In the sentence “The sense of guilt from success”
there seems to be an apparent contradiction. After all, a society in which, the
social rule of a presentation is no longer “Hallo,
I am Quirino Zangrilli, what is your name?” but “Hi, I’m Quirino: how much do you earn?”, does not seem to have
existed before now. In a society in which the individual has disappeared, his
history and his existential walk of life are no longer considered; his designer
clothes, the car he drives and the watch he wears are situated in pole position
in the categories of judgement of the social value; from an early age, the
sense of competition is drummed into you, thus it would seem strange that the
social achievement implies a continuous fight with a part of oneself that
perceives the success as a blame.
I would like to specify, however, that by “success” I
don’t intend to refer only to the economic and social achievements, but also to
the realisation of deep desires. I would like to say that our life is a kind of
Penelope’s shroud, which with hard work we weave and that despite ourselves, we
incessantly unthread.
The success is a difficult objective, above all in the
West: a research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
by Shigeiro Oishi from the University of Virginia, (a Japanese who emigrated to
the USA at the age of 23 and who was interested in finding the differences
between the two populations) studied the behaviour of 350 American, Japanese
and Korean students and observed that the Western people needed two positive
events (a compliment or a good mark) in order to “digest” a negative one. On
the contrary to their Asian colleagues to whom only one was sufficient. “It seems that the more a person in the West
finds himself living positive events – Oishi observes – the more he suffers the negative ones”. It’s as if a first class traveller suffers a
half hour delay by plane more than a traveller who travels in second class” he
explains. 1
What interests us is the fact that success seems to
put people in difficulty and forces them to a continuous feedback of expiation,
which in some cases can reach self-destruction. The history is full of precious
examples. Let’s look at the following phrase:
Ogn’uom di Ferruccio ha il core e la mano
I bimbi d’Italia si chiaman Balilla
Il suon d’ogni squilla
I vespri suonò (a verse of the Italian national anthem)
Only some Italians will have recognised the written
subject. But if we listen to the musical sequence of the Italian national
anthem, I think that ten out of ten Italians will recognise it instantly. But
who wrote the music? After all, I challenge the reader, unless he is an Opera
enthusiast to list the authors of the Libretto of “The Tosca” by Puccini, “The
Barber of Seville” by Gioacchino Rossini, “Cavalleria Rusticana” by Pietro
Mascagni, “Don Giovanni” by Amadeus Mozart and so on...
Since the world began, it is the composer of the music
who remains through history.
The composer of our national anthem is Michele Novaro
who was born on the 23rd of October 1818 in Genoa, where he studied
composition and singing. In 1847 he was in Turin under contract as second tenor
and choral director of Regio Theatre and Carignano Theatre. A Liberal
supporter, he offered his talent as a composer to the independence cause
writing tens of patriotic songs and organising performances to raise money
destined for the Garibaldian exploits.
Of an introverted and modest nature, he didn’t take
any advantages from his most famous anthem, not even after the Italian
unification. Once back in Genoa, between 1864 and 1865 he founded a Popular Choral
School to which he dedicated all his time and energy. He died poor on the 21st of October 1885 and his life was
marked by great financial difficulties and by health problems. 2
Here is the description, made by the Author himself,
of the moment in which he composed the music of the anthem:
“I know that I
cried, that I was agitated and I couldn't stay still. I sat at the harpsichord
with the lyrics of Goffredo on the music stand and I strummed, I killed that
poor instrument with my barking
fingers, with my eyes constantly on the anthem writing down melodic strains one
after the other but far a thousand miles from the idea that they could be
adequate for those words. I stood up unsatisfied with myself; I remained a
little longer in Valerio’s house, but always with those lyrics in front of my
eyes. I realised that there was no solution, I said goodbye and ran home.
There, without even taking off my hat, I threw myself at the pianoforte. The
motif I had strummed in Valerio’s house returned to my memory: I wrote it on a
piece of paper, the first I could find: in my agitation I spilt the oil lamp
over the harpsichord and, as a consequence, over the poor sheet of paper too;
This was the original draft of the anthem “Fratelli d’Italia”.
The Author
tells us that in the very act of its creation he almost set fire to the composition and to the instrument
that had played it! What’s more, the obvious fact that Novaro composed the music
impulsively cannot escape us, but in order to do it he had to be alone: afflicted
by the compulsion to failure, he could not show his capabilities even to the
smallest group of friends.
How many musicians of extraordinary talent live their
artistic lives in the shadows due to the impossibility of exhibiting
themselves?
And what should we say about the expiation that some
scientists have atoned to for
having undermined the religious and scientific references of their times? It is sufficient to quote the biography of the
Marquise Gabrielle Du Chatêlet, masterfully reconstructed by David Bodanis in
the enthralling work “E=mc2 A
biography of the world's most famous equation” 2 which I synthesise here
and I highly recommend the reading of.
Let’s take a look at Einstein’s famous equation that
we all know:
E= mc2
Let us concentrate on the only number present, the
square number, nowadays a term taken for granted but not in the middle of the
1700s...
In his work of popularisation of Newton’s theories,
Lavosier sustained consolidated theses: when colliding objects were analysed,
in those days, the only factor taken into consideration was the product of their mass multiplied by the
velocity or rather their mv1.
If a cannonball weighing 5 Kg travels at a velocity of
10 Km per hour, it has 50 units of energy.
But Gabrielle Émilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil,
Marquise du Châtelet, for our convenience Mme Du Chattel, had another hypothesis,
alternative to Newton’s theory, elaborated by the great philosopher Leibniz,
according to whom the factor to be taken into consideration was instead:
mv2
If a cannonball weighing 5 Kg travels at a velocity of
10 Km per hour, it has 5 x 102 or rather 500 units of energy:
quite a difference, don’t you
think?
Which of the two theses was correct?
Nowadays, we should be capable of distinguishing
science from religion but in the 1700s it was not so! If truth be known, it is
not so today either but for discretion’s sake, let’s leave it be! Newton
believed that verifying the validity of mv1 would have demonstrated the existence of God! Let’s imagine two weights of metal which collide
frontally. An instant before the
collision, a great quantity of mv1 was present in the universe: after the
impact, when by then the two weights were reduced to a shapeless mass of metal,
the two distinct components of the v1 had disappeared: they had annulled each other.
In Newton’s concept this meant that all the energy
possessed by the weights before the impact had disappeared, leaving a hole
somewhere outside of our visible universe. As collisions like this happen
incessantly, if it is true that we live inside an enormous clock, it is just as
true that such a mechanism needs to be continuously charged.
Using various geometrical abstract arguments, Leibniz
had faced the question about the existence of holes of energy in the universe,
hypothesised by the Newton theory.
He wrote: “According
to the doctrine (of Newton), God has to wind his clock every now and then
because otherwise it would stop working. It would seem that He wasn’t provident
enough to impress a perpetual motion in his clock”.
It resulted that considering the energy equal to mv2,
it was possible to get round this problem. Let’s imagine that the mv value of a
weight which travels towards west is 100 units of energy,
while the value of another weight, travelling in the opposite direction on the
collision route of the first, is also 100 units.
According to Newton, during the impact the two
energies should annul each other, whilst according to Leibniz, they should sum
together. When the two weights collide, all their energy continues to exist and
it is capable of projecting pieces
of metal into the air, heating them and usually causing a deafening noise.
In this vision of Leibniz, nothing is lost. The world
functions alone; there are no holes or leaks from which the energy could
accidentally escape, in a way that only a God would be capable of replacing it.
We are alone. By sheer hypothesis, as Bodanis acutely reminds us, we may have
needed God in the beginning, but no longer subsequently.
Emile Du Châtelet and her collaborators found the
decisive proof of Leibniz’s theory in Willem Jacob’s Gravesande’s experiments,
a Dutch researcher who had analysed the falling of various weights onto a clay
surface, putting into evidence that the formula
seemed to represent, for goodness knows which strange reason, a fundamental
rule in nature. The publications of the noblewoman created a great
impression. After the publication of her work, the Du Châtelet granted herself
a brief holiday but when she returned to Cirey, she hastily wrote a letter to a
friend:
3rd April 1749 The Castle of Cirey
I am
pregnant and you can imagine... how worried I am for my health and even for my
very own life... having to give birth at the age of 40.
At her age, a pregnant woman did not have many
possibilities of surviving. On the 1st September 1749 she wrote to
the Director of the Royal Library, letting him know that he would have found
the drafts of a work about Newton on which she was working, in the packet that
accompanied the letter.
Three days later, the birth began, from which the
woman survived only to die a week later due to an infection. The Du Châtelet immediately paid for her
own courage, as Icarus in his challenge against the Sun.
We can also associatively link this event to another
specular event: the
birth. The enormous decrease of perinatal and neonatal mortality, which modern
technological medicine has
reached, must not allow us to forget that for hundreds and thousands of years
the birth of human beings has been a truly key-event in the survival of the
mother or the unborn or for both.
Since time began, millions of women have died from
birth and millions of newborn have not survived. The first success of the human being is, therefore, the
birth but often it is associated to the pain, or sometimes, to the invalidity
of the person who has carried and nurtured us for nine months.
A heavy weight, that cannot be removed easily, burdens
the shoulders of the unfortunate, unknowing infants who have had a mother who
died giving birth or whose health was gravely compromised due to the birth.
Generally, we think that the situations; of progress,
of improvement, of realisations, of social expansion in a sentimental and human
way, cannot constitute a matter of interest in the analytic work. But we are
mistaken because, paradoxically, the final part of every psychoanalysis and the
essence of small pieces of work requested by the patients who have completed
(if it can be said) their analysis from a long time, are often motivated by an
intense sense of emptiness which the subject feels in conjunction with an
important situation of success. Targets reached, hard work completed, the
heights of carriers happily reached, the crowning of exhausting courtships,
desired births, it doesn’t matter
which situation of small or great triumph is experienced, this often determines
an intense sufferance, a cold and
empty sensation.
In another work, “The Seven Deadly Sins”, published in
this Review, I hypothesised that the seven sins are in reality only one, the
founding Sin of the human civilisation. The Parricide from which the relative
conducts of expiation and reparation derive.
But how does God react to the sins of his people?
Sealing a sacred deal with his chosen people: the Jews. And here we are truly
at the “casting out nines”!
The Brit Milah (literally “Covenant of Circumcision”), known in the Yiddish language as Bris (from the Hebrew Berit, “covenant”), is a religious ceremony within Judaism to welcome
infant Jewish boys into a covenant between God and the Children of Israel
through ritual circumcision performed by a mohel ("circumciser") in
the presence of family and friends, followed by a celebratory meal.
The interesting thing is that the Milah happens on the
eighth day of the child's life during the day: if by mistake the circumcision is made before the
eighth day or during the night, it is not valid and a drop of blood must be
taken after the baby has healed.
It cannot be ignored that eight is the number that
follows seven!
Not everybody knows that the Milah also includes the
Metzitza, that is the sucking of the blood from the wound, which in my eyes,
seems to be the inverted repetition of the totemic meal: you Child have killed
the Father and you have eaten him, I Father, will kill you “pars pro toto” and I will take back orally what has
been subtracted from me!
Furthermore, it is notorious how the elimination of
the foreskin diminishes the sexual pleasure noticeably; in the ritual act there
is also an attempt to defuse the drive toward the parricide that, as I have
illustrated in my article “The Seven Deadly Sins”, derives for the burning
desire towards the females of the family!
With regard to this, the enormous traumatic impact of
the circumcisions, performed at such a tender age in medical pathologies, such
as phimosis, paraphimosis and the short frenulum, should be underlined.
In the psychoanalytic treatment of a severe case
affected by a border-line pathology, it was possible to reconstruct the ego of
the patient’s mind, disgregated during the nights spent on a hospital ward for adults after a
frenectomy operation: the event was lived by the child as a true castration. So
much so that, during a sitting, availing myself of my medical prerogative, I
was obliged to ask the patient to show me his penis since he had been speaking
for about one hundred hours of its absence.
Fortunately, the organ was obviously in its place: it
had simply disappeared from his
mind.
And here I must insist again and again on the
importance of the personal experience, in other terms, on what we define as
phantasmatic or the set of phantasies, blended with affect and emotions, which
structure the psychic representation of the reality.
In the deep unconscious of children of either sex, the
male and female do not exist: a person endowed with a phallus and a castrated
person exist.
While with the vision of the opposite sex, the boy has
the concrete proof that the threats of castration from the father or his
substitutes are a real danger (his sister or his cousin were naughty boys whose
phallus has been eliminated), a fact which determines an enormous reinforcement
of the fear of castration, instead the little girl feels as though she is an
unfinished human being, she accuses her mother for her handicap and begins to
envy and desire to have a phallus. These existential proto-experiences print the clichés
upon which the entire existence of the human beings will be based.
The strong desire that the child has for his mother,
pushes him to challenge a person who is 4 or 5 times his size and endowed with an huge phallus: these
proportions will be his unit of measurement for his entire sentimental and
sexual life.
The last siblings, especially if born at a distance of
years from the older brothers, will conserve an inferiority vicissitude,
difficult to re-dimension.
They find themselves contending the oedipus object
against true cyclopses: the father and the brothers.
I do not use this term by chance: the Cyclops is the
actual phallic representation, which is guarding the cave!
And in fact it is necessary to become a “Mr. Nobody”
to escape their attention!
The little girl will conserve in her depth a sense of
inferiority towards the male, difficult to overcome. It is for this reason that
female professionals, craftswomen and female scientists who have nothing to
envy their male colleagues, often have an inexplicable fear towards them and an
over-evaluation of the male.
I know of female colleagues, who have an absolute
professional and scientific value, but conserve an inexplicable and irrational high consideration for some
mediocre colleagues.
The only solution possible for children tormented by
the invincible anguish of the imminent castration is the self-castration.
The unconscious sense is: I will do it myself, so I
won’t kill myself and it won’t hurt as much.
I won’t place myself in his hands.
The result is that classic self-destructive behaviour
which feeds a large part of the fate neurosis, characterised by a continuous
behaviour of renunciation and self-punishment.
The obtainment of success, the unconscious killing of
one’s own Father, automatically implies the dissolution of the obstacle, of the
rival and of the persecutor (whichever form it had taken previously) The
elimination of the limits, even if it is often accompanied by a comfortable sense
of freedom, enormously dilates the confines of the human being, increasing the
perception of the universal Void and amplifying his anguish.
If the analysed is not able to metabolise the impact
with the Unlimited, which implies the contemporaneous feeling of his complete
individual worthlessness, he often puts
into act attempts, sustained by the compulsion to repeat, to put into
act again persecutory situations of anchorage
and binding. It is obvious that, as the analysis proceeds, the game becomes ever
more evident and therefore less practicable.
The social affirmation implies a continuous fight with
a part of oneself that perceives success as a blame and pushes one to put into
act dangerous behaviour of punitive self-castration.
Notes:
1 Suh, E., Diener, E., Oishi, S., & Triandis, H. C. (1998). The shifting basis of life satisfaction judgments across cultures: Emotions versus norms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 482-493. 2 David Bodanis, E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation, Walker & Company, October 2005,
It is sufficient to quote the biography of the
Marquise Gabrielle Du Chatêlet, masterfully reconstructed by David Bodanis in
the enthralling work “E=mc2 A
biography of the world's most famous equation” 
At her age, a pregnant woman did not have many
possibilities of surviving. On the 1st September 1749 she wrote to
the Director of the Royal Library, letting him know that he would have found
the drafts of a work about Newton on which she was working, in the packet that
accompanied the letter.
These existential proto-experiences print the clichés
upon which the entire existence of the human beings will be based.
