Ciro Di Fiore: “According to your professional experience, is happiness fundamentally found in human relationships?”
Enrico De Notaris: “I would say yes. Of course, I believe that the desire of every human being is to love and to be loved … this is fundamental, and conversely, however, it should be said that even unhappiness basically arises from human relationships. Human relationships sometimes tend to freeze, Ronald Laing reports emblematic examples in dialogues in which personal characterization progressively grows in favor of the emergence of already written roles and which ultimately cancel subjectivity. The words become empty, white, voiceless while the ice stiffens and mortifies the relationships between human beings which in fact disappear. There remains the mutual insignificance, the negation of the other, and if we think that the origin of the discomfort lies largely in feeling insignificant, anonymity follows, the dissolution of everything you have about yourself, ugly or beautiful that is. These are happiness and unhappiness for me ”.
C.DF: “We know that Jung at the end of his career, summing up thousands of interviews with patients afflicted by a thousand ailments, said that all the neuroses of today’s men are based on the fact that they neglect or have neglected their spirituality . Would you also say the same based on your professional experience? “
E.DN: “Well, surely what I said earlier about the voice that the man heard is connected to this question. In my professional experience he is very, very, very present. Sometimes, even where there is no deep core of religiosity, the testimony of a dimension that recalls the metaphysical still transpires, albeit from a mechanical ritual. Sometimes this need is avoided to avoid a very problematic dimension, but beyond this very thorny question I believe that the ability to affect the world is also very significant. Recognizing in the other my own will to affect the world, the transformative commitment in the work of each one, trying to bring one’s behavior back on those tracks that lead to personal utopia, are all forms of spirituality. Sometimes spirituality corresponds to certain behaviors and is linked to different mentalities, but the drive to transcend our destiny, destiny understood as the Spaniards understand it etymologically (that is, “way out”, not “fate” already marked), is real spirituality. What then is substantiated by multiform social and political contents does not affect its concreteness. There is an old song by Lucio Dalla (“The house by the sea”, 1971) in which a prisoner glimpses, for years and years through the bars, a girl who lives opposite, but far from his cell. The prisoner then fantasizes about going out one day and going to marry her and this fantasy, this utopia gives meaning to her existence. In this way the real daily life of the prisoner was no longer the bars, the food that his jailer brought him, that very narrow space; but it was the free spirituality of this thought that kept him alive. He already loved that woman, he already felt in her body the concreteness of the spirituality of her love for her, already she was hers no matter if he would ever marry her. Being incarcerated in a two-meter cell also puts you in a completely different mental situation, of course, but, and here I go back to Eduardo, the real prison is misery, certainly not prison, if by misery we mean above all the poverty of our spirituality. In the light of these considerations, I can answer you that yes, even the lack of spirituality contributes to neurotic thinking, to psychic discomfort “
C.DF: ”Jung said that society would often be based on four false values: money, success, sex and power. Do you agree with this analysis? “
E.DN: “These that Jung enumerates are certainly the most immediate and concrete aspects that we glimpse in our social order, then there are the transformations in many micro-areas of these lines that privilege and in any case refer to these four false values. In the end I don’t want to hastily or superficially summarize, but what makes us adhere to these compelling scripts of domination indicated by Jung is always a characteristic that we carry inside: the I written in capital letters, a granite I that is firm in the necessity of the affirmation at all costs and for which any tool is perfect in order to re-propose the total supremacy of the personal over the politician. Even “culture”, knowledge, when used instrumentally, becomes a way of self-affirmation or manipulation and remains anchored to these false values because it is transformed into a means of domination, and therefore into money, success, sex and power. Unfortunately, Jung’s four fascinations therefore affect everyone a bit, and they also have many masks … “
C.DF: “About what Jung said … according to Gianfranco Ravasi,” the real problem today is not classical atheism, the one without any sky, without transcendence, but what I call “apatheism” (which touches even believers!), superficiality, indifference, vulgarity “… do you agree?”
E.DN: “Even in my family, friends, patients I see that the sense of belonging to a religion can tend to become a comfortable foothold. Because sharing a faith with others helps and strengthens on the one hand; but on the other hand it can contribute to what Ravasi calls apatheism and therefore can make one become more superficial, indifferent, vulgar. To this apatheistic form I would oppose the religious position of Don Lorenzo Milani. He understood the importance of culture, which he did not use to pursue the four false values we mentioned earlier, but to help people. That is true spirituality, that which Masullo in a very similar way calls “patico” to underline the capacity of feeling the other. After all, however, I believe no one can allow himself to judge that whoever goes to church and recites his prayers does not have his own spirituality or even less that he is an “apatheist”, in that case the rituality of religious services would only contribute to re-proposing the content of the faith mainly in formal ways, but in any case I find it harder to recognize myself in this type of spirituality. Also because I do not understand the inconsistency that often seems to detect in them: how can a believer, who reaffirms his faith in his heart, then produce behavior that is structurally in total dissimilarity with his own feelings? This too, if you like, is a form of “normal schizophrenia”.
C. DF: ”Gianfranco Ravasi in one Lectio magistralis he remembers that Luther’s sentence commenting on Job makes a certain sense: “God probably appreciates much more the blasphemies of the desperate man than the staid praises of the right-thinking bourgeois on Sunday morning during worship” … a surprising recognition? “
E.DN: “Sure. Luther, I agree with him, not forgetting the great historical significance of this assertion ”.
C.DF: “In a scene from Martone’s film” We believed “there is the joke of a man sentenced to death who rejects the sacrament of a priest shortly before the execution, saying, between the serious and the desperate:” No , father, my place is in hell “… Pascal and his bet here are dramatically dismantled?”
E.DN: “In this scene there is certainly also a political content deeply linked to history, the Clergy represents and has represented in many societies the part most linked to power, power itself. In that fragment of the film I believe that, in addition to the political judgment, is also narrated the coherence of the character who does not accept compromises with his lifelong convictions. “If up to now I have not believed in anything, I don’t see why now I have to deny my whole existence”. It is Vico’s message actualized in the plot of the film. Then the interpretation, the truth about this joke lies only in Martone’s thought ”.
C.DF: “Thank you very much for your patience and for the interview.”
“AND. DN: “Thanks to you”
NAPLES, Spring of the year 2022
Ciro Di Fiore