“Why do men harm women?“
“In my view, it’s not a question of patriarchy. Let’s leave that aside. In my view, it’s a sickness. At this point, it’s a sickness. At this point, it’s definitely a sickness“.
Good morning, everyone. I wanted to start with the wonderful Ornella Vanoni because she says things I wholeheartedly agree with. Obviously, I don’t mean to say that patriarchy doesn’t exist – far from it. Unfortunately, we are still immersed in a male-dominated society. Just think that until 1981 there was such a thing as an ‘honour killing’, and until 1996 rape was considered a crime against morality. So perhaps we should consider that these femicides are nothing more than the tip of the iceberg of daily violence – violence that may not be physical, but is certainly psychological, involving the denial and undervaluing of women.
Let’s turn to these femicides. If you think about it, these murders follow a pattern. In the vast majority of cases, there is a relationship, then the woman decides for some reason to leave, to seek a different fulfilment for herself, away from her partner, and at that point the boyfriend or husband kills her. And then we very often see that after committing the murder, the boyfriend or husband goes to the pub with his friends, goes to watch the match as if nothing had happened. So much so that I have followed Dr Bruzzone, a criminologist who has acted as a consultant on many of these cases, as she has been campaigning fiercely for the harshest possible sentences because these people feel no guilt, so that they might eventually come to realise it. The point is that perhaps we need to understand the reality of these people a little more deeply, because I believe that you could give them two life sentences, but they still wouldn’t feel any guilt. This opens up a major debate because these murderers are diagnosed with personality disorders, mostly of the narcissistic type, but I believe this diagnosis does not tell the whole truth; instead, I think we are witnessing a psychotic breakdown in these murderers. Unfortunately, we still cannot conceive of a person whose conscience is clear, whose behaviour functions perfectly, and who is deeply ill. This seems to be something we still cannot grasp. And why? Because we must take a step forward and realise that the major problem here is that the conscience is clear, but everything concerning non-conscious thought—the so-called unconscious—does not function at all.
The illness lies there, and if it lies there, we are obliged to draw on the theory of the psychiatrist Massimo Fagioli, who for decades has devoted himself to research into the unconscious.
At this point, let us try to start afresh and see what the situation is regarding healthy falling in love between two individuals. Because here the insight is enormous, it is extremely interesting, and what Fagioli tells us is that in falling in love, in seeing the other as different from oneself, the entire first year of life is set in motion again—that year in which there was no consciousness, no clear vision yet, a whole world made up of images in this profound relationship with one’s mother, a fantasy world that we naturally forget but which is reactivated when we see the woman we love; in seeing this woman, these vague memories are stirred, causing us to fall in love, and so we see in her something we hold within ourselves and which, in some way, comes to represent us.
Clearly we are talking about true falling in love, the kind that is unfortunately often downplayed, called a teenage crush; I believe, however, that it is something extremely important, that first falling in love which, as they say, one should never forget precisely for this reason. So there is something internal that is seen, that is activated, that is stirred by the woman. So something within me, unknown to me, is stirred, and the other person sets it in motion again. What happens instead? Actually no, perhaps we should mention one more thing that happens in many relationships because that is what life is like: that then the woman leaves, the beloved leaves, the relationship ends and gives rise to a perfectly natural sadness, an attempt to process this whole situation, to rediscover within ourselves those things we had seen in others, to go to the pub with friends this time to console ourselves over this separation, and then at that point we are ready to fall in love all over again with the same intensity as the first time, perhaps even more so. It must be said that things don’t always go this way, mind you, but it would be desirable if they did.
Instead, with these people, these murderers, we must consider that their first year of life was completely destroyed, largely because they had a completely unemotional mother who destroyed their first year of life, made up of fantasy and imagery—precisely what we were saying earlier. In their relationship with women, it is as if they see outside themselves something they have lost and are trying to reclaim; yet it is a relationship, so to speak, where everything is external to the self, not corresponding to an internal movement. So much so that in these situations we do not speak in the slightest of falling in love. Falling in love has nothing to do with it. Here there is a dynamic of possession. One must hold onto that image outside oneself through a relationship that Fagioli defines not even as identification but as a mirror relationship, that is, the woman becomes an object; she must be there because that would be my inner image, and if I lose that, I go completely mad because I completely lose my fantasy, and so on.
Here, yes, clearly we find, shall we say, the so-called personality disorder because that is what happens on a behavioural level, and therefore a more superficial one, and it is how these ‘tactics’, so to speak, are put into action to keep the other person close to oneself. And the narcissist does this by placing himself at the centre of attention, indeed by becoming the object of the woman’s admiration; as long as it holds up, that’s how it is, but it is a mirror relationship: the other person must be there.
Or, with a dynamic that appears opposite but has an identical underlying essence, this control manifests itself through concern, excessive attention, constantly worrying, being extremely attentive, and so on. But the fundamental point is that the other person, now effectively reduced to an object, must stay there because if they leave, he goes mad. Think back to that quote by Cognetti that struck me so deeply: ‘The illness is being able to see only the apparent side of reality’. There you have it, he understood everything. That is the illness.
At this point the woman leaves and he kills her because he holds her responsible for his own madness, when in fact the one responsible should be his mother. But this is what happens, which is why these people, despite behaving normally and having a perfectly functioning conscience, are completely mad. This is what we must understand.
Then, of course, we could open up a whole new chapter and ask ourselves: why do women get involved in relationships of this kind? But if anything, we’ll look at that another time. Goodbye.
Marco Michelini
Leave a Reply