Psychiatrists From Italy

"Pain makes more noise than any other noise."

"The limit of energy becomes the limit of civilization, of a civilization that seems to be one of well-being and that at times appears to be a civilization of waste."

"Marriage is my life with her and our children, but none of us can say that it has been a forty-year trip out of town."

"Marriage is the greatest of human frailties, capable of producing good and incapable of avoiding evil."

"The powerful do not believe they need to be resurrected because they think they are unshakable, like the Eiffel Tower made of iron and not flesh, soulless, cold as a railroad track."

"The powerful do not know how to love; the man of iron is cold, he knows how to envelop and bind in order to subjugate, to enslave."

"The sense of belonging. This is marriage."

"The old man lives on the dead and awaits death."

"Love has nothing free about it, because fear does not allow this utopia to be exercised."

"Man would not survive in the dark without a light bulb to illuminate a page to read or to power a computer on which to type a new world, which also depends on energy."

"The end is not a distant appointment, but a present that perpetuates itself, and so we die continuously and are dead even when we breathe."

"The fragility of fine Murano glass or Bohemian crystal: beautiful, elegant, but it takes very little for it to shatter and turn into useless fragments. Knowing its nature, one must be careful how one uses it, how one preserves it: one must keep it away from places where impetuous actions are performed, because otherwise that fine glass becomes nothing, just a memory."

"Fragility remakes man, while power destroys him, reducing him to fragments that turn to dust."

"Jealousy is the fear of being alone, now that the perfect formula for wholeness has been found, which means completion, security."

"My fragility leads me to love, so love is the answer to a need born of fragility, of the perception that without the other, my being in the world is doomed only to death, to non-existence; and the loneliness of the glass man is the worst of all diseases, of the diseases of living."

"Fear is not only linked to physical pain, to the feeling of no longer functioning, it also attaches itself to well-being, which has a mental and social dimension, to how one lives with one's personality within that environment made up of relationships."

"The perception of the end is within each of us, it is a stigma of the species, a mark of its transience."

"The presence of the divine in the world should serve to calm the visceral pride and sense of human omnipotence that exalt power and domination."

"Repetition has always been the source of certainty."

"Old certainties appear as gross errors, and there is now a need to educate, and to do so urgently, at a time when no one knows what it means anymore, since for several generations, throughout the 20th century, this term has not been used, obsolete and with the flavor of something dirty and perverse."

"Violence does not make history, it is not a difficulty that can be worked through, but simply a war that leads only to the death of love and sometimes even of its protagonists."

"Beliefs in heaven, populated by the living, express well the denial of death and the desire to remain."

"In the family, where daily disagreements have disappeared, dramas made up of extreme behaviors arise."

"To accept defeat, you have to believe in those who decree it, you have to be sure that the competitions are not rigged, that they do not become a business, but that they are conducted with absolute respect for skills and talents, whatever field they may be in."

"If your neighbor is antisocial and does not like your noise, he turns on his own and cancels yours."

"Dr. John Seward is the director of the Purfleet asylum, and throughout my reading of Bram Stoker's Dracula, I felt as if I had returned to San Giacomo della Tomba, my old asylum. For this reason, among others, the book literally drew me into its pages with the kind of engagement that only great writers can achieve. [...] If a novel has this ability, it is a masterpiece and needs no further proof. It is the mark that each reader leaves on it, and when they put it back on the shelf, it is almost as if they are separating themselves from something they have entered into and can only leave knowing that the book is there waiting and can be reread at any time."

"I deeply believe that priests are figures of great importance for non-believers."

"Isn't choice already an expression of freedom, even if only a basic one?"

"Fear is a defense mechanism that allows us to be aware of danger and therefore to take action to avoid its consequences."

"The memory of images is stored within us, and it is to this that we attach our feelings."

"Despair is madness. Madness, the perception of the impossibility of living: being there, but as if not being there. Despair as an experience of madness is incompatible with life. It sees death, plans death, and kills itself and the other. Despair is a madness possible to man, to all men; it is, in fact, a perspective of man, linked to his need to be with others, to the fact that he cannot live alone, because human life is not solitude but sharing, belonging, attachment. Killing is a moment of infinite and incurable despair, and then the world appears useless and harmful and an individual perceives himself as irreducible to the world, as an alien, as an alienated person. A human feeling, possible, compatible with normality. Killing is linked to the madness of normality, to that capacity of man which, when in crisis, instead of helping him to live, transforms him into death and pushes him to kill and ruin himself, to kill himself. Madness is different from a clinical point of view, but also from a legal one (the inability to understand and intend: an infirmity that has arisen, preventing the human machine from functioning). I see madness as a mechanism that mirrors that of despair, of the feeling of the end: the incomprehensibility of the world, pulling out of it. Still being on the planet without knowing it. Close to others without needing the other. Even losing the memory of words and their meaning, giving up on communicating. Schizophrenia is an extraordinary example of this: being in the world as if the world were ending and as if being had no meaning, since all meaning is based on relationships. The schizophrenic is an island, a monad locked in a cell of existence, in a prison of the world. In isolation because that way they can still breathe. Life that comes closest to death. In short, madness already has to do with death, though not in its physical representation, but in its psychological representation, personality, and social representation, relationships. There are three kinds of death: that of the body, the most emblematic and absolute; that of the mind, which allows the body to remain active and even to take on an air of elegance; and then social death: deprived of every dimension, as if we had become transparent and, even within a crowd, no one could see us. The madman is a dead man who walks and breathes. If he kills, he does so without despair, perhaps out of anger; he is a corpse who kills. Madness has already overcome despair and for this reason lives without living, lives as if dead and, if it kills, kills already dead."

"The most beautiful dimension is that of the priest who has nothing, but who is an integral part of an active and attentive community, within a flock that loves him."

"I don't know if the present time has brought us great benefits, but it has certainly invented a lot of fears."

"The old priest now knows that man errs, and that this often produces only temporary effects, so that what ultimately makes complete sense is precisely prayer."

"The priest seems to me to be the most appropriate person to talk about death: he knows that it is not a subject for despair."

"The non-believer is someone who feels the limits of their own existence, and who, while using reason and considering it the best way to solve many existential problems, and certainly as a scientific tool, wants to push it further to question the mystery."

"In their own way, non-believers are frequent visitors to churches: they love them as intimate places, as special museums where they can admire art and music, but there they find themselves wondering about the miracle of that presence which, after two thousand years, still fills the whole earth and the lives of so many people."

"I believe that the perception of being children of God, not in the sense of a statement of principle but of an experience that attests to their involvement, must be an extraordinary existential condition, capable of giving strength and removing many of the doubts and disappointments that the human condition activates and feeds."

"‘'The case of Renfield’', although fictionalized, does not lose its connotation of psychiatry and that of the time. On the contrary, it serves to raise a very pressing issue at the time: the relationship between mental illness, a natural phenomenon, and demonic possession, which is an extra-natural phenomenon. The psychiatric category that best lends itself to this issue is that which allows for rapid changes in behavior and thought. Renfield goes from a phase of excitement and delirium to a state of calm and apparent normality. Renfield's delirium is the need to feed on living creatures in order to obtain vital energy for himself and thus not die. To this end, he asks for sugar, which he places on the windowsill of his hospital cell to attract flies, which he then swallows. A subsequent phase is to encourage the development of spiders that feed on flies and then swallow them. And the next plan is to have mice that eat spiders and cats that eat mice, so that by eating cats he gains extraordinary vital energy. His whole life is conditioned and focused on this idea."

"(About Abraham Van Helsing) He is a psychiatrist, although he has many other specialties: he is a surgeon but also practices hypnosis, which he does regularly with Mina. He was one of Dr. Seward's teachers. He deals with the occult sciences: a term that well expresses the attempt to heal the contradiction between positivism and mystery."

"In the end, even the psychiatrist lived in the asylum like the other lunatics. A strange life, perhaps paradoxical, perhaps absurd, but all in all true. When it had to be established that things were not right, the comparison was with the lives of healthy people. A normality that, if I had to define it, I could only describe as pathological, since for the inhabitants of the asylum it is the “outside” that is abnormal."

"Dracula is a psychiatric novel in the sense that it focuses on strange behavior. The word madness is frequently used."