Self-Intimacy and Individuation
5.8 Life’s Relation to Itself: Symptoms
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dream, or simply thinking about it—in other words, by thematizing that content which is unthematically present.
On the other hand, while the avoidance of unpleasant emotions related to the separation continues to be unthematically present, every negative variation affecting the person’s present relationship corresponds to the opening up of an access to those painful feelings which this new condition ought to have helped him cope with. For example, if the person in question entered into a new relationship as a means to face the sense of emptiness connected to the perception of loneliness caused by the sepa- ration, every resurfacing of this sense of existential loneliness during his present relationship will correspond to the reemergence of the sense of emptiness and of the symptomatology which may spring from it. Just like when I realize that I have for- gotten my keys on the doctor’s desk as I am heading toward my car to return home, in this case too a certain situation will reopen an access to a past experience; but unlike in the case of the keys, it might be difficult to integrate this past experience within the present meaningful context. Clearly, this does not imply that symptoms are the price paid for the repression of experiences, as psychoanalysis claims; rather, what it implies is that the possibilities of meaning pertaining to the person’s present life condition do not allow him to grasp, and hence thematically integrate, a past experiential condition that therefore proves foreign to the individual, even though he perceives it as his own. While this state of affairs does not correspond to a symp- tom in itself, it may lead to the emergence of one. So it is possible to argue that the genesis of a disorder lies in the relation between the prereflective sphere and its narrative reconfiguration (Arciero 2002, 2006; Arciero and Bondolfi 2009).
mechanism of symptom formation takes shape as a kind of repetitive system which, activated by given conditions, will regenerate the elements from which it originates.
As the expression of a mechanism, each symptom points to an experience of the self which constantly produces itself in the same way and imposes repetition upon the motility of life. From this perspective, psychological symptoms and, more gen- erally, disorders may be seen as a limitation of one’s personal freedom, of the pos- sibilities of sense; as such, they are always accompanied by a certain degree of suffering. The previous example may help clarify this perspective.
The person who within a short time embarks on a new relationship in order to cope with the feeling of emptiness caused by his separation will gradually discover, as he gets to know his new partner better, that the latter is not quite as he imagined (new position of access to oneself). This will lead to the resur- facing of the feeling of existential loneliness, of emptiness, which the new relationship was meant to assuage. Consequently, the development of the new relationship engenders not only a change of the person’s perspectives, and hence of the existential dimensions related to them, but also—more gener- ally—a change in his current position with respect to the original projects of the couple: a different opening up to the future. At the same time, this new horizon redefines the person’s relation to his past, causing situations and feel- ings connected to the previous separation to resurface—memories that seemed to have vanished at the beginning of the individual’s engagement with his current partner and which now instead increase his feeling of emptiness.
Intertwined with the person’s present life conditions, emotional states con- nected to past situations resurface which, once removed from their original contexts, are experienced as something that is suffered: as an affliction the understanding of which is excluded from our present being-there (gap between ongoing experience and the background made up of contexts of intelligibil- ity). This past manifests itself as something unrelated to the individual’s pres- ent life condition, as something foreign to himself—since it cannot be thematically integrated within his ongoing existential position—but at the same time it is perceived as something that is his own. These emotional states perceived as something that is suffered may never be articulated, thereby engendering an emotional condition that cannot be appropriated within the subject’s current perspective, and may therefore trigger symptoms.
The sense of emptiness which becomes increasingly present and foreign to the person as loneliness takes hold within the couple may engender a state of fear, which he will attempt to face by focusing on the bodily aspects that accompany it, thereby anticipating the state of illness. In other words, the person who feels almost a sense of estrangement with respect to his own perception, as he cannot integrate its sense within his ongoing life situation
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It is clear here that each symptom always provides a double indication: on the one hand, the factual condition in which it emerges (the lack of correspondence between the person’s expectations with regard to his relationship and the actual present situation); on the other, the life situation within which it originated (the previous separation and sense of emptiness), and which is thus preserved by being reiterated, yet not assimilated. What also becomes clear, then, is the meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s intuition that “the movement toward the future, toward the living present or toward the past and the power to learn, to mature, and to enter into com- munication with others are all somehow blocked by a bodily symptom; existence has become entangled” (PhP, p. 192). Symptoms bring the motility of life, which reveals existence in its bodily actualization, to a halt; at the same time, through the repetition of the mechanism, the movement by which the world opens up reaches a standstill. This process takes a very different form in the case of a traumatic experi- ence, as we shall see (p. 175 ff.).
Symptoms, then, require interpretation, a restitution of meaning, the care of self;
and this care deconstructs the mechanism (reduction and destruction), identifies the gap on which it rests, and reintegrates the disunity of experience—interpretatively retrieving the unsaid—within a cohesion of sense (construction).15
Evidently, connecting in vital terms the experiences that lie at the origin of a disorder cannot mean simply recalling the trauma which represents their “cause”
nor explaining them according to a theoretical approach. Rather, it entails newly articulating these experiences as a vital part of oneself in a sense, based on a possi- ble view of the future.16 The first step consists in looking back toward the modes of being that accompany the patient’s behaviors (the unprominent correlates of factual life), so as to bring them to light, opening up to inquiry the domain of phenomena which the psychopathological condition of the person obscures to a substantial degree (reduction). This first stage includes the deconstruction of the symptom and of all those obstacles that prevent the understanding of the concrete situation in which meaning takes shape (destruction). In the previous example, this first stage consists in defining the actual situations in which the malaise emerges (the
15 The treatment of a symptom, therefore, also has its starting point in the patient’s experience of the mechanisms that underlie this gap.
16 Historical reality coincides with virtuality: the disclosure of possibilities that call one’s actual condition into question.
and thus becomes alarmed, will transform the body through which this perception takes shape into an object to be monitored (mechanism of the symptom). Consequently, in every condition in which emptiness re-emerges, causing fear, bodily modification grows more acute for the patient and with it the certainty of suffering from an illness, which in turn—through a vicious circle—fosters the fear that engendered it in the first place. This mechanism may lie at the basis of a hypochondriac disorder with panic attacks.
5 Self-Intimacy and Individuation
sense of emptiness), defusing the underlying mechanism (the emptiness-fear circle) and hence tracing the experience of emptiness back to the situations it is connected to.
By following these guidelines, we can bring the problematic experience to light and provide a concrete outline of it, so as to grasp its origin and the contexts related to it. This enables us to define a field of inquiry by clarifying the ongoing life situa- tion that governs its understanding. In our example, guided by an analysis of the exacerbation of the problematic experience through the development of the patient’s present relation, we may grasp the person’s sense of emptiness, con- nected to his condition of loneliness and freed from the vicious circle of fear, as an indication that points to his separation and the end of his previous relation- ship. The articulation of this access thus outlines the perspective within which meaningful moments can be disclosed—and with them the possibility of turning toward the past and of being addressed by it (construction). In our example, these moments emerge through an analysis of the end of the patient’s previous rela- tionship and of the ways in which he faced this separation. The establishment of this interpretative condition leads to the development of new directions and hence to a renewal of ipseity in the present: a renewal which cannot be confined to the acqui- sition of knowledge detached from concrete being-there (according to the theoreti- cal approach), but which rather co-constitutes ipseity itself. In other words, the past is appropriated through a new relationship, opening itself up—once again within ipseity—to becoming.
5.9 Life’s Relation with Itself: Memory and the Living