'I'm getting emotional ... and to think that I already know how it ends...'
Hybris and its plots.
On the occasion of the conference Ajax and Phaedra. Shameful Love and Loving Shame, Syracuse (Italy), May 31-June 2, 2024.
A problem that arises from the outset concerns the possibility of extending the psychoanalytic method in contexts other than the individual clinic.
In The Problem of Analysis Conducted by Nonphysicians (1926) Freud tells us
Psychoanalysis, as a "psychology of the deep" or doctrine of the Psychic Unconscious, can become indispensable to all sciences that study the history of the origins of human civilization and its great institutions, such as art, religion, and social organization. I believe that it has already offered these sciences considerable help in the solution of their problems, but these are minimal contributions compared with those that can be obtained when historians, psychologists of religions, glottologists, etc., are enabled to use themselves the new research tool placed at their disposal. The therapeutic use of analysis is only one of its applications, and the future will perhaps show that it is not the most important.
Extending these observations of Freud, we come to hypothesize the possibility of thinking about a new meta-psychology. A meta-psychology that, as was the case at the beginning of the discoveries about the value of the unconscious and how decisive it was for understanding the human being, can now, through the
extension of psychoanalytic practice to multi-psychic apparatuses, call into question the conception of another model of intelligibility to account for the plurality of places, dynamics and economies of unconscious psychic reality that emerge in such areas or apparatuses... (R. Kaès, The Extension of Psychoanalysis, 2015).
Beginning with Bion's early experiences in his observations of groups, one begins, in fact, to speak already of the group mind and the plurality of each individual. It comes, then, to approach and extend that Copernican revolution already initiated by Freud regarding the loss of centrality of the individual. It was another "catastrophic change"!
It is appropriate, therefore, to remain faithful to Freud's thought by declining it on the variations of experience that are produced in the process of progressive knowledge of the unconscious. Knowledge that, as can be guessed, can never be accomplished and requires a continuous plurality of interventions (L. Caldironi, 2018).
H. Kalweit tells us that «healing means daring to step outside one's fence» but this stepping outside is far from easy and affects all fields of knowledge. That is why it is important for each field of knowledge to ally itself with the other, not out of a form of scattered eclecticism, but out of an openness to the world; an openness that comes to intertwine and involve concepts such as approximation, intuition and intention, defined or declined within the creative process.
For these different framings to become suitable probes to investigate new territories, it is necessary that the field of observation also widens and contemplates an asymptotic approach to a project that can only proceed through transient and provisional instances. It is an exploration "of the adjacent" with respect to many and successive stages.
This is also true of the psychoanalytic "method" and its "framework".
And we come now to the staging.
Passions are staged in an a-temporal dimension. A dimension that is proper to the unconscious; we know, in fact, that there is no impulse, no instinctual drive or response that is not experienced as an unconscious fantasy.
And it is at this level that communication takes place.
Psychoanalysis itself was born from myth and through this it has been able to communicate and intervene in the difficult currents of our emotions.
Passions are kindled and so love, shame, and the shame of love come alive as 'works' of the gods, by 'inter-post-for-sonat'.
Dislocations are created that support different responsibilities, who is playing the game and where is this game being played?
In the dynamics addressed in Sophocles’ Ajax and in Euripides’ Phaedra. Hippolytus the wreath bearer, the 'caesura' in the flow of mind during the occurrence of experience no longer represents and no longer becomes a transitive and dynamic space, but, on the contrary, precipitates into rupture and collapses into an irremediable wound. There is no longer 'logos' and dia-logos between the parts.
The parts become 'alone'.
In these solitudes Hubris weaves his plots:
Phaedra's Hubris trespasses into the conflict between super-egoic aspects and restraining but pathological projections; in Hippolytus, on the other hand, it is inscribed in a kind of fanatical and defensive rejection of sexuality and erotic love and is punished for this.
In Theseus, blindness, the impulsive use of power and not seeking the clear-darkness of truth, is his hubris. A lack of wisdom and expectation, the failure to put oneself in a position of comprehending that is also 'under-standing'. That is a placing oneself 'underneath' to foster a 'supportive being'.... It is not possible, it is not free.
What I was also interested in pointing out here is that Aphrodite also suffers from jealousy ... it is her hubris, a divine hubris. She resents being ignored and not being preferred to Artemis ... the gods too, then, like men are made of the same stuff ... in their own image and likeness!
In these two tragedies the 'play' becomes rigid, in Ajax the field within which the passions are acted out becomes a container of tensions that cannot find re-solutions except in the consequence of the dramatic relief of a lack of contact and thus in the grief that arises from the knowledge that there is no glimmer of reconciliation except in death, a death that foresees no redemption.
Pride colliding with humiliation results in a psychotic 'break-down,' there is no longer the area of dreaming and the nightmare of wakefulness and unbearable reality drags into the arena of shame.
Perhaps only after Ajax's 'move-out', the appearance of his brother, Teucer, can the hypothesis of an encounter with the moderation of a 'new' man, Odysseus, be created.
An Odysseus reminiscent of the one who will meet Achilles' shadow in Hades, but only when Achilles has also become a shadow himself. A shadow of a past now extinct, but one whose drives are still alive.
In Ajax there is a different form of Hybris, it is a Hybris that differs from that of Aeschylus, Euripides, in Ajax a psychological profile prevails that leads to personal ruin. It is not, therefore, a matter of arrogance, but of character rigidity and inflexibility.
To change is unacceptable. It is not divine punishment, but something self-inflicted generated by an inner crisis that leads to progressive isolation to its extreme conclusion.
Ajax has a very different idea of salvation; it is a path he can only accomplish 'alone', an affair in which the figure of his father looms over him.
A face, the sight of which is not bearable. The father, contrary to his name, Telamon, which from 'tlénai' would mean 'hold up', 'lift up', is a figure of no 'support' or 'backing'. It does not facilitate the generational transition and Ajax, despite himself, becomes its interpreter; we could say that Ajax, moves but does not 'move', does not move along with the others and ends his existential affair by saying, I go where I have to go .... But the most absurd thing, we add, this 'I must go' is a place that does not exist except in its 'absence' but, precisely because of that it is very powerful!!!