psychoanalysts

"And so, by giving nothingness a semantic power that radiates at a distance to mean anything, fashion cheaply solves identity problems that put an end to the agonising question: “Who am I?”."

"If old age no longer shows its vulnerability, where can we find the reasons for “pietas”, the need for sincerity, the demand for answers on which social cohesion is based?"

"I am not a theologian, but a philosopher of history who follows Nietzsche's “genealogical” method, which, unlike Plato's, does not ask, for example, “what is the soul?”, but rather: “How did this concept come into being, what is its history, what meanings has it taken on, what effects has it had on reality?”, convinced as I am that the essence of a thing, its meaning, lies in its history."

"The importance of Heidegger lies in the fact that he describes his philosophy as “going beyond metaphysics”. Given that metaphysics refers to all philosophical thought from Plato onwards, this means placing oneself in a pivotal position, of which Heidegger is fully aware. What does metaphysics mean? Nothing more than the philosophical version of the religious view of the world. (p. 59)"

"What does this crisis consist of? A change in the sign of the future: from the “future-promise” to the “future-threat”. And since the psyche is healthy when it is open to the future (unlike the depressed psyche, which is entirely focused on the past, and the manic psyche, which is entirely focused on the present), when the future closes its doors or, if it opens them, it is only to offer uncertainty, precariousness, insecurity and unease, then, as Heidegger says, “the terrible has already happened”, because initiatives fade away, hopes appear empty, demotivation grows, and vital energy implodes. (p. 26)"

"The lack of a promising future deprives parents and teachers of the authority to show the way. A “contractual” relationship is then established between adolescents and adults, as a result of which parents and teachers feel constantly obliged to justify their choices to young people, who may or may not accept what is proposed to them in an “egalitarian” relationship. But the relationship between young people and adults is not symmetrical, and treating adolescents as equals means not containing them and, above all, leaving them alone to face their own impulses and the anxiety that comes with them. (p. 29)"

"Emotional excess and a lack of reflective cooling essentially lead to four possible outcomes: 1) the “stunning of the emotional apparatus” through ritual practices such as nights at the disco or drug use; 2) “disinterest in everything”, implemented to numb emotions through sloth and non-participation, leading to an opaque attitude of indifference; 3) “violent behaviour”, when not murderous, to release emotions and achieve an overdose that exceeds the level of addiction, as with drugs; 4) “creative genius”, if the emotional burden is accompanied by good self-discipline. (p. 42)"

"[...] before the psychotherapist's couch, where words are exchanged, as we know, for a fee, before the drugs that stifle all the words with which we could learn to name and understand our soul's movements, we must convince ourselves of the necessity and urgency of preventive emotional education, which is very rare in the family, at school and in society. (p. 49)"

"Feeling is not languor, it is not ill-concealed melancholy, it is not anguish of the soul, it is not disconsolate abandonment. Feeling is “strength”. That strength that we recognise at the heart of every decision when, after analysing all the pros and cons that rational arguments unfold, we “decide” because we feel at home with one choice rather than another. And woe betide us if, out of convenience or weakness, we make a choice that is not our own, woe betide us if we are strangers in our own lives. (p. 54)"

"If we call “intimate” that which we deny to strangers in order to grant it to those we want to let into our deepest secrets, often unknown even to ourselves, then modesty, which defends our intimacy, also defends our “freedom”. And it defends it in that core where our personal “identity” decides what kind of “relationship” to establish with the other. (p. 57)"

"Unlike all the beings that populate the earth, in fact, man thinks, and every thought tells him of his total estrangement from the earth. “Thrown into the infinite immensity of spaces that I do not know and that do not know me, I am afraid,” says Pascal, and he is not alluding to the infinity of cosmic spaces, but to their ignorance of human affairs: “They do not know me”. The indifference of the earth, its strangeness to the human event it hosts without knowing it, and to which it sends only a message of loneliness. (pp. 13-14)"

"Between the Self and the Self, the conflict is as violent as it is between God and the earth. (p. 20)"

"Love is only the key that opens the doors to our emotional life, which we delude ourselves into thinking we control, while it, deceiving our illusion, leads us down paths and detours where, unbeknownst to us, the vitality of our existence flows in a tortuous and contradictory manner. (“'Love and Desire”', p. 65)"

"Unlike animals, humans know they must die. This awareness forces them to think about the beyond, which remains so regardless of whether it is inhabited by God or nothingness. This makes the future unknown to humans and the hidden trace of their secret anguish. We are not anguished by “this” or “that”, but by the nothingness that precedes us and awaits us. And since there is nothingness at the beginning and end of our lives, the question of the meaning of our existence arises unavoidably. An existence for nothing or for God?"

"Among the enthusiastic followers of Tissot we find Rousseau and Kant, for whom those who masturbate are not unlike ‘suicides’ who destroy with a single gesture the life that masturbators sacrifice over time. (p. 48)"

"And so the Age of Enlightenment, which for Kant marks ‘the emancipation of humanity from a state of minority’, reveals itself to be much more backward, obsessive and persecutory towards masturbation than previous centuries, which were governed by religion, which perhaps, more than reason, is familiar with the flesh and the sufferings of its loneliness. (p. 50)"

"“'Myth is the search for origin”', its revival and re-proposal, “”religion is the announcement of redemption, its figures are hope and faith in what is to come. [...] Where religion intersects with myth, myth dies out. (p. 65)"

"This is the ability that today's man has lost, as he is unable [...] to “imagine” the ultimate effects of his “actions”."

"Umberto Galimberti, Cristianesimo. La religione dal cielo vuoto, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2012. ISBN 978-88-07-17222-9."

"Umberto Galimberti, Gli equivoci dell'anima, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2001. ISBN 88-07-81642-3."

"Umberto Galimberti, Heidegger e il nuovo inizio . Il pensiero al tramonto dell'Occidente, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2020. ISBN 978-88-07-10553-1."

"Umberto Galimberti, I miti del nostro tempo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2009. ISBN 978-88-07-17162-8."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il corpo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2013. ISBN 978-88-07-88237-1."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il gioco delle opinioni, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2007. ISBN 978-88-07-81800-4."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il segreto della domanda. Intorno alle cose umane e divine, Apogeo, Milano, 2008. ISBN 978-88-503-2717-1."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il tramonto dell'occidente. Nella lettura di Heidegger e Jaspers, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2005. ISBN 978-88-07-81849-3."

"The priority of Christians is to save the soul, and this has, on the one hand, placed the individual before the community and, on the other, eliminated death and awareness of the cyclical nature of time. For Christians, the future is always positive, it is progress, as it is for Western science. Whereas the past is ignorance, and the present is research. But this senseless hope that has replaced the awareness of death is dramatically passive."

"Sometimes I wonder if the Church still believes in God. This is certainly a paradoxical and provocative statement, but it has its justification: when the Church intervenes massively to promote legislation favourable to its ethics, then we may wonder whether those who wield ecclesiastical power believe more in the instruments of the world or in the work of God."

"We live within the Jewish Christian tradition and do not know how to face death except by entrusting ourselves to otherworldly hope. We have a very high opinion of ourselves, deserving of immortality. But does this belief reveal a truth or a disproportionate love of self? Because, in the latter case, it might be worth surrendering to our limitations well in advance, following the Greek wisdom that teaches: ‘Those who know their limits do not fear fate’."

"After Ernesto De Martino, Carlo Tullio-Altan, who passed away yesterday at the age of 89, was the greatest Italian anthropologist in two senses: as a significant exponent of cultural anthropology, a discipline so little cultivated in Italy, and as a ruthless investigator of the anthropology of Italians."

"In ‘The House of Psyche,’ it is noted that the problems that exist today can no longer be addressed through psychoanalysis, as they once were. Psychoanalytic tools treated the discomfort of the individual, the discomfort of civilisation in the sense of the miserable conditions in which people lived, in what I call “the society of discipline”, where the game was between the desire of those who wanted to break the law and those who wanted to suppress this desire. Today, this is no longer the scenario of pain. The scenario of pain, especially under the influence of American culture, which pushes us to achieve our goals in the shortest possible time, produces situations of anxiety determined by demand. No longer the traditional psychoanalytic demand (what is allowed and what is forbidden), but what can I do, what am I capable of doing? This inability to achieve goals when the bar is set higher and higher creates a sense of inadequacy, of a lack of meaning and, ultimately, beyond the technique that has no purpose but simply functions within an absolute, radical lack of horizons in view of who knows what."

"So let's suppose that God speaks: are we sure we understand what he says? When I give a lecture, I am convinced that my students, whether there are thirty or fifty of them, understand thirty or fifty different things. Because language is immediately a translation: when you listen to me, you translate what I say into your world view. And so this translation means that you understand something I did not say. What's more, God; I don't know: some people hear him, some people believe he speaks to them. But let's be clear: did you really hear him with your ears, did he say things to you when he met you, or do you imagine that those are the words of God?"

"I am thinking of something: philosophy is always translated as love of wisdom. But this is not the case, it is the opposite: it is not love of wisdom, it is wisdom of love. And so the figure of love is first and foremost intersubjectivity, it is exchange. That is, truth must not emerge as a doctrinal body: this is wisdom, not philosophy. It must arise from dialogue. From dialogue between two people. Dialogue with the other and above all with that other who is woman. Why is it that no woman ever appears in the history of philosophy: what is this being sidelined? Perhaps women navigate in regions that are not overly logical, which frighten men? These are questions I ask myself."

"When girls and boys in their secondary narcissism look in order to see beauty and to fall in love, there is already evidence that doubt has crept in about their mother's continued love and care. So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her."

"In individual emotional development the precursor of the mirror is the mother's face."

"If one cannot feel one’s way into people without, in actuality, representing the self as the arbitrator and judge of the other’s actions and possibilities, perhaps it is time to question what one wants from empathy. ... A more useful way to think about feelings requires attention to what it is that structures the ways in which feelings are imagined and read."

"Queer theory proposes to think identities in terms that place as a problem the production of normalcy and in terms that confound the intelligibility of the apparatuses that produce identity as repetition."

"Yoga puts our experience of enlightenment at the exact center of our being. Though we may appear separate from one another, we are no more separate than the wave is separate from the sea, or than the air in a glass jar is separate from the surrounding air. We are pervaded by and animated by the same spirit, the same nature, and that nature is constant through the manifold changes of birth, growth, and dissolution; it cannot be wounded, or separated from itself."

"I had read Kakar’s The Inner World, an exploration of Indian childhood and society that had received favorable reviews. But personally I thought his application of Freudian ideas, which had already been shown to be invalid by new research, to analyze the mind of the Indian child was pointless."

"Psychoanalysis . . . has been insufficiently aware of its underlying paradigm and its deep roots in Western culture. The implicit model of man that underlies the psychoanalytic meta-theory is certainly not universal; the psychoanalytic notion of the person as an autonomous, bounded, abstract individual is a peculiarly Western notion. In contrast, the holistic model of man that underlies Indian mystical approaches and propels their practices is rooted in the very different Indian cultural tradition which, in some ways, lies at an opposite civilizational pole."

"the Life/Death/Life forces are part of our own nature, an inner authority that knows the steps, knows the dance of Life and Death. It is composed of the parts of ourselves who know when something can, should, and must be born and when it must die. It is a deep teacher if we can only learn its tempo. Rosario Castellanos, the Mexican mystic and ecstatic poet, writes about surrender to the forces that govern life and death: “... dadme la muerte que me falta .../give me the death I need . . .” Poets understand that there is nothing of value without death"

"I think the best camp for women is the Wild Women’s Snowboard Camp, launched by women’s 1992 World Extreme Champ, Greta Gaines, and co-directed by Mary Seibert. It follows a philosophy by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, in that women need to break free; that there is a need and obligation for each woman to reach this level and let go. Snowboarding’s a fluid sport that allows you to do just this. Like rock climbing, it’s more about balance and grace than strength and ego. Therefore, women excel."

"Cynicism is the opposite of soulful. Cynicism means the conduit to the soul has a great kink in it, like a garden hose in which nothing flows in either direction. That’s what makes cynicism. If those conduits are open, you cannot be cynical."

"I have to say that a man can never know who he is, or a woman cannot know who she is, until she has poured herself through the sieve that is her mother and poured herself through the sieve that is her father and come to understand through both."

"We are all filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We were taught to feel shame for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings. But the shadow of Wild Woman still lurks behind us during our days and in our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed."

"The pathologizing of variation in women's bodies is a deep bias endorsed by many psychological theorists, most certainly by Freud."

"My theory, which is a blasphemous and heinous theory, is that as long as men elevate the maiden and the sexual woman, they will trash the mother and the daughter."

"a world-class psychologist and writer known for her themes on women...Since Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola-Éstes has become known for her empowerment of women through the use of the very mythology that has been long used to dismiss women in society."

"I interviewed Robert Bly in 1990. I can remember saying to him, “Now, what about the men’s movement?” And he said, “No, it’s not men’s movement.” And I said, “Well, what will you call it?” “Men’s work, just work with men, that’s all.” And, I really like that. I like that he called it work with men. Mythopoetic is too big a word. It is better to have simpler words."

"I understand mythology. I understand stories. I understand poetry. I understand that they cut close to the bone. I am a poet who became a psychoanalyst. That is my background. I am a cantadora. I am a storyteller. It comes from my feet, upward, not from my brain, downward."