At moments, I find myself missing the pandemic, or rather, the “lockdown”, because I don't miss masks at all (my relationship with masks has always been one of those imposed relationships, never chosen, that are left behind without looking back...)
What I miss is obviously not the social isolation or lack of hugs, nor the impossibility to travel and contact the rest of the world: a diverse, mysterious, and exogamous world, waiting to be discovered.
I do miss the pandemic emptying and retreat, in a world that in recent decades has become so full, so excessive, so consumerist, that it even causes indigestion...
It is like the feeling I have when (rarely) I go to a big supermarket or a large shopping center: sometimes I get lost in the middle of so much without knowing what to choose, sometimes I feel totally submersed and dumbfounded, as if I've just arrived from a small village...
But it's not just objects that are consumed; culture and travel can also be frantically consumed: collected cities and countries where one stays for a single day without them ever becoming internalized and thought-out (and dreamed of!) experiences.
Or the excess of films, series, television channels, unlimited streaming, of books that everyone makes a point of publishing, whether they are of interest to the community or solely for one’s own vanity.
Even relationships with others can become consumerist, through the viral proliferation of WhatsApp groups, endless conversations where every thought is immediately downloaded. Or the thousands of friends on social networks, where so many make a point of sharing their Self on the surface: what they do, what they eat, their children and pets, but not what they think, in exchange for some "likes"...
If I were to take an extraterrestrial being on a digital “guided tour”, I would tell him: “If you want to have many 'likes', share everything that is innocuous (landscapes, selfies, children, food) and that doesn't demand self-questioning, and don't share thoughts, opinions, or the dissemination of cultural objects likely to create internal conflict and new thoughts”.
Looking now at the psyche, an excess of gender categories has recently emerged, more than thirty, with multiple mathematical combinations that cross “biological sex” (masculine, feminine, intersex), “gender expression” (male, female, non-binary), “gender identity” (cisgender, transsexual) and “sexual orientation” ...
As if there were a sudden need to differentiate ourselves through identity labels. As if the humanity of the XXI century were no longer able to bear ambiguity, indefiniteness, mystery, the unknown...
A humanity that, throughout history, has always lived peacefully with gender bipolarity (note how our brain, as well as computer language, represents the world in pairs of opposites - good/bad, beautiful/ugly, big/small, 0/1...) in peaceful coexistence with psychological diversity (millions of human beings, all different from one another), without having to label them...
Perhaps a need to create categories able to contain growing and dangerous confusion in a world of excess?
It should be noted that here it is not a question of categorizing reality, as science does, for example, when differentiating races, biological sexes, or mental diagnoses (through behaviors, symptoms or personality organizations), but of categorizing the subjective, how one feels, such as: “I'm a trans-sexual because I'm not comfortable with my biological sex” or “I'm bisexual because I don't know which way to turn.”
Moreover, these categories are related to a small part of our identity: sexual gender/orientation, omitting all the rest of the personality, which reminds me of obsessional defenses that, in order to deal with emotional confusion, focus (isolation) on a small part of reality...
Finally, a world that confuses concepts such as “the right to gender equality” (men and women should have the same social, professional, and political rights) with “gender freedom” (each individual may choose whatever gender one wants).
Behind a world apparently concerned with respect for difference and acceptance of diversity, a dictatorial world is hidden, where subjectivities become dictatorships that impose themselves on others, revealing a fragile identity that requires the other to confirm the subjectivity of their person, thereby erasing the difference between the Self and the Other.
A world that forces the teenager in search of himself to define himself rapidly, a political and cultural world forcing young people to label themselves as straight or homo or bi or trans...
A world that exchanged the old adolescent models, such as musicians and actors, taken up in order to replace idealized parental models, now forced to descend from their pedestal and replaced by hundreds of anonymous digital "Influencers" with a "cute" face, who tell light jokes and collect likes, clothes and trips, and euros or dollars...
“When I grow up, I want to be an “Influencer”, to travel a lot and get rich...”; this is the new model of happiness for many teenagers!
Perhaps it was not in vain that during the first lockdown many of us imagined that the pandemic had come to change something in humanity...
Sometimes I find myself missing those days of retreat, missing the absence of consuming objects because stores were closed, missing the absence of excess tourism (and the noise of trolleybuses in the street), because people did not travel, nor did they worry about the latest fashion, or the best aesthetic operation (for breasts, butts and the like) and other frivolities, because a greater concern had occupied their minds: no longer a consumer society’s accessory goods of, but rather an essential good: health.
Some months ago, watching on television the terrible (absurd, revolting, unacceptable) invasion of Ukraine by Russia, bombing the cities but also the media, among the endless suffering testimonies by people who had lost everything, something caught my attention: the words of a Ukrainian woman, perhaps around 60 years old, who replied to the journalist: “It is terrible… But, on the other hand, it shows us what is essential, what is worthwhile, it gives meaning..."
If Wilfred Bion were alive, he would come out on social media to shout out loud:
Dear fellow psychoanalysts, it is imperative to remember what I have been telling you for so many years and shout it to this world - the concept of the 'Negative': thought arises from absence; the Concept is created when facing the lack of the object!
The baby builds the breast representation when it is not there...
The child becomes creative when he is not drowned in thousands of toys, and thus manages to transform a plastic bowl into a helmet, or a broken clothespin into a toy soldier...
The teenager needs unlimited internet absence to be able to get bored to death on the sofa during holidays, and so to have new ideas about what he wants to be in the future...
The adult needs introspection, to be less concerned with the body, with the envelope, with what he eats or stops eating in the literal sense, and become more concerned with spiritual food: reading, thinking, listening to music...
This text is already long, and the pseudo-morality of the ‘politically correct’ remains to be touched on, for which this text fails badly. But it doesn't matter, I leave it in the air for those who might want to think about it.
