The plague doctor - acrylic on board (128x92cm) by G.

Abela

THE BODY AS AN INDIVIDUAL AND AS A SOCIAL ENTITY :

CHALLENGES TO FACE AND THE FUTURE FOR BODILY PSYCHOTHERAPY

Isla de Margarita 29th October 2011

The Emotional Plague in Fluid Modernity

__________________________

Speaker - Dr. G. Ferri

UOC Director, Atri Psychiatric Hospital - ASL Teramo - Italy
Director of the Italian Reichian Rome Italy
genovino.ferri@aslteramo.it

1st PART
Yesterdays Emotional Plague
Neurotic Character working destructively in the social environment

Plague - A mark incised by history due to its epidemic spread

and the danger it represented.

Emotional - The area affected by the pathology; the

emotional world.
Neurotic - Does the neurotic still exist today?
Yes, but it is no longer indicative of the times. Borderline
disturbance is the true emblem of our time.

1st PART
Yesterdays Emotional Plague

The emotional plague manifests itself

in explosions of sadism and criminality
Explosions from compression:
from yesterday's neurotic repression,
from today's borderline unsustainability.

It is a disease in the strictest sense and it is of fundamental

importance that it be recognised as such to mobilise
education and medicine against it rather than bludgeon it.
Here Reich speaks of
which relationship to establish,
as a possible therapy.

1st PART
Yesterdays Emotional Plague

Financial greed is typical character trait of emotional

plagues, as is devious cunning
The action itself and the motivation for the action never
coincide
Concealment is an intrinsic part of the plague
The conclusion from a thought is already ready even before
the reasoning has finished.
A Defective Oral Trait which is Compulsive-Phallic Co-fixated
with a Narcissistic Axis
directed by the defective dominant oral fixation

1st PART
Yesterdays Emotional Plague

The emotionally plague-stricken expect that

their needs in life will be satisfied
by the world around them.
They try to transform the environment around them so
that
their ways of thinking and living are not disturbed...
They hate work because they perceive it as a burden and
they seek to avoid any responsibility
Taking and Expecting from Others
making up for what was not received,
amplifying the acquired Narcissistic Reaction sadistically

1st PART
Yesterdays Emotional Plague

The energy which feeds the reactions to the plague provokes

hunger to satisfy unsated desires

Hunger from
Dissatisfaction with Pleasure Relationships
with the Partial Object Breast yesterday,
Dissatisfaction with Pleasure Relationships
with the Partial Object Uterus today.
The Phallic-Compulsive Co-fixation thins and remains as cover.

1st PART
Yesterdays Emotional Plague

The plague rages in the most important areas of life:

Mania for authority, moralism, arbitrary politicising,
sadistic educational measures, masochistic acceptance, gossip,
defamation, petty bureaucracy, imperialism, pornography, usury,
cheating,
thirst for power and racial hatred.

Even
in the Living Body of Society,
the centres of Potency of the Being
are enslaved by the Hunger
of the centres of Power of Possession!

1st PART
Yesterdays Emotional Plague

The biological-physiological aspect which is common to all

forms of emotional plague is the sexual-biological blockage.

Blockage = disturbance in the flow of imprisoned vital energy

in a Phallic-Compulsive Shell --> violent, sadistic Expulsion
Pulsing

II PARTE
2nd PART
La Peste
Emozionale Oggi
Todays Emotional Plague
Today time is borderline
Today violence is borderline
Today sexuality is borderline
In

80 years we have seen:

the lysis of phallic-compulsive fixations;
the fall of the 4th (chest) and 3rd (neck) levels;
the lysis of paternity;
the collapse of the parent relationship through guilty and excessively tolerant maternity;
the modification-movement of the Super-Ego,
the transformation of the Living Body of Society, with the loss of so many differences and
the great increase in instances of indifference.
the shell which dissolves, first in Depressive liquidity and then, through volatile reactions,
into Borderline rarefaction

Zigmunt Bauman, with his fortunately, well-chosen word,

photographed modernity as being liquid... sliding through time like a
shapeless liquid because there is no time and no space for a shape
liquified by velocity.

2nd PART
Todays Emotional Plague

We are living in a Borderline time

More rarefied and less liquid
More instants and fewer roots
More emotional experiences and less feeling
More communication and less connection
More information and less knowledge

We are more on time (superficially), rather than

being (immersed) in time
Violence is born out of not respecting the becoming of our
internal time because of the acceleration of external time:
the starter's gun for the new emotional plague!

2nd PART
Todays Emotional Plague

Time marks our bodies!

But how our bodies mark time!
The Emotional Plague is a product of a clash between the Super-Ego and
the Id

Where does it occur in the body?

The 'primary where today is in 2nd level oro-labial defectiveness (mouth),
and in 6th level oro-umbilical defectiveness (abdomen).
Three-dimensional diagnoses are made with the body!

Today the Super-ego is mass media-style

emotionally-inhibited, persecutory, demanding, excluding, superficial,
narcissistic and emotionally illiterate.

The family is no longer the home of the Super-ego.

2nd PART
Todays Emotional Plague
For the younger generation we are in a Tribal Society
which goes from 2 to Tribe and misses out 3,4,5,6,7,8,9 Relationships
which should be responsible for organising the characteristics of drives.

We are living
The emptiness of Limbic-Emotional Relationships,
Primary oral defectiveness which binds the Reptilian to the Cognitive.
We are living
Rarefied-liquid modernity in which we apply the concepts of business and
economics to an ever-greater degree
the values of possession define the being.

We are living
An emptiness in relationships caused by the theft of time
perpetrated by the media-style Super-ego,
which dictates the velocity of time outside and rarefies time inside,
defining which the Luminous Object to be followed is.

2nd PART
Todays Emotional Plague

A Social Living Body which is travelling

towards
a reduction in 5HT (serotonin)
and
an increase in DA (dopamine)
Or rather
Depression
masked by Acceleration.

3rd PART
First Remedies for the New Emotional Plague

To make a Diagnosis, where diagnosis means

feeling, seeing and reading the object
and sharing all of that.
Restore yourself and Restore Time,
Limbic Time, The Time for the Chest,
the Time of Breathing, The for the Sentiments,
the Time of being With,
the Time for listening to yourself and the Time to listen,
to tell yourself and to tell,
for the Story and its Meaning,
for Corporeity and its Meaning.

3rd PART
First Remedies for the New Emotional Plague

Restore Time to Relationships:

Restore time to the Mothers... and to the Fathers,
to the Sustainability,
to open yourself up, to feel, to see.
To Set yourself and to Set Boundaries and Limits,
even the Negatively-entropic no.

Restore Intelligent Meaning to Things

to our children and our young people
and not the objects which compensate for defective guilt.
Restore Ourselves to our children and young people.

3rd PART
First Remedies for the New Emotional Plague

Take Back the Responsibility for the Super-ego

as Parents and Adults
to educate the emptiness-anger to reasonable challenge.
to challenge the young and dare to exclude
to leave the instantaneous
to be born and weaned from dependencies
to the adgredior - looking at the sky beyond the scene
to repossess your own becoming
to sink roots into internal time.

And all of this together.

3rd PART
First Remedies for the New Emotional Plague

And so

Let it be known and tell,

Educate the Sentiments and teach the Emotions
to read
and there is no Knowledge without Feeling and there is no Feeling
without the Body.
(an investment in Being and not only in Having)
come out of the it's-mine, oral cage
and enter the chest breathing of the of me...

3rd PART
First Remedies for the New Emotional Plague

W. Reich says: the emotional plague is destined to perish

whenever it is confronted by the natural meaning of life.

The natural meaning of life is

to be a Person and to be Humility
To be a Person and to be Humility have an extraordinary capacity for
negatively-entropic energy

Person and not a Masked-Position in the scene

in true resonance with your own corporeity
in feeling part of your own biological-biographical story
in meeting the People, who are behind the Masks hiding
the Positions in the theatre of life.

3rd PART
First Remedies for the New Emotional Plague
And then Humility.
How does my body function when I am humble?
I propose that humility be considered as the Evolution of Phallic
Narcissism.
The narcissist has a rigid, still, straight neck;
the distinguishing trait is incised on their neck;
their evolutive time is imprisoned there,
which is that of their Object Relationships.
If our neck softens,
then the head and the heart communicate more and we may pulse,
to respective bodily positions, even to our belly, to our fertile humus,
mother, earth and to sink our roots deeply so as to draw energy back to
us and to reach great new heights,
permitting us extraordinary vertical breathing.

3rd PART
First Remedies for the New Emotional Plague

Another natural meaning of life is its

Intelligent Being.
I like to read so-called life-wisdom as a negatively-entropic
recombination
of the 1000 intelligences,
which are stratified and spread along the philontogenetic
history,
starting from the Intelligence of Planet Earth as a Living
Body.

3rd PART
First Remedies for the New Emotional Plague
Cognitive Intelligence comes last in the sequence of time,
it is the highest and the most acute.
But to escape from the risks of separation and isolation it should be
connected and re-connected
to the Intelligence
of the Person as a Living Body
of Society as a Living Body
of the Planet as a Living Body
to become
Destination-Intelligence.
New awareness of Terrestrial Community
is the key element which may permit us to emerge from the age of
barbarism (Edgar Morin)
from the age of Emotional Plagues
(Me, today)

Thank you
Dott. G. Ferri