These days I have been very impressed by the interviews that writer Paolo Cognetti has given to Repubblica and Corriere della Sera, in which he talks about the tso he suffered because of a “severe depression that developed into a bipolar syndrome with manic phases.”
The things he says are emotional, here I quote only a few passages but I suggest you read the full interviews.
He agreed to these interviews “to say publicly that nervous illnesses no longer have to be a shame to hide and that rising up begins by accepting who you really are.”
“I have been sedated: since the beginning of December, because of medication, I have done nothing but sleep.”
“…In the hospital doctors you have to obey. They wake you up at 6 a.m. and force you to drink two big glasses of tranquilizers right away. You’re alive, but it’s like you’re dead. I would have tried to get well by going up into the mountains instead, or by going on a trip. From the psychiatric ward of a hospital you get out only if you say and do exactly what those treating you expect.”
After these publications there was an intense debate about the inhumanity of compulsory health treatment.
But the thing that struck me most was to hear again, even from estimable people like Francesco Merlo, the usual story, the banner of the left, that “freedom is therapeutic.” It would come to me to say something trite and obvious, that it is the cure that is therapeutic. Then perhaps here we need to understand the meaning of this two words, freedom and cure.
“I know that I fell in love with a woman and for her, after 12 years, I left my partner. In order not to abandon those who have been close to me for a long time, I also ended the new relationship. One should never give up on love, which does not return.”
“to leave the partner I had been with for 12 years took all my courage and also a lot of alcohol. I lived as a hardcore alcoholic: from spiked coffee at 8 a.m. to the last whiskey at 1 a.m., I spent all day drinking until I kicked myself out of the house alone.”
What freedom is there in these words? I would say none. Yet there was no external impediment, no policeman forcing Cognetti to stay with his partner, no one preventing him from parting with her, no one forcing him to feel terribly guilty about finding a new love. Then perhaps we can agree on “freedom is therapeutic” if by freedom we also and especially mean an inner freedom, one that frees us from internal prohibitions, from an inner prison. But then more than freedom we should talk about sanity. And here we open up another good discussion that leads us to try to define the other word, cure.
You always hear that artists are all a little crazy. Of course, to be an artist one has to be in touch with one’s irrational inner world, otherwise one is not transmitting anything, and in the irrational there can lurk so many pitfalls
And to come out of it, two paths open up. One is the well-known one, which is so fashionable, that of using techniques to keep these rages, anxieties, guilt, these emptinesses under control by going in the direction of a containment not to say a suffocation of these things, basically ending up in a rational control of the boiling pot that leads straight to normality, therapies that basically act as “talking” psychotropic drugs. All of which the artist (but I hope every human being) shuns like the plague because it would mean the end of his creativity and basically his identity.
The other way is what I consider to be the real cure, less practiced, longer and more complex, which is to address those internal prohibitions, those hidden voids, those unconscious annihilations, which prevent our deep identity from being free. It is not easy, we need a solid theory otherwise we mess up.
A crucial theme emerges in the interviews, that of depression, the real one, the ugly and dangerous one, which has nothing to do with sadness. It is the loss of affection, the anaffectivity. Cognetti tells us about it as only he knows how: “It happened that my eyes changed look. Already a year ago I discovered myself depressed. For me a forest became just a forest again, a stream just a stream, even a tree no longer told me anything. Silence descended in the heart: illness is being able to see only the apparent side of reality” ”…I stayed in my cabin looking at the ceiling, someone tried to drag me out, but I no longer cared about anything, there was no more love either for my mother and father who were there to take care of me, or for my dog Lucky: my heart had dried up. “… in the depression I no longer felt anything,…. At that time I experienced the cancellation of love.”
It was precisely of the annulment drive that I mentioned something a while ago on this blog. To reiterate, if one does not know and deal with these dynamics, which are unconscious, one cannot speak of a cure.
Forgive me the digression but reading the poignant sentence:“ the disease is being able to see only the apparent side of reality” it came to me to reply to General Vannacci: those who do not see that Egonu is black, must go to the ophthalmologist but those who only see that Egonu is black, must go to the psychiatrist!
I think that never before has the role of artists been as crucial as it is now, and we need to help them not to get sick without becoming normal. And perhaps it would serve our left-wing politicians as well to rediscover the ability to dream, to see that a tree is not just a tree, the ability to imagine a different world not giving a damn about the polls that tell us only what appears, remembering that “sickness is being able to see only the apparent side of reality.”
Happy New Year!
Marco Michelini
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