…There is no marital union!” The assessment of king Creon¹

 

In the picture "La paix", by Pablo Picasso (1952).  His celebratory thinking is not convincing us, so compulsively repetitive and bored by an artist who however was already at the peak of success.

 

  

This short interview was born from a curiosity to explore some ideas offered by Dr. Roberto Zanni during a recent public conversation about ‘narcissism’.

 

Marina Bilotta – An eight year old boy, who watches in admiration an anti-hero – you said Renato Vallanzasca – then a real man, not a cartoon character, really accused of crimes and murders, and really sentenced to criminal penalties by state justice. However is a man that many talked about, he was written about on the newspapers, he himself was interviewed for television, saying : “Vallanzasca is Vallanzasca!” What would this man have more, maybe looked upon with fear by the people talking about him on the street, compared to the ‘classic’ hero who spends himself for Justice?

Roberto Zanni – I start from a personal memory : as a child, just when I was eight years old, I used to spend the summer afternoons together with a friend of mine : often we played with toy soldiers and much of the game consisted in preparing for confrontation, each one building his own village, his own fort, his own army; then followed the battle and the count of the dead and wounded to decide who won.

One day, maybe because strategies and game modes were out (but more likely our thinking was breaking through), we decided as mutually agreed to ‘play for peace’ : the play, however, didn’t start.

 

1 The peace which bores.

With ‘peace’ nothing happened : the red man went hunting for bison and heartily greeted the cowboy intent on tending his herd. It was flat calm.

When Heraclitus, in that famous fragment, says that “Polemos is the father of all the things, and of all the things is the king” is careful : a king, infact, rules by means of laws, and the law for Heraclitus is the conflict, the dialectic of opposites which, as dynamic, would explain the totality of things (‘father of all things’, as a matter of facts).

But, if everything is war what is peace ? As an adult I would have guessed that thinking of peace is as arduous as thinking of mental health. What do heroes, positive and negative, good and bad,                   have to do with all this ? Yet they do, because also the so-called ‘good’ heroes are violent, with the difference that they resort to force ‘for good’…

Sure, you can think of personalities like Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi : very different men but united by the repudiation of violence – I’m simplifying – but violence, perpetrated or suffered, there is always : if this is the perspective Manzoni is right when he writes in ‘Adelchi’ : “All that remains is to hurt or suffer it”. Violence, conflict, clash seem then unavoidable : the theme of peace comes up again; it’s difficult to think of it as if not lack of motion and enterprise, that is as ecstatic bliss.

The friend and aret critic Mario Cancelli pointed out to me that, for example, when Picasso painted ‘The peace’ he represented different characters on a lawn, and you don’t understand well how they do… Do they play ? Do they enjoy ? And about what ? They look like jerks to me… The alternative would seem then to be between destruction (war) and inertia (peace) : the bad guys would be the brawlers and the good ones are those who do nothing. However the bad guys, while staying evil, would give a jolt : if unfortunately this ‘jolt’ ends in pushing into a ravine, that opens to the question of violence as a product of impotence (on this subject I defer to the question that follows).

When I was a child, without being bad, I claim my ‘sym-pathy’ for the bad guys, for those ones who unmasked the hypocrisy of goodness : I felt, like all children, the ‘goodness’ as a ‘reaction-formation’, or that the good ones… are not good!

At the secondary school, for example, I was impressed by the biographical insight reported in my Histroy book, on Caesar Borgia : a ruthless man but whose I appreciated the brutal unveiling of religious embroideries from the balance of forces among men. Of course, I didn’t spend my childhood to worship evil heroes, but as a child I really appreciated the relationships, and I brightly remember my repulsion for the moralistic sermons.

I was looking for a solution which was not an act of violence of my ‘heroes’, I just needed to think through themselves. Giacomo Contri pointed out the solution : a peace not by mysticism, but by juridical way.

Peace infact is a product, not a landing : if we don’t think so we’ll go on to mimic the fight between good and bad ones. If war, as a matter of facts, is the only way for relationships and the peace is the absence of war… It follows that peace is absence of relationships.

But is it really so ?

While we think about it would be nice to find out what the good guys will do, once they defeated the bad ones.

 

Marina Bilotta – May we call ‘fascination’ this special and widespread admiration, not among youngest ? When did you realize that it was ‘fascination’, not ‘admiration’, why did you decide to drop it ?

 

 

2 One’s thinking or a fascination hobbyhorse.

Roberto Zanni – Your question open stoa distinction : mine was ‘fascination’, not ‘admiration’. Fascination dropped because it wasn’t a ‘hobbyhorse’ (ad-mirare in Latin language) : it was just a moment of my intellectual work to try to get over the question of ‘satisfaction’, whose even ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ – when it ends well – can be intermediate steps.

The problem is when ‘thinking’ does not hold, does not govern and, on the opposite, rushes into action and pushes into the ravine. Violence infact is only capable of destroying because it is rooted in impotence, whose the heroes ‘super powers’ are the back side; I say again Giacomo Contri’ statement : “Between impotence and overbearing there is a hole which has not yet been filled”.

 

3 Work or not.

Marina Bilotta – Narcissism, you said, doesn’t match ‘work’ : on the contrary, it would allow, while staying still, to bend the other because narcissism doesn’t need working with a partner, it’s just an original quality. “Je suis belle” is a famous and dramatic statue by the sculptor Auguste Rodin, who imagines woman always repulsive towards her partner. Then, is it worth working or not ? When can we say that a child is working ?

Roberto Zanni – A healthy child always works, for him everything can be work. It is in any early psychopathology that a child stops working and begins to be a difficult child : and to think that everything was easy before…

About that, adults responsibilities are not to be forgiven : see the so-called ‘bullies’ into the schools : they are already into the narcissism, even we’ve stirred it up.

We tell to a child or a teenager when he commits vandalism that he ‘is’ a bully! Instead of sanction him we categorize him.

If ‘I am’ a bully I don’t need to work : “just the way I am!” At most he will be re-ducated : and the education often is sadism on sadism…

I looked at a banquet on the street for collecting signatures to reintroduce the hour of ‘Civic education’ in the school : wrong! Civic education is not to be taught, it applies!

Nobody charges  - then no one sanctions – but Projects are organized on lawfulness, while it is the Law itself to be disavowed infact! If I only could I would reduce the age of majority to 12 years old :  age : all criminally liable for their own actions !

 

 

5  Never-ending unsatisfaction.

Finally, the question of ‘work’ you introduce, make me think that a narcissist doesn’t know what to do with a partner : so he thinks about bending him, or her to an obedience without satisfaction. Then we can also say that a narcissist doesn’t know what do about the satisfaction itself.

A coarse but effective saying I sometimes heard is : ‘suck the nail’. That also will be the destiny of a  beauty who makes ‘the beauty’…!

I note in the margin that ‘destiny’ is an aftermath of narcissism².

 

 

                              A cura di Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – October 25, 2018

 

 

 

1 Tribute to ‘THINK !’ October 27-28, 2018, "Alleanza", by Giacomo B. Contri.

2 Roberto Zanni is a teacher in "Philosophy", also member of "Studium Cartello – Il lavoro psicoanalitico", and a psychoanalyst himself in Bologna.