Thinking as a partner

‘Caravaggio Napoli’ was the exposition in Naples gone at ‘Museo di Capodimonte’ April 12 – July 14, 2019) Picture ref.: 0_5516185_125008.jpg

‘Caravaggio’[1] is already famous when he comes in Naples September 1606, notwithstanding his arrival from Rome was rather escaping from justice[2].

As an international city, not just a town, Naples receives Caravaggio as a honour, and notable families soon commission to him important paintings, mainly for churches in central streets and squares.

‘Flagellazione’ is a frequent item in that Culture : ‘Flagellazione of Christ’ has been commissioned to Caravaggio by the judge Tommaso de’ Franchis, for S.Domenico Maggiore church[3]. And he again did surprise his public as roughly distancing by their Culture – he however knew in depth, and by which he had been educated for years – as this painting was really an ‘opera prima’ in Europe : ‘Flagellazione’ could divide infact any prevous flemish influence which insisted, notwithstanding the Council in Trento (1545-1563), on a ‘not human’ Christ, as sublimated and separated between a suffering body and a peaceful face.

This Christ (1607) is not distancing a millimeter from the real man of well known Gospels, he neither surrenders nor rebel to the people envy, who hate any involuntary light of his body : and everything is descripted in a suffering but not beggaring face, he well know the real life.

And capital are also the two persecutors, older infact and justified in their poor ‘jouissance’[4], exhausted indeed because of the following, unuseful at allo, torments and death.

Really is in that ‘before the martyrdom’, the wisdom Caravaggio did choose, the right time in which something can still light the perfect virility of a young, strong body of a man : so that we have here an excellent, more than faithful painter, opposing the catching smiling flemish fashion that submits to sin and to the eresy.

‘Umbra mentis’ does condemn the two persecutors, even favoured by an obscurity able to sweep away any reason and right mind, and that is only due to their geometrical position of common gestures : the non ingenuous human unvoluntarity is making his - or her, when a woman – innocence and cannot do but come up to the sunlight.

Neither will nor resiliency did lead Christ up to this point : he isn’t a stupid man at all – Caravaggio tells to us with an astonishing competence and without any emotion. Just a few paintings can so clearly express the human bless or the human evil.

This wasn’t a rush work for the author, ‘di getto’ as we say in italian, not usual for his own painter maturity, through a direct incision with the brush point on linen[5].  Those, as we technically name any painting cover[6], show a patient industriousness in Caravaggio.

On this wondering but profitable safeguard which Christ get into himself, Freud was wondering for a long time, as he treated a number of suffering patients by longlasting raves and visions : just a few years after editing in 1910 the ‘Schreber Case’, which he defined a paranoia case rather than dementia[7], Freud briefly had a dense correspondence with the american embassador William C.Bullit[8] - who was asking him for a comment on peaceful policy of U.S.A. president, Thomas W. Wilson, while he worked at the ‘Versailles Treaty’ (1919) – that both the acceptance of reality and its awareness are indispensable to avoid any madness.

With his lucid, revolutionary but not rebel interpretation, so long preceeding psychoanalitic discoveries, Caravaggio points then to an obscure, lying frivolity as a real responsible for criminality, and even for the most hateful crimes.

                      Marina Bilotta Membretti, Cernusco sul Naviglio March 27, 2021

[1] Michelangelo Merisi, said ‘The Caravaggio’ – place between Milan and Bergamo from which his parents came – was born in Milan in 1571; he died in  1610, when coming back to Rome.

[2] When fighting in town, in 1606, Caravaggio killed his adversary : after that last murder he was condemned to death.

[3] S.Domenico Maggiore is a very important cathedral in aples, where S.Tommaso D’Aquino lived and still remain his traces : ‘Flagellazione di Cristo’ was then transferred to Museo of Capodimonte, where nowadays it is.

[4] ‘Jouissance’ is a common term in French language, but was very often used by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to indicate ‘poverty’, also shown by unconscious.

[5] ‘Burying of saint Lucia’, Siracusa-Sicily (1608) – town where Caravaggio arrived from Malta – it is a specific painting by Caravaggio as the the drawing preceeding the oil colour was directly engraved on linen.

[6] On linen are evident the traces of a human then covered.

[7] “Schreber personality opposed a strong resistance to an imagination - ‘omosexual, passive which chose as a subject the medician himself’ (note by redactor) – and the and the defensive following struggle, among different shapes it could have assumed, we don’t really know why, the persecution deliry… The persecutor is separated, if we see better, between the medician Flechsig and God; then Flechsig has been separated in two different persons… This i very common situation in paranoia.”, ‘Osservazioni psicoanalitiche su un caso di paranoia descritto autobiograficamente. Caso clinico del presidente Schreber’, Sigmund Freud (1910) in ‘OSF. Vol.VI’ Bollati Boringhieri editore Srl (2012), pp.374-376.

[8] “…This too much enlarging of Super-Io is not so rare, indeed : psychoanalysis can confirm that is a quite normal, not constant, psychic situation when father is identified with God. But when a son identifies himself with his father and father with godness, leading even his own imagination to Super-Io, then he feel as godness is really into himself and that he can really become as godness. Everything he does must be right, as godness did. In some persons, the quantity of libido he or she puts into this imagination is so large that they can’t any more accept the reality when in contraddition with their fantasy. At the end they go to a lunatic-asylum. However, if a human has a Super-Io like this but he can keep an acceptation of real life and he - or she - have talent, then they can do something important in the world…”, pp.44-45 ‘Sigmund Freud. Manoscritto 1931 inedito in edizione critica’, by Manfred Hinz e Roberto Righi – transl. by Stefano Franchini (2015) ‘lacasa USHER’/ ‘VoLo publisher srl’.

“Here is the reason why when your saying: ‘I don’t want to know any more about’ is ok for you that you can peacefully take a distance - if you are my analyzers - from your own analytical work.

And I can say that, even if someone doesn’t agree, my position of analyst is not absolutely prejudiced by what I’m doing, here and now.”

With some evidence that is the same position of Freud.

                                                  Marina Bilotta Membretti, Cernusco sul Naviglio March 8, 2021

[1] The cited paragraph is from “Jacques Lacan. Il seminario – Libro XX. Ancora (1972-1973)”, authorized by Jacques-Alain Miller, Italian edition by Antonio Di Ciaccia. Einaudi Piccola Biblioteca (2011), pag.3

‘Dora’ was less than eighteen in 1898[1] when his father – worried about her daughter sudden being moody, and also annoyed by her being in strong and unexplainable opposition to him - decided to call doctor Sigmund Freud who was living and working in Wien and about whom they knew some successful among patients of the incoming psychoanalytical method.

‘The Case of Dora – Fragment of an hysteria case’ was edited by Freud only in 1905, more than four years after the conclusion of that Case and without any reference to the young woman whose father asked and financed the therapy : the text refers without resistance how Freud decided to work in defense of the young patient, realizing she was the principal.

The father of ‘Dora’ pretended the daughter would become quiet and obedient and at first Freud accepted that but, as far as the analytical work went on, he began to seriously consider what her patient was asking for :  and he realized also that ‘Dora’ was diligent also about the rules in analytical work. Defending ‘Dora’ became then the real goal of the so named ‘psychoanalysis’, i.e. a respectful work between the two, patient and analyst : that professional position Freud was having did show a cross-road in the care of neurosis as the women were generally lead by husbands or fathers due to their not acceptable behaviours among people.

Freud realized that the way ‘Dora’ was leading herself would be enough to justify her defence – also towards her father as an external principal – and up to a hopeful recovery.

Publishing the Case was a formal step as regard as the analytical profession and towards Freud colleagues : in that Case you can see how neurosis make poor any individual defence, also worning out good chances in favour of someone.

It seems so suitable indee the title “The client” of a well known novel by John Grisham where Mark, eleven, decides to get to a lawyer on his own : he was present  - together his eight year brother – at a suicide which, when trying to foil, that got the boy into the violence of the man and his own previous crimes not be found out.

Mark realizes very soon – while calling Police to indicate the corpse and also when being informally  interrogated – that his defense can’t stand up. And the lawyer which seemed favourable when Mark was appointing her with some ingenuousness, will also be affordable ? But the boy hadn’t so much time.

Mark still doesn’t know that his position won’t meet the favour of Law : a witness infact, notwithstanding he is a minor and evidently exposed to reprisals,  can be easily condemned as ‘justice obstacling’[2] if he doesn’t say everything he knows about an investigation in progress.

“There was something absolutely not right in a Court system where a kid could be lead in a Law court, with lawyers quarreling while the judge observed them as an arbiter, among a number of laws, penal code paragraphs, sentences and legal uncomprehensible words, and finally the same kid had to know what was happening. It was irrimediably unfair and not at all acceptable.”[3]

That ‘unfairity’ has been correctly perceived by Mark, then : that is the same for any human ‘capable of understanding’.

However, being ‘capable of understanding’ is only a first access when structuring a defence where ‘capable of willing’ can honoraubly be linked, when that capability has come up down, lost or otherwise absconding, in a man, or a woman.

                                    Marina Bilotta Membretti, Cernusco sul Naviglio February 27, 2021

[1] ‘Il Caso di Dora – Frammento di un’analisi d’isteria’, S.Freud (1901) in “Sigmund Freud. Isteria e angoscia. Il Caso di Dora e altri scritti”, Edizione integrale di riferimento – Introd. by Cesare L. Musatti, Bollati Boringhieri editore (2014)

[2] p. 238, “Il cliente”, John Grisham (1993) – Mondadori editore (2016).

[3] pp. 285-286 “Il cliente”, John Grisham (1993) – Mondadori editore (2016).

Books to work on 2.

Does need more heart to conquest the space or the classmate girl ?

It isn’t a nonsense item nowadays when the sex difference is bending to a taboo : but, if also a conquest can begin by curiosity, is the curiosity itself to be charged with in all the human history and nowadays too.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant[2], who raised bureaucracies and organizations to government itself, was stumbling in curiosity as an obstacle, even when profitable but irremediably and only individual, so that not able to be systematized; but he was, on the opposite, obliged - while when building a theory - to generalize what humans cannot like, or choose. In any social field by now, those theories seem to be unproductive indeed, as they have been drawn out ‘tout court’ from physical sciences.

How then any ambition begins, as it is also an area (‘ambito’, in Italian language – n.b.e.) which usually refers to something exceeding one’s own  daily life ? Each one of us can find convenient the sources of his - or her - own ambition, also when connected to a catchable ‘taking a distance’, even from the Earth and from its colourful pedagogies : but don’t let us laugh too easily, just because we can represent that.

Surely, not so fit to be generalized would be the ambitions which lead a youngman Paolo Nespoli – here the leading character of a fantastic space mission and also, at the actual age of sixtythree years, the oldest space man in the ‘European Space Agency’/ E.S.A. – to get to, in 1988, a Bachelor of Science in ‘Aerospace Engineering’ at Polytechnic University of New York, a Master of Science in ‘Aeronautics and Astronautics’, up to a degree as ‘Mechanical Engineer’ at Florence University (Italy). Between 2006 and 2015 Paolo Nespoli has already been carrying out three space mission, more than dealing with training for E.S.A.

It is challenging, time by time, to undergo the trials required by any space mission, notwithstanding the space men are aware of : and a very long and accurate training is demanded to them, but the outcomes of which are logically not predictable[3]. However, both challenges and goals which can be involved by a conquest of space are already opening to never before experienced alliances among Countries which were competitors, both from an economic and political point of view.

“C’è spazio per tutti” is finally a call to nourish one’s own ambitions, by working on, and even hard : but it is also a warning to whom those ambitions would like to censor, or even to ‘systematize’, that is to banalize their goal.

                                                          Marina Bilotta Membretti - Cernusco sul Naviglio February 3, 2021

[1] “C’è spazio per tutti”, is a graphic novel by Leo Ortolani (2017), ‘Panini Comics’/ Panini SpA in cooperation with E.S.A. European and Italian Space Agencies : with the contribution of Paolo Nespoli, engineer and spaceman for ‘European Space Agency’ and ‘Rat Man’, character created by Leo Ortolani and leading part in many of his stories. Leo Ortolani is born in Pisa in 1967, studied Geology at Parma University, town where he is also living and working : he began at ‘Lucca Comics 1990’ winning as the best scriptwriter. Paolo Nespoli i salso the author of ‘Dall’alto i problemi sembrano più piccoli’ (2012), ‘Mondadori’.

[2] Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the greatest philosopher of ’Enlightenment’, wrote – among many other works - ‘Critic of pure reason’ (1787) and ‘Critic of practical reason’ (1788).

[3] Paolo Nespoli remembers on his Facebook page the ‘Challenger’ shuttle tragedy in 1986 when seven spacemen died : he himself flew as a training on that selected but unreliable engine. Notwithstanding heavy responsibilities after the tragedy, Nespoli says that one’s own ambitions support an individual wish to go beyond one’s own limits, and that is also a benefit to human race : “paving the way” is exactly that, he recently remembered. In “C’è spazio per tutti” Leo Ortolani points, one by one, the animals, as not conscious about their mission and preceeding spacemen, but sacrificing themselves as the first space passengers.