Original painting by Gianni Russomando.[1]

“On one hand we have evidence that also a subtle and difficult intellectual work, which normally requires rigorous meditation, can be done preconsciously without coming to consciousness. There is no doubt on such cases : they occur for example when sleeping. A subject can be found himself, or herself catching, soon after waking up, the solution to a difficult problem, mathematical or whatever else, to which during all the day he, or she, was in vain applying.”[2]

“What makes some cognitive operations more difficult and hard than others ? What achievements should we acquire with the currency of attention ? …Today we have tentative answers to those questions.”[3]

Freud sensed that any ‘perception’ – not only phisical, strictly speaking - is the result of an individual ‘assessment’[4]  which doesn’t need conscience to go to goal : even, the presence of conscience can prevent thought from grasping those experiential perceptions which are indispensable to intellectual synthesis.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – February 15, 2023

[1] Gianni Russomando, biographical note : “I’m born in Vercelli (1956), graduated at the ‘Istituto di Belle Arti di Vercelli’, I describe myself as an ‘amanuense’ (medieval hand-painter) and far from expositions and competitions.”

[2] ‘L’Io e l’Es’, S. Freud (1922) in ‘OSF – Vol.IX’, Bollati Boringhieri 2020 p.489

[3] ‘Pensieri lenti e veloci’, D. Kahneman (2011) – Mondadori Libri SpA 2022, p.46

[4] “It is the concept of the law of the motion of body named ‘drive’, where the source of satisfaction is an Other one (i.e. an external subject). Memory is one of the species of thinking.”, ‘Il pensiero di natura. Dalla psicoanalisi al pensiero giuridico’, Giacomo B. Contri – SIC Edizioni 1998, p.85 Nota 7.