THE SCHIZOPHRENOGENIC MOTHER

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 quoted verbatim a well-known example of double bond cited by Haley who thought that this type of incongruous communication from the mother, defined schizophrenogenic borrowing the name given by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, caused the son mental illness because of the latter’s inability to respond adequately.

I remember a long time ago, an introverted, closed-in, shy-to-the-limit boy found the courage to date a girl he really liked. He comes home in the evening extremely happy with a face that sprinkled happiness from all pores and the mother was very angry because… he had left the room a mess! But do you really think she was upset about that?

In these cases the kids come into conflict because they don’t have the courage or the ability to bring that indefinite feeling of anger to the level of knowledge. In other words, to arrive at a complete understanding of the true internal reality of the mother in these cases is roughly defined as: my mother does not love me. But it is difficult to get there, we often stop before the acknowledgment and we remain halfway between a blind anger and guilt.

In this period there is an annoying chorus of people, intellectuals and journalists, who say that the thought of a return of fascism is ridiculous. Beyond the well-known tendency to run to the rescue of the winners (Flaiano) I think they have become too rational and have lost the ability to hear and see beyond words. Of course I do not believe that we will come back to see the balilla parade but I think that precisely due to this we risk being in a more hidden, creeping, underground, hypocritical dimension of fascist thought which is very difficult to decipher clearly, and clarity is an essential condition to arrive at a true rejection, a NO, and we risk in the near future to witness a blind rebellion that destroys without building anything, as in the boy of the first example.

Let’s try to orient ourselves using some quotes of our future premier. In Europe there is a design that aims at the ethnic substitution to bring in immigrants, “a planned and desired invasion… To give cheap labour, slaves to be delivered to the strong powers”. Apart from the fact that I would suggest to read a history book, even a subsidiary that was used in elementary school to discover that for example Italy has been invaded many times over the centuries for which I don’t really understand what ethnicity she is referring to. But apart from this, the first feeling while listening to her is that she is racist but then she says that this “replacement” (?) must be prevented because migrants would be exploited and enslaved. Then she’s not racist, she’s just good and generous. Only to discover, as Giacomo rightly points out in his letter, that instead Venezuelans can be welcomed because they are Christians. Ah, so the initial feeling was right! So there is no problem of invasion when it comes to Christians!

I will now refrain from talking about the Christian roots, but I am sure that looking back on the horrors that Christians have wrought in history, just think of the Crusades or the Holy Inquisition, frankly I hope I have no Christian roots. Let’s take another step, the 194 Abortion Act. “I am not against the 194 I just want to give extra guarantees giving the possibility to those who do not want to have an abortion to receive support…while today there are institutions that push you to do the easiest thing” (abortion)

Here, too, a shiver pervades the body in listening to it. 

There would be so many things to say but surely there will be a occasions to do it in the future but now I would like to mention some ideas that lurk and base this thought. I know it may seem an abstract step but it is not at all because if we do not start from the rejection of certain basic ideas we will never be able to lay the foundations for a new thought of left.

One idea is that the human being cannot change, so it was made by God and it will remain this way forever. It follows that the new and the different will always be seen as dangerous, abnormal, and will be eliminated, marginalized or returned to “normality”. 

I quote in this regard Orban, Meloni’s friend (she does not say these things and will never say, of course!): “We must say that in our society we don’t want diversity, mixing. We don’t want our colour, our traditions and our national culture mixed with those of others. We don’t want that. We don’t want that at all. We don’t want to be a country where there is diversity. We want to be what we were a thousand and one hundred years ago”.

The other is the one that all human beings have underneath a violent, animalistic reality, which is the deepest human nature and therefore must be controlled by a higher entity.

I do not dare to think, with these conditions, of what will be the situation in the prisons, full of boys, mostly non-EU…

The left, unfortunately also partially victim of these thoughts, must instead be able to refute them without if and without but. 

Back to the issue of abortion and pill RU 486, it must be clear that in these cases it is not about leaving the woman free to murder children – as some misogynistic delinquents say – but to understand that the foetus is an exclusively biological reality that before the sixth month of pregnancy, if put out of utero, has no chance of surviving. Human life begins to be formed at birth with mental, psychic reality and therefore in abortion there is no murder. We need maximum clarity on these things. Otherwise at this rate you risk arresting for murder a guy who masturbated as he would have killed millions of potential children! And yet to think that for a woman to choose to have an abortion is the easiest thing to do, really gives shivers.

In these days I happened to listen to Elodie interviewed by Diego Bianchi at Propaganda Live. 

I was struck by her, how to say, natural intelligence. Her thought seems to merge with the body and with the affections, a whole that leads her to reject spontaneously, without uncertainties and without ideologies, certain violent thoughts that instead confuse many people. 

When thought is separated from affections it becomes abstract rationality that no longer understands human reality, it is good with inanimate objects, to measure a table or to weigh pasta, but fails miserably in the interhuman relationship.

In this regard, I would like to recall that some time ago Anna, a reader, scolded me for having made a hasty diagnosis to Putin because I had not visited him for which she rightly said how do you say certain things? If from a formal point of view it could be right what our friend said, for me it was important to emphasize one thing, that is, those who arrive with this coldness to send to the massacre thousands of boys who have the task of killing other thousands of boys, it cannot be sane because I am sure this is not the human nature, so I have no need to visit him and frankly no desire! And I also wanted to point out, since people wondered a lot about this, saying “he is not crazy because he is lucid”, that mental illness lies precisely in extreme rationality, cold and ruthless logic that completely cancels the human reality of others, people become objects. 

I know that many people will turn up their noses at some of my remarks, people have issues around bills and they don’t care about these things, but I think that if we don’t start from the basics we will never go anywhere. Many people in this period say they wait before judging the new government to see the facts, the only thing that really matters. I think instead that politics is research, passion, love, dream…utopia and many young people who did not go to vote remind us dramatically.

Marco Michelini

Thanks to Chiara Fanasca for the translation of this article