3.2The
psyche of the kamikaze James Hillman (1) sets the perspective of the suicide not only «as an exit from the
life but also as an entry into death». The problem is not merely in
relation with the breakdown towards the thought and the ethic of society,
that opposes and deplores this gesture, especially considering that the
suicide «underlines in radical way the independent reality of the Soul».
The analyst faces problems that represent in the patient «above all experiences and sufferings, problems with an ‘interiority’. The patient’s firstly wants
that his analyst is aware of own suffering and to attract him into own
experiential world. Experience and suffering are terms strongly related to
Soul», Hillman says. Sometimes Soul rejoices other times it suffers, but it is so delicate, reactive and sensible to easily crouch in
itself, at times almost as far as to disappear, when it has the feeling
that someone is doing it an injustice or is neglecting it, other times as
far as to annihilate itself when it feels
to have been “mortally” wounded. The “reasons of the soul” exist and are deep
but they appear “without discernment” to all people who would like to
approach it by means of the logic of the ordinary mind. For these motives,
Hillman justly underlines that,
during a psychoanalytic treatment, the therapist has to draw near to the Soul avoiding “a proceeding with an attitude of prevention” and since
only like this he can maintain that necessary contact to be able to
understand what is really happening to it. The question is that we are not sufficiently accustomed to treat with
psychological dimensions that has symbolic valences and with expressions
of the psyche that constitute above all “symbolic
realizations.” At the cost of to be misunderstood, but with intellectual honesty, I
want to sustain that the soul of the kamikaze
(2)
doesn't disdain to perish; his self-destructive action is loaded with
symbolic values (3). We will be never able to
entirely understand the kamikaze
(that we must
maintain well distinguished from the terrorist), we can never enter his psyche and, therefore,
we cannot also defeat never from him with systems that are not only war or
we cannot prevent his actions, if we won't be skilled to understand his
“Soul”, that is distant “light-years” from the western culture that
also can accept to despatch on the battleground one hundred thousand
people but cannot conceive the personal life-sacrifice for a cause. And
clearly we are not here discussing if it is a just or wrong cause! I don't
think, in fact, that one person, endowed with a crumb of humanity, exists
in the world who is lacking in a feeling
of deep disgust in front of the slaughter of human life! Simply, if we want to approach the Soul of the Other and if we want to find “the words” - this both in the therapeutic
field, and in the social field, and in the intercultural field - we have
to near Soul understanding its sufferings and its more intimate “irrationality”,
besides abandoning the pre-conceptions that can darken a more penetrating
vision of that part of the psyche interpretable as the deepest nucleus of
the experience.
If we turn the look to the group events with a less
enthusiastic eye than the group-therapist, we could also discover the most
dangerous sides of the collective dimension and of our social being or “We”. The group-aggregations can, for instance, appear
“socially pathological”, that is deviant on the basis of some
perversions or “aberrations” of the basic-assumptions until the
formation of “social-bodies” specialized in running and maintaining
the attack-escape assumption (gangster’s organizations, mafia etc.), or
coupling-assumption (organized prostitution), or dependence-assumption (drug-addiction
groups). Now, on my opinion, a deep nucleus of
truth seems can have the old Latin saying: “senatores boni vires, senatus mala bestia”(4). It is on these aspects regarding the group that
stands up the part pro-individualist of our experience but without a my
capability to lean towards one of the two poles constituted by the
binomial “individual-group”. Only we never have to forget that behind
different negative social events there is the influence of one or several instigator heads and that a vast humanity can be seen to execute as uncritical victim of
the “flock-syndrome”. Was Freud then so distant from the truth when in his analysis of the social world saw the masses as subjugated
by the figure of the leader, for a process of global identification
equalizing and uniting the most people? Further,
the fact that
the chief is unconsciously a perfect interpreter of the underground
feelings of the community (Bion) and he is, therefore, the expression of collective sentiment rather
than a “people-fascinator”, it seems that in practice don't change a
lot! A last aspect that I desire to signal, with regard to the psychology of
the
kamikaze, it is the presence of a double destructive mechanism, because of two
contemporaneous dynamics of death: one connected the unconscious
“logic” usually present in the homicide and in the war (your death - my life) to which it is
added the “logic” of the destructive nihilism (my death - your death) typical of who is lacking in the survival hope, at last the survival
on Earth, that recalls to the mind the biblical epilogue of the Sampson’s fight: “Sampson
dies with all the Philistines!”. Probably to
gather the present aspects of desperation in every form of kamikaze action and to work for giving back hope to whom totally appears of it
deprived this could contribute to find more lasting solutions to the
matter of the destructive acting by the kamikaze
men and women. References (1) Hillman J., Il suicidio e
l'anima, Astrolabio ed., Roma, 1972, pagg. 7, 28,33, 37. |
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