Edina Altara (1898-1983) was born in Sassari where her talent in drawing very soon made itself known : she participated in 1917 to an exhibition of Art in Turin and her collage, titled ‘Jesus salvadelu’ was acquired by king Vittorio Emanuele III (still today the work can be found in Rome, at the Loggia d’Onore in Quirinale). At first she devoted herself to drawing for ceramic productions (plates, saucers, tiles then framed as in the above picture), in 1934 she went to Milan to collaborate with fashion sketches at the magazine ‘Grazia’, and in 1942 also at the magazine ‘Bellezza’ edited by Giò Ponti, as well as ‘Stile’ and ‘Domus’ and up to collaborations for the furniture of five Italian ocean liners. She was fashion illustrator for the magazine ‘Rakam’, for ‘Il Giornalino della Domenica’ – a publication of ‘Domenica del Corriere’ dedicated to teenagers – for various advertisements (cosmetics, beauty products) and illustrator of novels on magazines. Two exhibitions in the last months did show a few of her most beautiful works : ‘Edina Altara. La mia Sardegna’ at the ’Art Port Gallery’ at Olbia, and ‘Edina Altara. Mondi di carta’ at the ‘Galleria Siotto’at Cagliari.

“The coordinating role assumed by the tailor towards different artisans employed in the making of a garment helps to better define the contours of the craft performed by this craftsman who, according the legislator, was the main originator of novelties.”[1]

Individual competence is science of thinking, or unconscious, to whom conscience begins to address respectfully. 

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – February 24, 2023

[1] ‘L’arte del sarto nel Medioevo’, by Elisa Tosi Brandi 2017 Soc. editrice ‘il Mulino’, p.48

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.

‘Working memory’, by F. Duranti[1] : drawn from the exhibition ‘Glossario clinico di Psichiatria per Immagini’ – Pavia, ‘Hangart Studio’ October 8 – 23, 2022.

“System 1. It operates quickly and automatically, with little or no effort and  no sense of voluntary control.

 System 2. It directs attention to the demanding mental activities that require focus, such as complex calculations.”[2]

“ It takes longer to say ‘automatic system’ than ‘system 1’ so that the first expression takes up more space in our working memory. Everything occupies working memory reduces our ability to think.”[3]

No regard, then, for starting work as thinking capability to inform us about limits of our competence is not a characteristic of conscience.

It is the unconscious, as a matter of fact, able to supply us with this not ambiguous, quick message : whose communication, however, depends on how much conscience considers oneself independent of thought initiation.

Any reaction forming[4] is, by logic, secondary to an initial assessment on the offer to which it refers.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – February 6, 2023

[1] The biographical notes are drawn from the brochure available at the exhibition// Franco Duranti has an academic background in Fine Arts and in Conservatory  of Music in Milan : hsi own work merges with an activity as an Art therapist in hospital (Milan, Pavia, Legnano). In 1988 he begins a long quest to give life to a ‘ Clinical Glossary of Psychiatry for Imaging’ – these are notebooks of working – ended only in 2021 and starting from a field observation of patients attending the Art Laboratories inside the Health Units : it is a study aimed at distress and emotional sides, a trace to observe what cannot be observed with a strongly calligraphic graphic language, as supported by an active career as engraver.

[2] ‘Pensieri lenti e veloci, D. Kahneman (2011) Mondadori Libri SpA, p.25 / As far as ‘Sistema 1’ and ‘Sistema 2’ D. Kahneman cited ‘Individual Differences in Reasoning. Implications for the Rationality Debate’, by K. Stanovich and R. West in ‘Behavioral and Brain Sciences’, 23, 2000.

[3] ‘Pensieri lenti e veloci, D. Kahneman (2011) Mondadori Libri SpA, p.37

[4] ‘L’Io e l’Es’, S.Freud (1922) in ‘OSF – Vol. IX’ Bollati Boringhieri 2020, pgg.496-498

<An authorized performance in a not European square>

How do they get to the option of a ‘social standard’ to assent which silence is enough? Can we talk about a ‘society’ default ? With which prototypes and reference models ? Introduced and spread, how ?

“The system 1 is wonderful in a particular specialty : it automatically and effortlessly identifies the causal connections between events, sometimes even when the connection is spurious.”[1]

It’s difficult to acknowledge ‘automatism’ when the goal is individual, as it is in every human act : more understandable is to acknowledge an individual direction, which may be also very very fast – as it is in any intuitive synthesis which captures what is already within one’s mind – in coordinating and leading to their own goal a number of conscious and unconscious representations, and whose multiple capacity to spend itself maybe has already been experienced.

We’re interested then in what Kahneman[2] states, because his underlining “even when the connection is spurious” indicates that there’s some thinking able to start ‘non causal connections’ for one’s own intellective synthesis, and with a level of effectiveness that can be well assessed by the subject : and more, we’re interested in that ‘non causal’ because it directly and exclusively addresses to the subject of direction, without almost referring to one’s own ‘conscience’, which first of all checks – we know that – the access in social life.

Kahneman’ statement, while aknowledges and keeps only ‘the non spurious connections’, also points out the existence of a remnant of thinking which, even if latent to awareness, however is not absent because can stop that specific frame, escaped from the conscience, which opens to consider the construction of a crossroads not existing before.

Here it is that latency-not-absence interrogates and questions again the distinction – not at all granted, but    to a great extent by now used as a reference of social life too – between a ‘mnemonic self’ and an ‘experiential self’[3], opening then to the comprehension of why no memories are automatic, ever.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – November 26, 2022

[1] ‘Pensieri lenti e veloci’ (orig.: ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’), D. Kahneman (2011), Arnoldo Mondadori Editore SpA, p.146

[2] Daniel Kahneman (Tel Aviv, 1934) is a psychologist and professor emeritus at Princeton University, has been studying for years the decision-making processes together with Amos Tversky. In 2002 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics because he integrated the results of psychological research into the economic science, with special regard to the human judgement and to the theory of decisions in conditions of uncertainty.

[3] ‘Pensieri lenti e veloci’ (orig.: ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’), D. Kahneman (2011), Arnoldo Mondadori Editore SpA, p.508

“Such is the man of the Institution of the Object, whose uneconomic behaviour I describe according these three kinds of damage : 1) ceasing profit, 2) emerging damage, 3) non-emerging profit”.[1]

That a benefit passes into surplus value, makes that headword - introduced by Freud[2] - an inevitable crossroads of thinking : that is what I called ‘ceasing damage’[3].

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – October 21, 2022

Illustrazione originale di Gianni Russomando[4]

[1] Cited by : ‘Economia’, Giacomo B. Contri in ‘A chi non ha sarà tolto. Economia e psicopatologia’, by Giacomo B. Contri with Ambrogio Ballabio, Alberto Colombo, Raffaella Colombo, Maria Delia Contri, Luca Flabbi, Glauco Maria Genga, Maria Gabriella Pediconi – ebook SIC Edizioni Collana ‘Il pensiero di natura’ (2010) Reference book for the Course of ‘Studium Cartello’ 2010-2011 ‘La perversione al bivio’. 

[2] ‘Aldilà del principio di piacere’, S. Freud (1920) ‘Bollati e Boringhieri’ Vol.9 p.242

[3]  https://www.tutorsalus.net/index.php/it/events/233-born-in-a-used-frame-costantino-nivola-fra-salvatore-fancello-e-le-corbusier

[4] Gianni Russomando, biographical note : “I was born in Vercelli in 1956, graduated at the ‘Istituto di Belle Arti’ of Vercelli, I describe me as an ‘amanuense’ (that is a Middle Ages painter), and a long way from exhibitions, competitions and shows.” 

Mazurka, couple dance born as a community dance from Poland, has a ‘tempo’ of three four with a rythmic accent which, falling on 2nd time of three four musical fraction, gets the typical trot step of well trained horses : that allows therefore a large number of vaults to the dancers, which can so remain into a set of choreographic figures. A high rewrite, by famous musicians allowed a large diffusion of it in XIX century. Here : Claude Debussy (1880) ‘Danse bohemienne’.

“You can feel my rush in coming out from so many cautions I’ve been bringing back psychoanalysts to their less debatable certainties.”[1]

The needs of a scientific nature more and more pressing, the multiplying of his own contemporaries, ambitious of stands, the loving slownesses of sorrowful psychopathologies : what then was pressing Jacques Lacan when he called ‘many’ the ‘cautions’ which until that moment he obeyed ?

“… this inspiration came to me : that when on the way of Freud you see the unusual getting lively of an allegorical figure, almost trembling in a new skin it dresses with the one coming out from the well, I was giving her a voice.”[2] Unconscious however is no longer un-conscious when becomes representation, no longer a dark ‘well’ : and ‘the new skin’ with which the ‘bareness’ ‘is dressing herself’ offers a verdict to the defence.

That ‘reduction’ indeed, as Lacan cried, and “sometimes so long to be fulfilled, but ever crucial, for the birth of a science”[3] it is not for the science of thinking, because that reduction is already ‘removal’ and does subtract, rather than bearing fruit the drive start-up.

Hence the ‘experience’, “what Descartes opens and that is named ‘cogito’ …défilé of the rejection of any knowledge, but at the same time pretends to establish for the subject some sort of splashdown in the being, which we believe is the subject of the science” does confirm that the Cartesian ‘cogito ergo sum’ is individual and then legal, not at all an objective ‘cause’ and “…paradox of an imperative urging me to to undertake my own causality.”[4]

If anything, an imperative press the key, and whom with it but without any transport : the urge[5] which Freud ascribed to the drive is not an imperative indeed, it is a ‘benefit’[6].

“Say the subject on whom we operate in psychoanalysis cannot be than the subject of science, maybe seems a paradox… For our position as a subject we are always responsible. You can call that, everywhere you like, terrorism.”[7]

Right here, however, Freud distances himself from Lacan theory, as psychoanalysis doesn’t ‘operate on a subject’, but by the same subject is required in favour of an individual competence and better defence : ‘rushly’, then, is marching in place who is occupying that place without any logic, because not an “epistemological drive”[8] was the one discovered by Freud : but Lacan does insist that “any attempt, or temptation, when the current theory is ceaselessly recidivous in further emboding a subject, is wandering – always prolific in mistakes and as such guilty.”[9]

Lacan never explained why he didn’t appreciate when Freud wrote : “… Everything which has been removed will remain unconscious; however it is our intention to clarify from the beginning that what has been removed doesn’t exhaust the whole of unconscious. The unconscious has a larger extension; what has been removed is a part of unconscious. How can we get to know the unconscious ? Naturally we know the unconscious only in a conscious form, after a transformation or translation in something conscious. Psychoanalytical work makes us experiment every day that such a translation is possibile.” [10]          

For “the birth of a science”[11], Lacan quickens, “some reduction needs… which constitutes its proper object… A position of any science justifying its radical change in the ‘tempo’ of its progress …”[12] : and that ‘tempo’ – which Lacan keeps in Italian in his original document – is, as a cut and reduction, the music ‘tempo’ of any neverending psychopathology which comes back and begins again at a rythmic consolation.

At the crossroads with the individual competence and with an analytical work as proposed by Freud, there is the ‘time’ – unavoidable indeed – of a ‘psychic occurrence’[13] that becomes the goal, the aim and the satisfaction of whom has been working.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio - June 26, 2022

[1] ‘La scienza e la verità. Lezione di apertura del Seminario 1965-1966’ in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri – Bibliot. Einaudi (2002) Vol. II, p.862

[2] Ivi p.871

[3] Ivi p.859

[4] Ivi p.869

[5] ‘Pulsioni e loro destini’, S. Freud (1915) – Bibliot. Bollati Boringhieri (2011)

[6] ‘Aldilà del principio di piacere’, S. Freud (1920) OSF Bollati Boringhieri Vol. IX, p.242

[7]  ‘La scienza e la verità. Lezione di apertura del Seminario 1965-1966’ in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri – Bibliot. Einaudi (2002) Vol. II, p.863

[8] Ivi, p.873

[9]  Ivi, p.863

[10] Here cited from the ‘Premise’ to the essay ‘The unconscious’, in “Gesammelte Werke” published by Freud in 1915 / Bibliot. Bollati Boringhieri (2011), p.69

[11] ‘La scienza e la verità. Lezione di apertura del Seminario 1965-1966 ’ in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’, a cura di Giacomo B. Contri – Bibliot. Einaudi (2002) Vol. II, p.859.

[12] Ivi p.859-860

[13] ‘Precisazioni sui due principi dell’accadere psichico, S.Freud (1911) in OSF Vol.VI Bollati Boringhieri