Of Roberto Pechioli

Source: Heretically
Reading Vittorino Andreoli is always a stimulating intellectual adventure. The Veronese psychiatrist, with that mad scientist look of his, i radi capelli lunghi, disheveled, similar to directionless electrical wires, it is an important witness of our time. His long clinical experience, combined with a surprising humanity and the acute sensitivity of a scholar make us think. A recent speech of his focused on contemporary man who no longer thinks and is a slave to frustration. Two conditions that Andreoli considers complementary, linked by an invisible yet persistent plot.
Postmodern man lives in imitation of the machine, his reasoning becomes binary, immediate stimulus and response, yes or no, right or wrong. Everything is cooked and eaten immediately, the waiting time evaporates, which is also that of hope, of the dream, of the project. Inadequate by nature to support the comparison with the technical apparatus, vive di scosse, continuously clicks on itself, loses the joy of the goal achieved, the satisfaction of those who linger to contemplate the outcome, savor the effects of acting after having imagined and constructed them. He also loses the ability to accept defeats or simple inadequacies, fruit of self-acceptance, of the condition of an imperfect creature, to the point of attributing them to a sort of malfunction of the personal machine.
Frustration spreads, that is, profound unprocessed disappointment, in each of its three meanings, that is, the feeling of those who consider their actions in vain; the psychic tension determined by the unfulfillment of a desire; the effect of the failure to satisfy a drive.
The abolition of waiting is a crime against man perpetrated by the mechanisms of the market. They fuel the desire to move it continuously, divert it to new induced needs to be replaced quickly. This breeds frustration, a component of the eclipse of the sacred, because within the wait lies the mystery, which in turn, Andreoli tells us, it is the perception of the sacred. A difficult concept, impalpable, not purchasable with credit card, linked to the spiritual dimension of existence. There is no doubt that theconsuming manpost-modern, just as he can't stand the wait, which produces anxiety and estrangement, he has a horror of mystery, as he cannot control it, measure, manage, nor evaluate in terms of binary thinking, stimulus, action and obligation of immediate feedback. It is highly inadvisable to linger, take a breath, meditate.
The absence of meditation is certainly one of the characteristics of contemporaneity, together with the agony of philosophy, that is, critical thinking. There's no time, we need to move, do without acting. Activate immediate reflexes, living on short-term memory seems to be today's imperative. React to the stimulus in a fast and stereotyped manner, be ready to carry out the assigned functions “in real time”, and then be a consumer, worker, obligatory user of free time, owner of impulses to be satisfied, instincts to abandon oneself to like animals without innocence. The manner of the beasts.
It also goes beyond alienation, the escape from oneself that at the dawn of modernity occupied thinkers such as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and now it seems to have become the essential code of the time: Work, I'm going on holiday, I'm leaving for the week end, I run to the mall, I am connected to the network, I have sex. Always the binary man, stimulus, answer, performance anxiety, frustration. An emotional distress distinct from alienation, which refers rather to foreignness, to the distance, and leads to the unpleasant sensation of loss of mystery and the sacred, the disenchantment of Max Weber's world.
Frustration is more than the contradiction between nature and culture activated by the civilization process (Freud). It is rather the perennial dissatisfaction with the gap between desire and reality. Everyone aspires to a leading role, everyone convinces themselves that they are the victim of an unfair position on the social scale: I am low not because of demerit or inability, but as a victim of injustice, or because I was unable to seize opportunities. It's the myth of success, to be measured in money and possibly by the number of friends on Facebook or "likes" at the bottom of the sentences entrusted to social networks. We demand a role, but we reject the rank, that is, the position held in a hierarchy of values, since it would mean accepting the judgment of merit, the ranking.
It would be a further unbearable frustration, yet many subject themselves to the toil of Sisyphus on a daily basis, since the other-directed and compulsive desire that possesses them never comes to fruition, resulting on the one hand in disappointment due to the non-compliance with hopes, on the other in the need to start over, with renewed expectations frustrated in the next round. The imperative is not to pose, because postmodern man has a horror of limits, it is programmatically incapable of stopping, reflect, choose, renounce. It is the popularization of the tenacious scientific research of perpetual motion, which fruitlessly engaged brilliant minds for centuries. Paradoxically, it is also a defeat of free will, a determinism of the race, of going beyond reality. Alienation plus frustration for a world that imposes the same on us, the same (“to be like everyone else”), the ideological denial of differences, but at the same time it asks everyone to be special, unique, unrepeatable.
A further schizophrenia that some live in the most extreme bizarreness, others in the physical construction or denial of themselves (clothing, tattoos, unnatural hair color, obsessive care of the body to "stay young", now false identities online), many in the compulsive search for products, conducted, gestures that make us unique yet identical. A sophisticated form of frustration is the search for transgression, which has also become a social obligation and therefore itself devoid of meaning.
An excess of pride that seems to us to be a side effect of another contemporary frustration: the annoyance of being creatures rather than creators, confusedly wishing to be one's own children and parents. Plus, the belief that they are products of Chance, a species that evolved faster than the others, but what else is it than a bundle of chemical processes. Chemistry desires, the sensations, even feelings. For a certain behavior, a specific part of the brain is activated, for another we produce certain substances which, in turn, they set in motion the mechanisms that govern our actions. It is a terrible frustration to consider yourself the product of chemical reactions combined with physical laws: the most frightening materialism, cold and incapacitating of human history combined with very powerful means transformed into ends.
Man is inadequate in the face of the impersonal power of technology, scrisse Guenther Anders. Vittorino Andreoli, psychotherapist with experience of concrete man, he goes further and accuses the Case, or the matter that became God, until concluding with a sentence that we offer for everyone's reflection: if I have to choose to kneel, I do it before God, not before the Case. An intolerable prospect for today's man: kneel, he so powerful, capable of discovering and exploiting the forces of nature, able to bend them to his will! And then, before God, an antiquated hypothesis no longer taken into consideration since the time of the Enlightenment. Too much light is bad for the frustrated and binary man…