The soul’s physics. Ecobiopsychological considerations in psychology
Diego Frigoli*
Review by Dr.ssa Lucia Carluccio appearing in Psychofenia — Volume XX, Issue 35–36 (2017)
Freud discussed the consciousness that appears behind any psychic action by means of the “hidden meaning” culture. Jung described personality instead as being teleological and so with a finalistic attitude, besides being retrospective and provided with a casual behaviour.
According to Jung, the collective unconscious along with its archetypes constitutes one of the personality’s fundamental systems: several debates have taken to the birth of Depth Psychology; after fifty years from Jung’s death, moreover, much of his research has shown a great resemblance to Quantum Mechanics studies.
In his La fisica dell’anima [The soul’s physics], Diego Frigoli — i.e. a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and President of the National Association of Ecobiopsychology — enables the reader to venture into men’s extraordinary knowledge through the union of different disciplines, such as biology, psychology and neurosciences. Frigoli stresses the new approach that psychotherapy would have if it considered that the basic particles of matter and consciousness are joined all together by a mechanism known as “entanglement”.
A challenge for the future is announced already in the first chapter with originality and strength: revealing the relations between personal unconscious, collective unconscious and consciousness. Indeed, each of them does not act separately from the others, but all are continually intertwined. Being able one day to represent psychic life in its entirety and complexity constitutes the main goal. Frigoli demonstrates that DNA does not transmit to individuals an unchangeable fate, as people are strongly influenced by their ordinary experiences. Regarding the neurobiological side, the nervous system structure is subject to a constant alteration and the genetic components are continually activated through their dialogue with the outer environment. Frigoli’s discussion of Jung’s collective unconscious and its archetypes by means of the quantum mechanics is surprising. Acting as dynamic structures that cannot be observed, archetypes belong to Bohm’s implicate order, while the archetypical images that appear in dreams belong to the evolutionary order. In other words, whatever exists, including us, is regulated by such an intelligent energy as the implicate order.
One of Frigoli’s most original ideas in his book stays in describing reality as a gigantic hologram where the smallest always contains the biggest. Far from any time and space, a mind emits numberless frequencies; these are then decoded by the human brain, which behaves as a common hologram. Hence, the mind is not embodied by a human being any more, because its body has become the entire world. Plus, a very important premise is that a brain’s existence is not necessary to a mind’s life. The reader thus approaches a new and fascinating vision of both life and its meaning.
Entanglement is a key word in Frigoli’s book: the universe is entirely intertwined and all the matter particles are in touch one with another, exactly as they were before the Big Bang, namely when there was neither time nor space. The way in which the human psyche goes beyond the body and interacts with the world, even reaching the farthest galaxies, is well explained in the middle of the book.
Frigoli investigates with a unique and coherent style the ecobiopsychological field while proposing a new approach to psychotherapy by means of a holistic conception of reality. When does a world exist? It exists when consciousness selects a parallel world among the ones available. Reality as so does not truly exist, but it is the observer who creates it. There is a world made of pure ideas and not everybody can enter it: only mathematicians, theoretical physicists and creative people.
In the last chapter, the book gives the reader an experience of “light”. The soul has got a spirit capable of creating images which offer themselves to the reading of nature by entering the world’s soul.
* Diego Frigoli, La fisica dell’anima. Riflessioni ecobiopsicologiche in psicologia [The soul’s physics. Ecobiopsychological considerations in psychology], Editore Persiani, Bologna, 2013
Synopsis
A new perspective in the study of consciousness — and, as a result, impressive consequences in psychotherapy and medicine — has recently derived from the research in quantum mechanics and, more specifically, from its concept of entanglement. This notion explains how a uniquely physical-synchronous mechanism can put the phenomena all together, from matter basic particles to consciousness, thereby making all of them full part of one holographic reality alone. By following the idea that mental phenomena have got an extra-cerebral origin, the ecobiopsychological approach focuses on the analogical-symbolical method of the images as the discovery of the archetypes language. These images can summarize the recent developments of the relationship between body and mind that derive from psychoanalysis and Jungian analytical psychology, as well as neuroscience, biology, culture and nature. The experience of the images, which are thus evoked, inspires a concrete — and available at all the levels of the human dimension — perspective, thereby enabling psychotherapy to move the approach to patients — and the cure of them — towards a holistic way of individuation.