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I believe we should take the time to speak about what’s important, and ask the hard questions.

The privileged of us should speak up, put their louder voice at the service of the ones who are not listened.

And, like it happened during the #BLM protests, let go of the Ego for a bit, of the personal purpose, to offer space to something else.
So, I would put aside the word ambivalence, if it wasn’t in such an important connection with what happened recently in Italy.

Four guys beat up a younger one to death, while he was trying to defend a friend.

Now, some context. They are right-wing enthusiasts, and the guy they (some of them, all of them, it doesn’t really matter) killed was a Black Italian 21-year-old.

Italy is, as usual, divided between the supposedly ‘pure’, who point their fingers at THE CRIMINALS, and the ones who support them, of course just until they receive a s**tstorm on social media and apologise. 

I, and I assume many people around me, who are even more informed and aware about the issue, feel a sense of ambivalence.

It’s more common than we expect: one part of us is tempted to associate with ‘the right ones’, judging the abominable act with disgust and detaching from it as much as possible.
Rage does that; it detaches us from reasons.

The other part of us is timidly trying to show us a bigger, scarier monster hiding behind these ‘smaller’ ones.

Violence, racism, prevarication, division are part of our environment; we breathe them all the time, we grow up surrounded by them.

Like when a woman dies at the hands of her partner, he is the criminal, but he is in fact only the peak of a rotten system that raised him to treat women this way.

We condemn by saying ‘I am not like them, nor will I ever be’. 

To the point that some of ‘the pure ones’ have gone to attack this quartet by wishing them to die, wishing that the unborn child of one of them would be aborted, throwing disapproval in the form of insults and threats. 

Ambivalence, here, is the choice of honesty. I don’t like racism, I don’t approve of it, but I am still slightly racist. And you know what? I want to improve. I am still sexist, but I want to improve. I have still some inherent prejudice, but I want to improve. 

The ambivalence is the courage of not creating compartments that forgive us and leave us in a stagnant self-entitlement. It’s a much more tragic and complex understanding that we are only moving on a continuum. Ahead, improvement, and behind, the ugliness we cannot deny if we want to grow.

How can we condemn, without detaching?

Is it possible to make a more “ambivalent” stance? 

With this third episode we dive into what it means to accept one’s desire, and how this does not coincide necessarily with a happy and tranquil life. We see how much easier it can be to just surrender to the expectations of others, as opposed to pursuing our desire – what Lacan calls ‘encountering the real’.

Then, we see what the ideal conditions for the growth – and fulfilment – of this desire are. Surprisingly, it’s not a lack of limits or a disinhibited freedom of flowing that encourages its manifestation; it’s a ‘NO’ that creates the opportunity.

Today, we dive into the connections between our concept of identity and our unconscious; we see how the rigidity of our definitions causes a risk of rupture between us and our most personal desire, our creative Self.
Then, we look into the ethical issue of responsibility in relationship to this new concept of symptom: if I cannot choose my desire, can it become an alibi? Something above my will, an excuse?

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How many times life gives us the impression of moving in circles, rather than straight, towards a destination? 

And how many times those destinations feel like yet another beginning?
There’s not even the time to realise we arrived, and we are already leaving. 

We fantasise about places that we haven’t reached, situations that we haven’t experienced, people that we haven’t met.
We make plans and we convince ourselves we will move linearly towards a goal. 
But that linearity is just an illusion. And a boring one, too.

We move, 
we stop, 
we ponder, 
we go back,
we change plans,
we transition,
we bail,
we reinvent,
we turn around,
we change.

There is a process, much deeper than the one we force on ourselves. And it’s a never ending cycle of integration. 🔄

Certainty, doubt and assimilation.

Thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

It’s a process with meaning, and one goal: learning.
Being better not by gaining more medals, reaching more goals, but by being always a bit different, a bit wiser, a bit more aware, more in contact.

The analyst is the expert in the exploration

The analysand is the owner of the territory

Richard L. Rubens

⁣These words capture that intangible force we experience in counseling; never fully the client’s, never completely the counselor.⁣
That force, that has led many of us to liberation, revolution, awareness, is created in the interaction between two, irreplaceable individuals.⁣

⁣There is one of them who comes with ⁣
📔 a story, ⁣
⚙️ a complaint, ⁣
🧩 a request.⁣

⁣🔥 For some these are messy, unclear, all tangled together. There is a raw emotion, something growing inside. It’s almost physical; so, when the therapist asks “where do you feel it?”, at first it’s strange but then the answer is found while searching for it.⁣
“It’s in my hands” and suddenly something blurry starts having a shape, a home, a story.⁣

🌊 For others, it’s words. It’s a definition.⁣
There is a statement, prepared just to unveil what’s safe and leave out the rest. Words reveal and protect, rationalise the emotion. So, if there is a wall between the two, they will both have to look at it. There will be a way around it only together.⁣

⁣With the experience of the one who knows how to move around walls, how to climb them, how to read what’s on them; and the wisdom of the one who created it, and knows what it’s made of, and what’s behind it.⁣

⁣🌞 Counseling happens there, in that space brought by both parts.

During this first episode, we start approaching the concept of ‘unconscious’.
First, we look at the innovation brought by the Freudian unconscious, different from previous definitions, and how it interplays with a different concept of man, therapy and fulfilment. Then, we look at the way the external world becomes a primary contributor in our internal one, how our relationships are the foundations of what we come to understand as ‘us’.

I am excited to inform you that from next Monday, 24th of August, I will be starting my short series on the unconscious. It will be a chance to answer many questions about psychodynamic theory and its implications, to explore concepts that do not only belong to this approach but are useful in the clinical field and in life.

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