Just two lines on a topic that has been addressed on this blog so many times. In fact, I return to the increasingly frequent episodes in which heinous murders occur but the perpetrator of these murders is a completely normal person, not delusional, not hallucinating, from a good family, always courteous to neighbors, in short, the classic decent person. We have seen thousands of such situations, they happen again and again. Just to name a few of those that have happened in the last period: “I killed her to pass the time,” the two boys who kill their peer and then go for a beer at the beach, the lady who puts her newborn babies in the ground and then continues to live normally as if nothing happened.
Although these situations occur all the time and are becoming more and more frequent, they are talked about as if each time was the first time, people are left appalled and bewildered by something absolutely incomprehensible. Then one looks for motive, for accomplices, but what precisely is dismissed out of hand is that it could be mental illness. The latter is often seen as a cleverness adopted by lawyers to exonerate their client.
Among insiders, everyone knows that the only one who has managed to talk about these things clearly and scientifically is the psychiatrist Massimo Fagioli with the discovery of the annulment drive, but fellow psychiatrists have always had great difficulty – to put it mildly – in recognizing it.
We have said it many times that it is precisely this annihilation that leads to the loss of affections and leaves in place a lucid, cold rationality that completely throws off the interhuman relationship, whereby the relationship with material reality is absolutely correct but the relationship with human reality no longer works because the other is considered precisely a material reality, an object that I can get rid of without feeling any guilt or even feeling bad about it.
But today I would like to point out that the problem goes far beyond the clash of psychiatric schools; to admit that a rational, normal person can be mentally ill is to raise a huge cultural problem. If it is an out-of-control individual who performs certain acts, walking around naked and screaming alone at the world, no one is surprised, but if a “normal” person does it, one is bewildered. Then here it is not just a question of whether to put a person in jail or treat him or her. Recognizing that a normal, rational person may be mentally ill meets with so much resistance because it shakes the central element that our culture has used to define the identity of the human species, Reason, cogito ergo sum. Instead, these episodes testify to the fact that, while reason is functioning just fine, crazy acts are being performed.
How much would a beginning to think that it is precisely the loss of the affections, of the irrational, of the body that leads to cold rationality in the interhuman relationship and thus to mental illness take with it?
There would be a total and complete reinterpretation of the man/woman, parent/child, and then schooling, work, immigrants, and in general all that are the interhuman relationships systematically based on usefulness, appropriation, exploitation, performance, etc. etc. It would be a Copernican revolution! Of course, we are still a long way from that, but I think these heinous acts by ordinary people are beginning to creak many certainties hitherto taken for granted in the Western world.
To begin to say that he is mentally ill not in spite of but precisely because he is so lucid and rational, could open the breach to a new way of thinking about the human being whose properly human specificity would then no longer reside in reason but in that irrational world made up of a body, images, affections and imagination that then naturally merge into conscious thought and rationality would be left to deal with material realities.
And maybe we would be in a better world, how about that?
Marco Michelini
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