The first prehistoric world football championships are about to begin in Qatar.
After the massacre of thousands of workers involved in the construction of stadiums, in the almost general silence of national and international football federations, the country of the Arabian Peninsula, through its ambassador to the world cup, Khalid Salman, sets the record straight about homosexuality , according to this man, interviewed by the German television Zdf, “a mental illness”. That said, he adds, with considerable pedagogical zeal, that it would be better if the children, for their own sake, didn’t see gays around.
When the male-female binomial is touched, disturbances can invest, making them ridiculous, even unsuspected workers of thought, like that professor who refuses to accept the transition from his student, now a student. There is no reason for it. The primitive, immature, obsessive part of these individuals, so refractory, goes into fibrillation when someone changes the arrangement of the pencils and paper clips on their desk, forcing them to put everything back where it should be.
According to them, of course.
A few years ago, a priest, responsible for the family pastoral care of a northern diocese, proposed to me, on behalf of his bishop, to take care of a group of homosexuals. When I asked him what kind of pathologies they had, he replied, not unlike Mr. Khalid Salman, who were gay and that would have been enough to offer them a space for reflection and, who knows, for change.
It seems evident that homosexuality sows regression, even in subjects who hold delicate offices, including spiritual ones. At a small church in the countryside around San Gimignano, the celebrant, roughly forty, seemed to be in a trance while, occupying what must have been the space reserved for the homily, he uttered violent and involuntary words. We were on the eve of the gay pride of 2000, organized in the year of the Jubilee.
“Dirty, depraved, immoral”. So that man, oblivious to his role and the delicate responsibilities connected to it, spoke of those who would march for their rights the next day.
Meanwhile, the waters stagnate, just a couple of months ago, a boy who feels he is gay and was about to participate in the Milan pride, was scolded by his parish priest in the same tones used by his colleague almost a quarter of a century ago. . “You won’t tell me you really want to go to that antics!”
A foreign prelate, in these days, speaks of the possibility of blessing homosexual couples. I wonder how many arrows he will draw, but at least he tries.
In the rash expressions mentioned above, there is the deplorable catalog of excesses that then end up in the armamentarium of those who, yesterday in history, today in the news, try to make money on diversity, passing it off as “irregularity”, pathology, vice, attack to traditions, forgetting the only value really at stake, namely the person and his freedom to be as he feels he is.
The triggering of this regression, because this is what we are talking about, can be found in an archaic mechanism, very useful when we are children and we need simple coordinates to guide us in our tasks, which are also elementary. In that first season of our life, a two-track scheme can prove to be precious, which helps us to polarize reality: right-left, small-large, high-low, good-bad, right-wrong and so on with the antitheses. As children we need to proceed without too many complications, but the nuances, unnecessary at that time, will be indispensable once we are adults, indeed they will become an indicator of the level of maturity reached.
Evolution not taken for granted, which can get stuck by interfering with the maturation processes of individuals and with the quality of their social presence. Certain problematic experiences regarding sexual orientation can be affected by this slowdown, both because homosexuality, more than any other characteristic of the human, cannot clearly be placed in the primitive bipolar scheme mentioned above, and because this time it is a question of a ‘opposition, male-female, culturally very sensitive, capable of touching deep chords, confusing and misleading those who reject – out of ignorance, fragility or bad faith – the most precious paper of nature. The variability.
An adult mind, enriched with the fruitful contribution of “nuances”, tends to evaluate an individual based on his contribution, small or large, to the common good, certainly not on the basis of sexual orientation. It was Alfred Adler, more than a century ago, who affirmed that the “barometer” of normality, that is the criterion for measuring the degree of mental health of an individual, is “social feeling”. No sensible person could argue that the dosage of this ingredient, social sentiment, is influenced by sexual preferences.
This should close all discourse and check the weapons of many intemperate, ideological and religious included, in perennial conflict with everything that does not conform to the dictates of Euclidean geometry, populated by impeccable squares and triangles, but the theory of relativity itself would never be born if another geometry had not come to its rescue, that of curved space, thanks to the genius of Bernhard Riemann.
In the meantime, no theory of homosexuality has appeared on the horizon nor do we know of scholars capable of giving us exhaustive words, if any. On the other hand, biological explanations are pursued, consoling fictions of innatism are built, which reassure those gays who would like to reduce their feelings of guilt and shout to the world that it is not “their fault”. Fictions that would also be a balm for political and religious agencies, which would no longer have the bother of whipping “depraved”, just as they would be a panacea for the most riotous heterosexuals, finally free to lay down their weapons and find the time to seriously question themselves on the true root of their hypersensitivity to matter.
But not even this path, that of innatism, will give great satisfaction, we will continue to grope in the dark, until, finally, we decide to
follow more reasonable ones, like adopting an individual reading, because only in the biography of the individual, especially in his fascinating “private logic”, can one find clues and possible explanations, which are not pathology but, in fact, clues and explanations, the only drawers where it is permissible to peek.
The rest is prejudice, which torments the targets and does not honor the riotous actors, who are better off using their poor inner resources better, since, as Alfred Adler claimed a century ago, still him, despite the general blame and condemnation ” the number of homosexuals is growing ”, therefore“ the prohibition and excommunication of a religious and judicial nature ”will be of no use.
Domenico Barrilà, Adlerian analyst and writer, is considered one of the greatest Italian psychotherapists.
He is the author of about thirty volumes, all reprinted, many translated abroad. Among the last ones we remember “The bonds that help us to live”, “What I don’t see of my son”, “The super-connected”, “Tutti Bulli”, “We stay together. The strength of interdependence to be reborn ”, all published by Feltrinelli, as well as the Bildungsroman“ La casa di Henriette ”(Ed. Sonda).
In his production there is no shortage of works for small children, such as the series “Growing without collateral effects” (Ed. Carthusia).