This paper explores the use of the ‘concept of cause’ throughout Massimo Fagioli’s writings. It first appeared in his 1962 article about delusional perception, subsequently in his 1970 introduction to “No and yes” by Spitz, then in “Death Instinct and knowledge” as well as in some of his following theoretical writings. We highlight the significant occurrences of this notion in order to enlighten its specific use in different passages of his work. These occurrences connect to each other along a trend of thought increasingly developing and deepening over time.
There has always been, in the history of human thought, a research about the ‘why’, the cause, variously defined by different authors. In the attempt of delivering some points of reflection, we refer to some key moments of the history of philosophical and epistemological thought in which the issue of cause has been explored.
Our purpose is to emphasize the novelty in the reconsideration of the concept of cause in Fagioli’s work, its contribution with respect to previous propositions in western thought and its impact on both psychiatry and psychotherapy.
In “Death instinct and knowledge” Fagioli argues the structuration of an unconscious ‘logic’ related and derived from projection: the subject blames the external object for his own sadomasochistic situation, so that a concept of cause is formulated.
Fagioli theorizes the genesis of mental disease in the activity of the subject with the discovery of the annulment pulsion, as the pathological resolution of a sadomasochistic relationship through the psychic elimination of the external object. The research on the ‘why’ becomes, in psychiatry, etiopathogenetic research.
The knowledge about the inner merging of death instinct implies the idea of a dynamic phenomenon. The investment of death, leading to a non-relation, must always be comprehended within the relationship itself, without which it couldn’t exist and from which it derives.
We discuss how, in Fagioli’s thought, the transcending of the notion of cause is possible by the connection among the concepts of time and interhuman relationship through the disappearance fantasy.
We therefore propose how the notion of cause (in its basic meanings of regular and repetitive sequence of events, logical-rational deductibility of an effect from its cause and productive power) is reframed in Fagioli’s theoretical formulation as a psychic reaction, as a dynamic phenomenon in the context of an unconscious relationship and as human creativity.
Note
- Fagioli, M. (1962). Alcune note sulla percezione delirante paranoicale e schizofrenica. In Il sogno della farfalla, 3, 2009, 9-22.
- Fagioli, M. (1970), Introduzione a Spitz R.A., Il sì e il no. Saggio sulla genesi della comunicazione. Roma: Armando Armando, pp. 9-16.
- Fagioli, M. (2017). Istinto di morte e conoscenza. Roma: L’Asino d’oro., p. 50.
- Ivi, p. 86, nota 38.
- Ivi, p. 78.
- Ivi, p. 194, nota 20. Cfr anche: Fagioli, M. (2011). La marionetta e il burattino. Roma: L’Asino d’oro, p. 240.
- Cfr. Fagioli, M. (2011). La marionetta e il burattino. Roma: L’Asino d’oro, p.170 nota. 32; Fagioli, M. (2012).Teoria della nascita e castrazione umana. Roma: L’Asino d’oro, pp. 221-223.
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