, but ourselves, we have created the conditions for the pandemic. I do not want to forget that the information has too often been voluble losing sight of that in a pandemic a clear information is the most important prophylaxis. I do not want to forget the political chattering always present as a background noise often quite disturbing, interrupted here and there by unconvincing explanations. I do not want to forget as the emergency made us forget we are, socially speaking, a composite multitude with different needs. I do not want to forget that Europe moved late and that to any mass media came to mind to compare the national contagion curves with the European ones, if not just sporadic hints as if symbolically all the Nations were separated among themselves even though belonging to Europe. I do not want to forget that the origin of the pandemic is not a secret military laboratory as claimed by several voices, but it was born out of precise conditions that are becoming clearer and clearer. It was born because of a compromised relationship with the environment, the nature where a viral species can leap making this type of virus that is new for the human species.
This emergency mechanism will end, but extremely important new socio-economic modalities will come forward and they will not end because if the fear remains inside the unconscious of people, it will act even if the restaurants open again, and it will continue to prevent people moving in complete freedom. I cannot say if the capitalism is at risk, I do not know how to change the economic systems, I do not know how to establish a new agreement with the environment … but I know that it is impossible to realize these things if not thought in advance. Let us begin to imagine the future to avoid the “unthinkable” takes us by surprise. Can we make it?
An answer concerning all of us, both believers and not, comes from a wonderful reading from the Gospel of Luke telling about two disciples of God animatedly talking to each other while going to Emmaus. A lonely wanderer approached them with curiosity and asked “”What are you discussing together as you walk along?” They stood still, their faces downcast. Then one of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “”Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?” The wanderer asked in amazement: “What things?” “About Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied. The two men told him that having hoped that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, they had become his disciples, but after he had been cruelty crossed they had come to have doubts. The wanderer who pretended not to know the situation was Jesus, but the eyes of the disciples were unable to see him. At this point, the mystery becomes even double: a dead man is walking together with his friends who even if perceiving his presence cannot recognize him. The act of perceiving and recognizing are in the Gospel incompatible, they are on different levels. The foreigner does not reveal his identity, but conversely keeps on walking together with them because it is up to them the change of this point of view that is inadequate. The view is blurred when we concentrate only on our needs, but it is in a situation like the one we are living, when we are tempted to lose our certainties, that we have to recognize the Infinite, the sense of what is happening and it is just then that we recognize the pleasure of our daily actions and must give them a new authenticity so that “the returning to life” becomes “a life for ever”. It is therefore necessary to make an effort of awareness to reconnect in ourselves what appears to us as unknown and threatening in order that, thanks to our reflection, we can go beyond our survival and open us up to what the archetype of life is communicating to us through the pandemic.
The ecobiopsychological model has been able to highlight some central themes in a meaningful way: the concept of archetype, systemic organization of life, last developments of the epistemology of the complexity, quantum physics, evolutionary biology etc. How these aspects in the health-disease debate, can open us up to new reflections in order to begin to build a “network” of what it is happening around us?
One of the first reflections arisen in this pandemic, made me reflect on an article published by Jung in 1936 entitled “Wotan”, an essay dedicated to Odin, the God of visions, of the Northern avalanche where Jung asked himself quite an important question: what was happening to the Germany of that time when an archetype was collectively evoked? In this case Wotan, becoming that powerful to be celebrated by all the crowds? Jung analyzed the symbols evoked in that period that are extremely important because punctually and precisely anticipating what would happen some years later, as if the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 had been well delineated, predicted and described in all its tragic consequences just from a Jungian reading of the archetype of this evocative dimension.
Wotan was born in the German youth movement and since the beginning had been honored with sanguinary sacrifices of sheep as to repeat something archaic and barbaric. Let us bear in mind that Germany of that time was the Weimar Republic where thousands and thousands of German unemployed people got to vagabondage wandering without destination: as Jung wrote “By 1933 they wandered no longer, they marched in their hundreds of thousands. The Hitler movement literally brought the whole of Germany to its feet, from five-year-olds to veterans, and produced a spectacle of a nation migrating from one place to another. Wotan the wanderer was on the move.” and this awakening had resulted in a conscious organization among all those that adhered to this archetype. Wotan is the “god of storm and frenzy, the unleashed of passions and the lust of battle, moreover he is a superlative magician and artist in illusion” a furious god, a god of the storms, the lord of the dead and the re-evoking anticipates what will happen as a consequence: the death, but he is also a fascinating god to the point that Nietzsche tells about the re-awakening of this God calling him Zarathustra… and we know about the tragic end of the German philosopher.
Today, if we thought to explain all what is happening only economically, politically and broadly speaking ecologically, for me we would accomplish a reduction. We must widen our knowledge and try to see the connections existing among these different areas of the human thought to reveal the archetypical dimension and what is hidden in it. Obviously, we know that the archetype is in itself unknowable, but it is not unknowable if we examine the consequences of the relationships that the archetype entertains with the collective consciousness. Therefore, we know that the gods are the personifications of psychic forces and that these personifications assume the role of archetypal images that guide the collective consciousness. At the times of Nazism, Wotan was a god of the irrational and had taken control of all the German people, of the culture, of the military aspect, of the economy and even orientated the destiny of a nation to become a sort of “beacon” for mankind. In synthesis, Wotan is an emotive and impulsive component of the collective unconscious so much that is also compared to Mercury in relation to his wandering life, to Pluto in relation to the theme of death, to Dionysus for his frenzy and to Hermes for his ability to get hold of the souls.
This wonderful and profound work of Jung has certainly influenced the reflections carried out by the ecobiopsychological School in relation to the actual collective phenomena. The first aspect our approach takes into consideration is the concrete experience of what a virus is. While the bacteria and the yeasts are vital forms and tend to replicate and live, the virus is quite a strange vital form because it replicates only inside a host (for example the chicken virus in chicken, the bovine virus in bovine, the human virus in man) and is technically described as “obligate intercellular parasite”, something alive that can only multiply when finds its host otherwise it dies, and it is not active anymore. This modality reminds me of the fable of the scorpion and the frog where a scorpion asks a frog to take him over a river and the frog answers him: “Never, why should I? I can’t trust you and your stings!” The scorpion tells the frog: “Bur mister Frog if I sting you, we both die in an instant.” So the frog agreed to take the scorpion across the river. Halfway across the river, the frog suddenly felt a sharp sting in his back and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the scorpion remove his stinger from the frog’s back. A deadening numbness began to creep into his limbs. “You fool!” croaked the frog, “Now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?” The scorpion shrugged, and did a little jig on the drownings frog’s back.” I could not help myself. It is my nature.” It is evident there is something automatic going beyond the experience of life and death, a virus is like that: it has the potentiality to make the host die but in so doing it dies as well.
But a virus not only needs a host, it is necessary for it to move from a host to the other. For example, the rabies virus — before the discovery of the vaccine by Louis Pasteur — had a mortality rate of 100%, but it is evident that once the man is dead, the virus itself is dead because the contagion cannot continue. It is curious how this virus comes to infect man: it is pretty common in the animal forms of life and when it hits it goes up along the neuronal paths to get to the cerebral areas of aggression descending in the meantime along the nervous system to the salivar glands where swelling them, prevents the introduction of liquids and the animal spasmodically thirsty produces the drool and cannot swallow anymore infecting all what it bites. In synthesis, it attacks the senses of aggression, blocks the introduction of the saliva and of water and the saliva not swallowed anymore becomes drool to get to the man that dies with painful spasms. But this virus even if that terrible comes to kill the man just in the final phase, but there are other viruses a bit more clever, that invented a way to move from a human being to another without necessarily killing the man, but entering an “infected relationship”: we speak in fact of “infection” to define the transmission of the viral component from a person to another.
The virus has its own protein coat called capsid, a sort of capsule that can be more or less robust inside which there is only genetic material the DNA or RNA, there is no cell cytoplasm. We know there are two modalities of cellular reproduction: the first one concerns the somatic cells and is named mitosis, the second concerns the cells for the generation and is named meiosis. There is an enormous difference between these two modalities because in the progenitor cells with 46 chromosomes about 23 come from the paternal inheritance and 23 from the maternal one, and when the spermatozoon fertilizes the ovule the zygote will be formed, and the cell subdivides into 252 specialized cells that maintain in their nucleus the original cell. That is the extremely important news because through the cellular multiplication of the cellular specialization you are losing in multiplication but gaining in specialization. Just think about what is happening at a conceptual level: we can easily think that the dimension of the zygote is analogous, even if not the same, to a sort of archetype that produces an archetypical image where gradually the images become more and more defined in their specializations as happening according to the infrared point of view, to the specialized cells. But everything starts from the unity! The passage of a cell, from the zygote to the specialized ones happens according to a precise biological syntax: there are in these passages some “regulation factors” that sophisticated that if in the DNA there are some situations of “error” protein modalities activate to correct and most of all put in place specific strategies to eliminate that portion of DNA that produces altered proteins meaning that inside us mechanisms of control are present!
But if the DNA is present in every cell, which is the difference between for example a cell of the blood and the protein dimension of the musculature? How can I make that in blood that DNA that is the same in all the other cells, produces only those of blood and not for example those of the muscle? Why in the molecule of the DNA there are precise criteria, “switches” that silence some parts and leave others active? It is evident that in each cell there is the genetic code, but in each of them is active only the trait of the genetic code that permits the formation of those proteins while the others are silenced. It is like we had a lot of rooms and we put light on just in the one we had to go to; the role of switches is evident. But why this premise in the general introduction? Because when a virus enters a cell it substitutes its DNA to the DNA of the cell, therefore it is possible to imagine what happens in a cell when that kind of informative source that would have produced a specific protein is substituted by another DNA with other information: the information chaos!
What are these proteins? They are macro-molecules formed by elementary bricks called amino-acids. What organizes the amino-acids? It is the direction of the original DNA that organizes them; if it is necessary to develop the protein called “actin” in the muscle, it is to be imagined that the departure unit of the DNA silences all the other aspects and maintains active only those that will form the muscular protein; the DNA communicates a specific and sophisticated message to the RNA, a messenger that takes the information to the ribosome production and assembly units, and at that point the protein is created. Let us make a metaphorical example: let us image we are choosing a dish at the restaurant. Which dish would be the actin and which the myosin? The waiter who is taking and giving the order to the chef is the messenger RNA: the chef is the ribosome cooking only dishes previously ordered. But if my DNA, is substituted by a viral DNA, it is if while ordering we were hypnotized by a stranger preventing us from ordering what we would like. The hypnotizer is the viral DNA!… The waiter, the messenger RNA that takes the information to the chef-ribosome that will cook the dishes ordered by the viral DNA. Therefore, the virus substitutes to the order of the cellular DNA and thereafter will order only the protein necessary for him to survive: therefore the whole cell, the whole cytoplasm will be oriented to favour the production of the DNA, of the proteins, of the capsid necessary for the virus and its survival. That is why it is called parasite, because it “parasitizes” the cell dedicated to specific functions and diverts the course. Therefore the molecule that is at this point copied is not anymore a cellular molecule but becomes the molecule of the virus. The same if I am ordering what I like but the messenger waiter-RNA deforms the messenger according to his intentions with the result that what will come are the deformation produced by the RNA of the virus. It is therefore clear that when we are talking about a viral infection we are dealing with a DNA or RNA with devastating consequences because all what is vital must obey to this criterion. Hence, reading all that from a psychological point of view, which are the psychic characteristics where there is an idea that overlaps a quite ordered thought deforming it and changing its connotations moving in a repetitive way producing what mentally thought? Would not that make us think about narcissistic modalities or delirium? A deviation of the thought oriented and unilateral at the service of a personal dimension when it could have been orientated according to a collective order.
An additional element could be the so-called protein capsule, I mentioned before, a simple coat. This more robust is the coat, the more it protects the DNA or the RNA of the virus. It is evident that if we are dealing with a virus equipped with a robust capsid, the defensive attitude is much more difficult to be fought; one thing is a robust capsid , the “tunic”; something else is a shield, a soft tunic, a virus that is less protected by a protein capsid Will it be enough to wash our hands? The creation of a superficial tension of the soap in front of a virus with a fragile capsid to kill the virus itself? If the virus has a robust capsid, it will not be sufficient to put into play this kind of modality, it will be necessary to activate other defenses to prevent the infection from a subject to another. Indeed besides taking into consideration the dimension of the capsid that can be more or less fragile, it is necessary to consider also the latency times. For example, the virus of the cold even passing from one host to the other after a certain times deactivates, but the virus of the hepatitis A can also last six months!
But how is it possible for a virus to enter a cell? The cell is a structure open to the extra-cellular liquids equipped with real locks exiting on the surface of its membrane where “keys” are necessary to communicate to the surrounding environment. The virus meant as a “vital form” is extremely intelligent because it has no proper “keys”, but quickly replicating adapts its key and from passage to passage, it is as if it “filed” it making it more and more active until making its own DNA enter the cell. In other words, not being the virus equipped with a precise specificity goes by trial and error until coming into play and infecting the cell using the internal structures to produce its own protein mechanisms. But how can the DNA of a cell be substituted by the viral DNA to the point of to reproduce only the viral substances? The virus has learnt how to make its own DNA a priority by creating false “alarm” situations that induce the system to consider its own proteins more important; it is as if it were said in alarmist terms: “we are all dying, we need to produce these proteins” and as a consequence the cell adapts to this criterion and produces viral proteins.
On the basis of the criterion of complexity where more factors are to be put together in interactive terms to be read in their respective influence to describe an observed model in a coherent key, how is it that the precise and metaphorical language used to describe us this kind of passage can permit us to comprehend the actual dimension?
In the domain of the physics, the scientist using a universal language, that of the mathematics, considers “coherent” a phenomenon that can be described with a function, with a mathematical function able to summarize more aspects. The classical example is E=mc2, a precise formula that puts together the energy, the mass and the speed of light in a coherent picture scientifically proved in the relativistic phenomena… elements that before Einstein were considered separated among themselves become responding to a single coherent equation.
When moving from the world of the physics with its universal language, to the world of the mind it is evident the absence of a common unitary language. Besides, the mind investigating itself deforms its field of work, we are therefore moving by trial and error to face something without a precise instrument. For example, the discovery of the importance of dreams as a reading of the mind, of the transparent manifested content in respect to the latent content, has put into evidence how the oniric work, oscillating between the displacement and the condensation, is according to Freud the first clue of how the mind works. Then the studies of Jung highlighted how the unconscious does not only consist in what is “removed”, but operates as a compensatory process to the unilaterality of the consciousness determining the “individuation process”. The studies that have been carried out by the ecobiopsychological approach have further dilated the field of observation highlighting how the complex of the Self and the archetypal dimension of the Self are not limited to express the field of the psyche, but also involve the experience of the body. This broadening of perspective has permitted to consider the archetype of the Self as a factor of order either of the body instincts, or the psychic images coherently responding to them. And it is through this “coherency” that gradually has been defined the modus operandi of the archetype of the Self.
Therefore in each human being we have always to consider the presence of two principles: the information between the body and the mind, and the totality of the psychosomatic energy. In obedience to the studies of the School of Santiago, the neuroscientists Maturana and Varela sustain that the living organisms are autopoietic and capable of intelligent interactions with the environment. Therefore if every living system interacting with the environment, carries out an activity of cognition, independently if in presence of a nervous system or not, it follows that all the living systems are cognitive and that life itself is not but cognition, that is “mind”. If living is getting to know, and getting to know is an attribute of the mind then — for Maturana and Varela — each living being has its own mind. Therefore in the interaction process with every single living form, from the most microscopic one to the biggest one, “knows” the world according to its own possibility of integrating it in its own cognitive pattern. The virus, even if not a living form but a parasite of living cells, “knows” the world according to its own possibility to specify itself through the modification of the DNA or RNA of the cell that has been invaded. And it will act towards the cells of the human body as the collective psychic experiences that “parasitize” the consciousness orientating it towards solutions not personal and human anymore, but only destructive.
Which will be the “viral” psychic experiences present in the collective consciousness able to invade it and submit it to their own criteria till destroy every opportunity of individual choice in the name of a logic that is not human anymore?
Among the most viral ideas, I would underline the consumerism that can be considered a collective drive to “introject” the demand for needs not essential for survival causing irreversible environmental damages and general diseases like tumors and immune system disorders.
The glorification of material consumptions has profound ideological roots going further the domain of economy and politics because they concern the loss of the symbolic function in favour of the sign experience. In 2014, together with Prof. Biava and Prof. Laszlo I published the book “Dal segno al simbolo: Il manifesto del nuovo paradigma in medicina” (“From the Sign to the Symbol: the manifesto of the new paradigm in Medicine”) where is highlighted how health consists in the dynamic equilibrium of the subject in respect to the web of life, and the disease is seen as an “in-formation dis-equilibrium towards life itself. In this perspective the pandemic of the Corona virus is much more than a viral epidemic determined by a “ spillover” of a virus from its reference source towards Man, but the concrete demonstration of a series of collective inconveniences entangled among themselves until they come to entropically invade the life of Man.
From an ecobiopsychological point of view, it would be an opportunity to study the pandemic gathering scholars of different disciples to examine the complex domain of this disease from different points of view: not only the virologist, but also the economist, the anthropologist, the scholar of social behavior, the psychologist and so on to put into evidence those connection bridges able to understand the meaning of this pandemic in relation to the habits of the Man.
The real challenge of Man is that related to a new behaviour, an epochal change the pandemic is dictating to mankind to avoid the risk of having to face really painful problems for its own survival in the future. We have entered the era of the prophecies and the prediction, but not that of the unexpected. In a near future, we will have to face unexpected political changes, climate changes, new changes that unexpected not to be imagined. And the experience of a mind able to “think” analogically and symbolically can help to perceive a “world” more and more connected to the web of life. We must remember that the living systems are self-organized systems open to an in-formative flux that operates far from the equilibrium, and only a collective consciousness able to work with an “open” and analogical attitude available for information, can put together in a coherent the sense of what is happening.
We know that each entity in the world surrounding us, as each human being, owes its existence not only to simple fundamental laws of the physics and to the environmental laws, but also to the in-formation networks of the unconscious that have always conditioned the nature, the cognition and the collective consciousness. Matter and Consciousness are two faces of the same medal: they are the inside and the outside of the same process; and if we wish to understand their message, it is necessary to make their language more and more conscious making use of the symbol and of the analogic thought to define the information field of the consciousness orienting it in a neg-entropic sense, as happening in the evolution of the different forms of life.
The symbolic thought permits the consciousness to orientate not only horizontally in the sphere of the body and material experience, but also vertically towards other levels of awareness able to integrate the consciousness in a synthetic and cosmological dimension acting as a bridge between the modern scientific knowledge and the sacralization process of the cosmos. The symbolic knowledge and the proceeding of the analogic thought cosmologically translate a human situation and vice-versa. That means that Man stops feeling “isolated” in the cosmos because he can open to a world that thanks to the symbol can consider “familiar”. In this way, recuperating his centrality and totality the Man can assume the almost divine function of guardian of the natural world coming to perceive in it the “Great Root” and the “Great Origin” of the virtue of Heaven and Earth.
If possible to address to psychologists, doctors, health specialists as well as to those people willing to better see and understand the actual situation, what would happen observing the theme of the “distancing” from a psychodynamic perspective, what would you say?
The social distancing imposed by doctors to control the pitfalls of the Corona virus implies technical reasons that can coincide with the “disorientation” of the Self, from its relational habits to the extreme aspects of trauma and dissociation. But the question arises spontaneously: social or physical distancing? Better a control on the health protection of the single person or a collective control of the frustrations and expectations before they translate into a destructive fury capable of putting into crisis the complete maintenance of the global society? The ecobiopsychological approach highlights how the central aspects of the distancing are basically two: being able to tolerate our own independence from the social opinions of the mass media in sight of our own individuation and being able to elaborate the physical and social distancing without creating a fracture between the Self and the shared language between Self and Life. In this perspective, our School proposes a psychosomatic reading of the current situation considering the fear of the disease as an opportunity for a psychological transformation through the discovery of the wisdom of Life that as the needed and natural solitude of the poets, is necessary to face the overall resilience and overall maintenance of the psyche. But for such a comparison it is more and more necessary a “new figure of therapist” able to dialogue with two communicative aspects, the sign and the symbolic modality where the efforts of all the scientists — biologists, geneticists, physicians, doctors and psychologists — harmoniously working on the individuals might converge to reflect on the whole in-formation network and the inseparability of the mind-body relationship.
