Aesop’s fable, The Frog and the Scorpion, is unfortunately still relevant after 2,500 years. It is relevant because we continue to think of human nature as violent and, above all, unchangeable. This is not the case at all, as I have tried to explain in this short video, but human beings certainly still have a long way to go to free themselves from this belief, which often forces them to be willing victims of the most sick and violent individuals.
So, good morning everyone! After almost five years of publications, of articles written every Friday on Papillon, this time I decided to make a video instead of a written article. Let me know if you like it, don’t like it, if you preferred the old format, I don’t know. Anyway, so, Aesop’s fable, The Frog and the Scorpion, why?
Because it tells us about crossing from one side of the river to the other. And this period, the summer period, perhaps August in particular, presents us with this dynamic of transition: from the end of the school year to the beginning of the new one, from the old school to the new one, from the old class to the new one, from the end of the university year to the beginning of another. In our case, there is also the whole issue of the summer break in psychotherapy: one cycle ends in July and a new one begins in September, and so on and so forth.
However, I wanted to revisit this fable for other reasons as well. Wikipedia tells us that this fable speaks to the immutability of human instincts. First of all, let’s clarify that human beings do not have instincts. Animals have them, but humans do not. But beyond this discussion of immutability, there is also the idea of an ugly human nature, because, after all, a scorpion is certainly not cute, in the sense that it represents a suicidal or at least generally violent aspect of human nature. Well, I think this is absolute nonsense, and you might say, “Of course, we’re talking about something Aesop said 2,500 years ago,” but 2,500 years later, people are still saying more or less the same things. So much so that today psychotherapy is only a support, a containment, that is, the idea is that deep down, human beings are unchangeable, so there are 100,000 schools of psychotherapy, and that’s fine, because essentially the aim is not healing or profound transformation. In fact, if you try to talk about healing, they think you’re crazy. Because, above all, it is very difficult to distinguish health from pathology, physiology from pathology. Just think about how many murders are taking place in such a, shall we say, almost senseless, fatuous way, with absurd motives: ‘I killed her because she laughed’. Or the other guy who killed 80 children in Norway, but unfortunately there are many, many cases of femicide. And in all these situations, in the vast majority of cases, the thing that puts the judiciary in a quandary, so that they then go and arrest these people, is not that they send them for treatment, but that they are rationally sound. That is, the issue is very serious, because everything on which Western thought was based, cogito ergo sum, reason, is beginning to falter in the sense that mental illness seems to be evident in these people, even though they have absolutely solid and perfect rationality, and this risks bringing a lot of things with it, because then it turns out that the issue of human health is not to be sought in rationality, so where is it to be sought? In something else?
So, now we come to our little story. I hope I’m not spoiling anything if I tell you that this scorpion ends up stinging the poor frog halfway across the river, that is, on August 15, today! In short, let’s hope not, let’s hope we can change the outcome of the fairy tale after 2,500 years, but honestly, we have to tell ourselves that in some people, I would say depressed people, we see this inner scorpion, that is, an instance, a superego, an internal prohibition that prevents these people from fulfilling themselves, as if they couldn’t do it, as if they had an internal handbrake. So much so that if by chance they do something nice, achieve something beautiful, they then have terrible, frightening crises! But to say that this is human nature is utter nonsense.
That is, we must reflect, investigate, and understand that what causes a human being to find a scorpion inside themselves is the mechanism of introjection, an unconscious mechanism that causes introjection to occur, that is, to internalize what was previously an external prohibition, an external object that prevented fulfillment, that made negations, that said “you must not laugh, you must not joke, you must not play, you must not have fun” etc. etc. At a certain point—for a series of reasons that I don’t have time to explain in detail now—it becomes an internal object, and this gives rise to a terrible internal conflict between a deep reality that pushes towards fulfillment and this prohibition that instead prevents it, etc. Now, however, to call all this human nature is, it seems to me, to confuse people. After that, we often find ourselves faced with relationships that these people form in order to free themselves from the terrible internal conflict, so they go and form relationships with people who represent this handbrake, this external prohibition, etc., etc., and they form relationships from which they find it difficult to escape, so they get terribly angry with what prevents them from achieving fulfillment, however, they cannot do without it because it represents an internal dimension that has been externalized, so if they do not handle this rebellion well, they risk hurting themselves badly.
And here we should get into a discussion of etiopathogenesis, where mental illness comes from, etc., which would take us far afield. But what we continue to see is there for all to see, that is, how many situations there are, and perhaps I would say not only of the depressed, because the depressed, unfortunately, end up allying themselves with the violent, that is, they almost enjoy it when certain things don’t happen, they go against it, stupidly, but they ally themselves with the most violent, and we see this now, excuse me for jumping from the psychological level to a much broader level of geopolitics (which I don’t understand at all), where we see the history of human beings, and today it is there for all to see, look, in short, at Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, not to mention our own, that is, the figure that our country, Italy, is presenting, truly disgusting things. But the question is, do these characters really represent human beings? Because that’s the question, otherwise people will say, well, that’s human nature, there have always been wars and conflicts since the beginning of time… Well, I would be willing to bet: go to Russia, ask the Russians, “Are you really happy to go to war with the Ukrainians and vice versa?” And try asking the Israelis if they are all happy with this mess, no, with the genocide that Netanyahu is carrying out. I am certain that people want to have fun, play, make music, fulfill themselves, make love, etc., but not to do these things. So what the hell is going on? It is as if human beings, and here I return to my initial point, are still unable to conceive of a fulfillment that goes beyond the rationality that must keep a sick inner dimension in check. No, we all have Scorpio in us. It is as if we are still unable to fully accept that our human reality is not that of reason, that sanity does not lie there, because otherwise we systematically delegate authority to the most violent, ruthless, and dirty people who, in any case, control and keep at bay the emergence of who knows what madness would come out if we rebelled against these things and brought out something truly human. So we all risk allying ourselves with Scorpio, risking ending up—I don’t want to spoil anything—like the frog.
Marco Michelini
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