C‘It is something, today, that rests in the way we talk about man. We invoke it to public speeches, we reduce it to figures in the statistics, we analyze it in the workshops – but we seem unable to listen to it. Maybe because we have lost the right words. Or maybe why We forgot that being human is, first of all, a fragile, contradictory, incomplete experience. It is from this awareness that it is born Homo. Journey to human behaviorthe 28 volume series signed by Vittorino Andreoli, an initiative of Corriere della Sera and Io Donna in collaboration with Gazzetta dello Sport.
The human soul explored by Vittorino Andreoli
“I wrote them entirely by hand, on notebooks and notebooks, in these five yearsthe” tells. It is not a scientific compendium, nor an intellectual exercise for a few: It is a bold attempt to answer questions that have always accompanied us – “Who are we?”, “Why do we love?”, “Why do we hate?”, “What makes us free or fragile?” – With a look that crosses philosophy, psychology, history and clinical experience.
Each volume is the stage of an exploration that does not proceed in a straight linebut moves between passions and contradictions, lights and shadows, desires and fears. Like the human being himself.
Professor, she dedicates an entire necklace to the investigation of human behavior. What does it mean today, to think man?
I had the desire to build a fresco. Not a closed doctrine, not a rigid system, but something that could welcome the thousand forms of the human being, even the crooked, fragile, uncertain ones. I have not sought abstract definitions, but lives live: gestures, emotions, daily contradictions. Because it is there, in practice, in the most ordinary behaviors, that man tells his deepest truth, much more than in the great statements. The logic of philosophers, however admirable, is not enough. I tried to tell a condition that is formed and gets distant. There are times when we grab something, and others in which everything escapes us. And that’s okay.
Opens with Genesis. The evolution of the mindthen you go to complex areas: the inner darkness, the masks, the shadow, the apocalypse. Why so much attention to the dark dimension?
Because man is never just light. We cannot speak of the human being without confronting his opaque part, the one that rests us, which is hidden, which we struggle to name. In my clinical experience, as a psychiatrist, I learned that he does not heal ignoring his own shadows. On the contrary: you learn, slowly, to live with it. Instead, but not even expel them. They are the slits who say who we are, not the intact facades.
One of the volumes is titled Apocalypseanother Future. Between fear and possibilities, what space does it remain today to imagine a desirable tomorrow?
The apocalypse is not just destruction. In its original sense, it is also revelation: the end of one world to make room for another. Today the imagination of the end does not contemplate rebirth. And this paralyzes us: not so much the fear of the collapse, but the inability to think an after. But the future, if we want, is not a prediction: it is a task, a responsibility to be assumed.
Homo He also speaks of desire. What role does it have today?
Desire is one of the deepest forces of the human soul. It pushes us forward, takes us away from immobility, brings us beyond what we are. It is a generative force, but also restless, ambivalent. It can nourish or devour, depending on how we recognize it and cross it. It is the hope of being able to become anything else, to escape a fixed version of ourselves, not to remain prisoners of one’s present. And for this you need imagination, yes, but also compassion. Because without the other, without a face to turn to your impetus, there is no future that really worth it is the penalty of being built.
She writes: “The bond with the other is never free”.
Freedom is, in part, an illusion that helps us to live. We tell ourselves that we are free, but every time we relate to another, that freedom is transformed. The link, by its nature, involves bond, influence, exposure. When I recognize that I need the other, that my identity also defines itself in the gaze I receive, my “I” is no longer isolated: it becomes a “us”. In this sense, absolute freedom does not exist in relationships.
You have often spoken of the relationship as the foundation of the human. But in a society that multiplies contacts and reduces the presence, is it still possible to speak of the other’s care?
The cure is not a competence: it is a human act. And like any human act, it does not arise from control, but from vulnerability. It is true that we live in a company that has delegated the cure of structures, protocols, devices. But no machine, no technique, can ever replace the gaze of those who really take the other to heart.
On many occasions he has called himself a “psychiatrist of feelings”. What does it mean?
I have always thought that psychiatry cannot be limited to classifying disorders or prescribing therapies. The most urgent task is to listen to the emotions that live every human being, even confused, uncertain, difficult to say. Feelings are the living matter of our existence: love, fear, anger, hope, pain. They are the ones who give shape to what we are, our fragility and our relationships. Returning dignity to feelings, for me, means returning dignity to the human. Because it is in the feelings that we recognize ourselves, or at least we try.
Homothe next outputs on newsstands
4 Freedom and identity. Know yourself – June 10th
5 human passions. The voice of the psyche – June 17th
6 The shadow dark paths of the human psyche – June 24th
7 The inner darkness from temptation to perdition – July 1st
8 The light of the good are the virtues they illuminate – 8 July
9 ties the invisible threads of the report – July 15th
10 faces and masks built and imposed identities – 22 July
11 Being and nature relating to the world – 29 July
12 Identity and objects The construction of the Self – 5 August
13 I and we social dynamics – 12 August
14 social animal. Community and Conflict – August 19th
15 From birth to old age. Life towards maturity – 26 August
16 fragility and weakness. Limits and afflictions of the human being – September 2nd
17 beyond all limit. Desideri, obsessions and extreme destinies – 9 September
18 Fear or believe. Infinite and its finiteness – September 16
19 The figures of the past. The man who is no longer there – September 23rd
20 the challenges of the present. Face the contradictions of our time – 30 September
21 machines and new horizons. The evolution between technology and future – 7 October
22 The digital era. Life in the era of the global connection – 14 October
23 new worlds. Disturi and change visions – 21 October
24 utopias. Ideal, visions and research of a perfect world – October 28th
25 apocalypse. The perception of the end and the hope of a new beginning – November 4th
26 Future. Projections, dreams and reality of tomorrow – 11 November
27 The theater of existence. The faces of man – November 18th
28 Instant Man. One and one hundred thousand – November 25th
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