Marco Michelini

I was reading again the article published on this blog titled Freedom to undress, not to be, written by some students of a second class of the Grassi High School in Latina, a fresh and intelligent testimony that brings out the beauty of these young people who try not to be confused by the dominant culture proposed by the media and beyond, and offer us a reflection on what freedom actually is for a woman and how much the mass communication, which conveys a (sadly) common thought, is subtly and invisibly (or not even too invisibly) violent in proposing woman as a “decoration,” as an accessory of the program of the day, to be admired in her perfection (because woe betide not to be perfect).

Today I would like to talk about a very frequent topic in the psychotherapy of adolescents. It is not, of course, a question here of dealing with everything relating to depression, but of seeing something that I think is extremely important.

A mother visits her son in a mental institution. Glad to see her, he put his arm around her shoulders and she stiffened. He retracted his arm and his mother asked him, “Don’t you love me anymore?” The boy blushed and the mother said, “dear you should not feel so easily embarrassed and afraid of your feelings!” The patient could not stay with his mother but a few minutes and after her leaving, he assaulted a janitor and was put in the cold bath.

I was re-reading today Maria Pranzo’s beautiful letter published on this blog entitled “a woman premier.” An unfortunately predictive letter… after all, there was no doubt that it was, to quote a very famous movie, the Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

This year after the summer the sea or the mountain, returned to our cities to expect we found the countryside… It was not so much the usual rhetoric or slogans that struck me as the use of a few words that I was struck by, rather reluctantly following debates and talk shows, perhaps motivated by the obligation to try to think.

August is a strange month: there is the sun, the beautiful weather and then suddenly a storm with hail that lowers the temperature by several degrees makes you think you are in winter. Psychiatrists would call it bipolar. Yes, in fact, they think that bipolar disorder is due to a biological clock that from time to time changes and makes good weather or bad weather or depression or excitement.

Once upon a time, not too long ago, a little less than fifty years ago, there was a civilized and secular society, where after years and years of fighting to defend women’s rights there was finally room for debate on great principles and the state, secular (or at least trying to be), finally allowed freedom of choice on issues such as divorce and abortion. All this is still there. In Italy. At the moment.

I was thinking about the meeting of June 17, about the themes and questions that the students of Grassi High School in Latina proposed in the video and I thought that these kids are not looking for a freedom tout court, they want to “rip the edges wrong” but they are not so much looking for freedom as for self-realization. In fact, they stress the need to feel good, the need to overcome their problems that they recognize with honesty and cleanliness: “The pandemic was needed to make us understand how much we were sick!” We are therefore far from the thought of ’68 in which there was a claim of freedom per se as main purpose worrying if this freedom was supported by a health. Something from 1968 seems to echo in the current debate on sexuality where, in my opinion, there is a huge confusion between the sacrosanct civil rights and the research on mental health.

” You are unable to split up even from your cat.”. That’s what my therapist told me, a million years ago now. And it was bloody true. Over time then luckily (luck is a figure of speech, I worked my butt off to put it in French) step by step some decent separation I made. At least from the cat yes, I have successfully separated. I’m proud of it.

Seriously, these days I’ve been thinking about how people split up.