Death, anxiety and metaphysical experience
10.4081/rp.2023.725
L’autore muove la sua riflessione a partire dalla filosofia antica, intesa come esercizio spirituale di vita vissuta, e introduce il tema della morte che secondo Platone ed altri filosofi antichi rappresentava il morire alla propria individualità per accedere ad un pensiero vero ed entrare in contatto con l’universalità del tutto cosmico. Successivamente approdando al pensiero filosofico moderno, attraverso Heidegger, viene introdotto il tema dell’angoscia quale inevitabile viatico per accedere al ‘puro essere’ dell’essere umano o Esserci; e infine da qui, soprattutto appoggiandosi al pensiero di Elèmire Zolla prova ad indicare una strada che, superando l’angoscia e ‘perdendo’ la propria individualità identitaria, possa portare a identificarsi con l’’essere che semplicemente è’ nel mondo. In quest’ultimo passaggio viene individuato il possibile emergere dei diversi disturbi mentali in luogo di una possibile illuminazione, soprattutto se si è lasciati soli nella propria esperienza fenomenologico esistenziale.
application/pdf
2037-7851
725
1
it
Paolo Milanesi
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Ricerca Psicoanalitica
esperienza metafisica
Morte, angoscia ed esperienza metafisica
Text.Serial.Journal
https://www.pagepress.org/socialsciences/rp
34
Scritti
2023-05-15
2022-09-06
2023-04-30
2023-05-15
Ricerca Psicoanal
Paolo Milanesi
2023/05/15
10.4081/rp.2023.725
Psychologist, Psychotherapist, Psychoanalyst and SIPRe - IFPS Supervisor. Lecturer at the SIPRe course of high specialisation in Psychoanalysis of the Child in the Family. Member of the Cultural Association ‘OttoCentro’.
2037-7851
1
esperienza metafisica
it
Zolla, E. (2016). Archetipi Aure Verità segrete Dioniso errante. Tutto ciò che conosciamo ignorandolo, Marsilio Editori, Venezia.
Morte, angoscia ed esperienza metafisica
https://www.pagepress.org/socialsciences/rp/article/download/725/739
34
                                    Ricerca Psicoanalitica | pISSN 1827-4625 | Year XXXIV, n. 1, 2023
                                                                              doi:10.4081/rp.2023.725


                                                                                         WRITINGS



Death, anxiety and metaphysical experience

Paolo Milanesi*




ABSTRACT. – The author focuses his attention on ancient philosophy in the sense of spiritual




                                                                    ly
exercise of experience, of lived life, and introduces the theme of death, which according to
Plato and other ancient philosophers represented the death of one’s individuality to gain access




                                                              on
to true thought and connect with the universality of the cosmic whole. Approaching modern
philosophical thought, through Heidegger the author introduces the theme of anxiety as the

                                                  e
inevitable viaticum to gain access to the ‘pure being’ of the human being or Dasein (being-
                                               us
there). Finally, leaning on the work of Elèmire Zolla, the author attempts to identify a path
that, in overcoming anxiety and ‘losing’ one’s individuality of identity, can lead to
                                            al

identification with ‘the being that simply is’ in the world. This last passage recognises that
mental disorders may emerge in lieu of possible enlightenment, especially if left to deal with
                                        ci


the existential phenomenological experience alone.
                                  er



Key words: being; unity; death; anxiety; metaphysical experience.
                             m
                     om




      ‘Around the time of Descartes, Pascal discovered the logic of the heart and
                 -c




      compared it with the logic of calculating reason. The interior and the invisibil-
      ity of the heart is not only more interior than the ‘inside’ of its calculated rep-
          on




      resentation and therefore more invisible, but it embraces a wider reason than
      that of simply producible objects. In the invisible ‘ultra-interiority’ of the heart,
      N




      man is driven first of all towardss what must be loved: ancestors, the dead,
      infancy, the newborn.’
                                                                       Martin Heidegger
          (at the conference commemorating Rainer Maria Rilke’s 20th anniversary)

    Death, anxiety, and metaphysical experience are states that can be
merged and connected at various levels and in various ways. I will attempt
to do this from a mainly philosophical perspective but will, at times, oscil-
late in a psychological-psychoanalytic observation vertex. Referring to
Pierre Hadot’s work (2001), we can say that historians distinguish between



    *Psychologist, Psychotherapist, Psychoanalyst and SIPRe - IFPS Supervisor. Lecturer at
the SIPRe course of high specialisation in Psychoanalysis of the Child in the Family.
Member of the Cultural Association ‘OttoCentro’, Italy. E-mail: paolomilanesi@icloud.com
128                               Paolo Milanesi



philosophical discourse (theory) and philosophy itself. Philosophical dis-
course was divided into three parts: logic, physics and ethics. Thus, we had
the theory of logic, the theory of physics and the theory of morals.
Philosophical theory in ancient philosophy was not ‘Philosophy’, or at least,
did not exhaustively define it. Philosophy was at its origin an actual, con-
crete, experienced exercise: the exercise of logic, ethics and physics. True
logic was not the pure theory of logic, but experienced, lived logic, the act
of thinking correctly and exercising one’s thinking accordingly in everyday
life. Authentic ethics was not the theory of ethics, but ethics experienced,
lived in life with others. True physics was not the theory of physics, but
experienced, lived physics, a certain attitude with respect to the cosmos.
This lived physics consisted above all in trying to see things, not from an
anthropomorphic and egocentric perspective, but from the perspective of




                                                            ly
the universe and nature. The earth and everything human are an infinitesi-




                                                       on
mal speck in infinitude. This experienced physics consisted, above all, in
becoming aware that one is a part of the unitary Whole and that one must

                                                 e
accept the course this Unity demands, and with which, since we are one of
                                              us
its parts, we should identify. In the history of philosophy, this experienced
physics was a truly spiritual exercise (Hadot, 2002) and has always existed;
                                           al

it was physics but had spiritual value. We can use this fundamental distinc-
                                      ci


tion, mutatis mutandis, as a starting point to distinguish between, but also
                                  er



to connect psychoanalytic theory and clinical exercise.
                              m




    The world can be understood scientifically using tools for measurement
and exploration, through mathematical calculations but also through the
                       om




naive use of perception. This duality may be better understood by thinking
of Husserl’s observation (1992), taken up by Merleau-Ponty (1945) for
                   -c




which theoretical physics accepts and proves that the earth moves, but, from
              on




one’s perception, the earth is immobile. Well, it is precisely one’s perception
that forms the foundation of the life we live. It is in this perspective of per-
           N




ception that awareness of the presence of the world and of our belonging to
it can be placed. Here, the philosopher’s experience corresponds to that of
the poet and artist, and could also correspond to that of the psychoanalyst.
This exercise, as Bergson (1946) has shown, consists in overcoming our
utilitarian perception of the world to reach a disinterested perception of it,
not as a means to satisfy our interests, but simply for the fact that it is the
world, as if it were to rise up before us for the first time. ‘True philosophy’,
said Merleau-Ponty (1960), ‘is relearning to see the world’.
    This ‘philosophical’ attitude thus appears as a transformation of percep-
tion. Marcus Aurelius (Hadot, 1996) argues that perceiving things as for-
eign means transforming one’s gaze so as to have the impression of seeing
it for the first time, becoming free of habit and banality. It is an exercise
aimed at making us overcome, once again, our particular partial point of
view to make us see things and personal existence in a cosmic and universal
                          Death, anxiety and metaphysical experience                          129



perspective, thus relocating ourselves in the immense event of the universe,
but also, you could say, in the mystery of existence.
   Let us consider our attitude, as psychoanalysts, to our patients’ narration
and their ‘being’ (Milanesi, 2022), or to Bion (1967), who advised
approaching the patient ‘without memory and desire’, with a negative
capacity which resembles epochè (Husserl, 1992), the inner monologue of
certain writers, fluctuating attention, the possibility of oneiric encounters in
the analytic field, where the invoking of reason to explain the world, the
patient and patient-analyst interaction represent only noise, an incursion of
that ruthless killer at work that Freud calls the death drive (Riva, 2022).
   How could we conceive of a secular, spiritual lifestyle nowadays? We
could think of it as a resolute intention to refine the quality of feelings,
thoughts and actions to tend towards feeling, thinking and acting for the




                                                                  ly
exclusive purpose of what engages us (Zolla, 2016) and not for any selfish




                                                            on
or altruistic gain, both egocentric. The aim could be to lose our individual-
ism and move towards an affirmation of the ‘being as such’.

                                                 e
                                              us
On death
                                           al

   Plato argued that philosophy is the exercise of death (Plato, 1966). By
                                       ci


that, he meant that the soul and the body need to be detached. This was not
                                 er



meant as the exercise of death, but as the exercise of the spiritual or intel-
                            m




lectual life, of the life of thought; it meant finding a form of knowledge dif-
                    om




ferent from knowledge of the senses.

     ‘Make every effort to keep the soul separate from the body, and get it used to
                -c




     collecting itself and withdrawing into itself away from every corporeal element,
         on




     and to remain there, as far as possible, in the present life, as in the future, alone
     in itself, intent on this liberation from the body as if from chains’ (ibid., p. 144).
     N




    For the soul, it means freeing itself, stripping itself of passions of the
senses, in order to acquire independence of thought. In fact, we would be
able to represent this spiritual exercise better if we understood it, again, as
an effort to be free of the partial passional point of view, that pertaining to
the senses and rise to a universal point of view.
    Plato, the Stoics, the Epicureans have always considered the exercise of
death as an exercise of life (Hadot, 2001). Meditation or thought or the exer-
cise of death is ultimately always an exercise of life and it is worth being clear
that practicing dying does not mean torturing the body; it is, again, the exer-
cise of dying to one’s individuality, to one’s passions, seeing things in a per-
spective of universality, which is different from what one may understand on
reading Plato superficially. The rejection of the body, then, would be the
rejection of that tiny object that we are, and, on closer inspection, it may not
even be a rejection, but an awareness of the fact that we are only a small part
130                                   Paolo Milanesi



of the whole and that there are far more important things, values that are
somehow absolute. This, however, does not imply a repulsion toward the
body (Hadot, 2002).
    What is striking about this profound consideration of Plato and of a con-
siderable number of ancient philosophers, is the relative lack of phenome-
nological descriptions of the subjectual process on an existential level. It is
as if the totality of the cognitive system of the phenomena described was
anchored to ‘ratio’ as the only viable way to explore the knowledge of the
world, without any supplantation by intense emotional experiences.
    It seems to me that Zolla (2016) and even earlier, Heidegger (1976), as
we will see, go down other paths, based less on ‘ratio’ and ‘logos’, tending
more towards the loss of individuality and the approach of the ‘Unity of the
Whole’. For Heidegger (1971), the essence of what has just been said lies




                                                                    ly
in the idea that preempting or anticipating death is a condition of authentic




                                                              on
existence. The consciousness of finitude must induce man to assume exis-
tence as it is. But Heidegger does not seek, as in ancient times, to eliminate

                                                     e
the anxiety of death; as we shall see, his philosophy is a ‘exercise of death’:
                                                  us
the authenticity of existence lies in the lucid projection of death, distin-
guishing being-towards-death from meditatio mortis (ibid). It may be that it
                                               al

is a feature of the modern world that has engaged thinkers such as Nietzsche
                                          ci


(1995), Rilke (2017), Kierkegaard (2020) and Goethe (2013). In other
                                      er



words, the idea that the awareness of existing is linked to anxiety and that
                                 m




the value of life, as Goethe said, in reality, consists of trembling in the face
of Ungeheure (roughly translated as the terrible, the prodigious or the mon-
                          om




strous); in any case, it is completely absent in Spinoza, Epicurus, the Stoics
and Plato (Hadot, 2002). It is crucial to remember, however, that Plato
                      -c




(1966) in the Republic, presenting philosophy as an ‘exercise of death’
                on




made an extremely important decision, of a very profound truth, which had
an immense influence on Western philosophy (Hadot, 2001).
            N




    Thus writes Montaigne (1953, p.110) in one of his most famous essays:
‘he who has learned to die, has unlearned to serve’.
    The thought of death impacts on the tone and level of our inner life pro-
moting the possibility of its transformation. This philosophical and psycho-
analytic theme is related to the idea of the infinite value of the present
moment to be lived as if it were the first and the last. According to Platonic
philosophy, it is not just a question of thinking about death, but of exercis-
ing death which, in reality, is an exercise of life, which leads to a conversion
accomplished with the totality of the soul:
      ‘As an eye which cannot be turned from darkness to light except by turning the
      whole body, at the same time, the faculty of apprehension must be detached
      from perishable things with the whole soul, until it becomes able to bear the
      sight of what ‘is’ […] Education is the art of directing this eye of the soul’
      (Plato, 1966; Repubblica p. 343).
                      Death, anxiety and metaphysical experience            131



    For our contemporaries, this devaluation of the sensible in favour of the
intelligible is hardly acceptable as it was probably hardly acceptable for
Plato’s contemporaries (Hadot, 2002); but Heidegger’s interpretation of
Plato’s thought can help make sense of it.


On the unity of human beings and on thinking

Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato’s soul as tension toward being

    In the perception that occurs through the senses, writes Heidegger
(1997), there is a seeing, a hearing, a tasting, but who sees and hears and
tastes? It would be terrible if there were ‘nobody’ who could, at the same




                                                             ly
time, see, hear and smell; if this were not possible, we would witness a frag-




                                                       on
mentation of the entire human being, which would be torn apart and lacer-
ated. The essence of man would be lost. If, on the other hand, there is

                                            e
‘someone’ and, therefore, the unity of the human being exists, we should
                                         us
ask ourselves how this is possible. Heidegger suggests that this unity can be
called soul and if we use this term, from the Greek ψυχή, psychè, we must
                                      al

understand it exactly as it is defined by the Greek terms of ἰδέα (idea as
                                  ci


‘unity’ and as a certain ‘thing seen’) and we may not understand it in any
                             er



other sense (ibid). In order to avoid a terrible dispersion in the various per-
                        m




cepts, there should be something like an ‘idea’. Plato, with the word idea,
means something related to his most intimate philosophical questioning,
                  om




something which opens and guides this questioning and defines the mean-
ing of ‘thinking’ as ‘learning through’, ‘taking one thing through the other
              -c




‘. There is a duplicity, in other words, a ‘welcoming’ of what is shown but
         on




also a ‘questioning’ in relation to something. The idea would be the means
to grasp the essence of it; in a nutshell, to say that a certain thing is, for
     N




example, a book, is possible thanks to the idea of a book that allows us to
grasp the essence of the book itself. Thinking, in this sense, thinks of the
being of things, even without knowing it, and has little what to do with
thinking as it is understood today, as a function of ratio; the latter is not at
all thinking in the sense that Plato strives to define, in developing the doc-
trine of ideas, as the essence of thinking (ibid).
    In short, the general meaning of the word idea can be understood as ‘that
which is sighted, precisely in its being sighted’ (ibid. p. 205). This seeing
and such sight are not to be understood as the sensible seeing of eyes. This
‘sight’ and this alone can pick up on something that has a certain aspect, that
is present in its unity in this or that way.
    This unity does not arise from, with and through single perceptions, it is
something that is already there. Plato says that this unitary area of possible
apprehension of the percept which we always have before us, we can call
132                                     Paolo Milanesi



‘soul’. So, what is the soul? The ‘soul’ is what envisages this unitary ambit of
apprehendability, which can perceive and which, in perceiving, assumes the
percipient/percept relation. The nature of the soul, understood in this way, is
characterised by relating to, it is extended towards; the relationship is the soul
itself (ibid., p. 208). The soul is such by virtue of the fact that it only gives
itself the ‘through’ in the form of organs through which we perceive every-
thing that is generally perceptible. Only in this way can a physical body
become a human body. The human body, which in one respect is a physical
body, is such only because it identifies with a soul; the opposite is not true,
that is, that a soul can be formed into a physical body. The soul does not stand
on its own, with – and almost attached to it - a thread that descends to things.
Soul is a name indicating a relationship with the being of things and in a
sense, we could say that ‘the soul is the body and the body is soul’.




                                                                        ly
    In interpreting Plato’s Theaetetus, Heidegger (1997) suggests imagining




                                                                  on
lying on the grass while looking at the blue sky and simultaneously hearing
the song of a lark.

                                                       e
                                                    us
      ‘Color and sound are displayed through a ‘view’. We apprehend both. But what
      do we apprehend about both? Do we not apprehend of both, through the senses,
                                                 al

      that both ‘are’? For example, that one, with respect to the other, is always anoth-
                                             ci


      er, but with respect to itself, it is identical?’ (ibid., p. 216).
                                        er



    One, being, is a different object for the other, but for itself, it is the same
                                   m




object. Both are apprehended as ‘existent’ and on this basis, is it possible to
                           om




apprehend color and sound as different and identical entities, and in this way,
we can also apprehend being equal and unequal. Conversely, if both present
to us as different, we have already apprehended both as ‘existent’, whether we
                       -c




know it or not. Therefore, something extra is to be learned, in a manner of
                on




speaking, and everything that can be built on being and non-being, being-
            N




identical and being-other, and so on, belongs to this extra; all the concrete
characters which, implicitly, always presuppose ‘being’. In other words, if I
say that a pillow is white, it is not the white that constitutes its being, but the
ability to define it as white, which presupposes an earlier being.
    This learning takes place through the soul, in its passage through itself.
In order to apprehend being, non-being, equal being, otherness and the like,
the soul passes through itself without using any psychic quality, it is in itself
what the unitary ambit of learnability envisages. It is in itself, by its very
nature, reaching towards something other, that may be given it, and it is
continually, solely tensed; the soul is, therefore, ‘tension to being’ (ibid.).
    For the first time, the exercise of pure thought is given a name by Plato
that will be preserved throughout ancient tradition: ‘greatness of mind’. The
greatness of mind is the fruit of the universality of thought that tends to think
and to grasp the being of things, and all the speculative and contemplative
work of the philosopher thus becomes a spiritual exercise to the extent that,
                         Death, anxiety and metaphysical experience                      133



by elevating thought to the perspective of the whole, it is freed from the illu-
sion of individuality (Hadot, 2002). Marcus Aurelius (1986, p. 134):

     ‘Do not just co-breathe the air around you any longer, but, from now on, co-
     think with a thought that is all embracing. Since the power of thought is no less
     diffuse everywhere, it insinuates no less into every being capable of letting it
     penetrate, than the air into one who is able to breathe it… an immense field will
     open up before you, since you embrace with your thought the totality of the uni-
     verse, you traverse the eternity of duration.’

    It is evidently on this level that we can say one dies to one’s individuality
in order to access both the interiority of consciousness and the universality
of the thought of the whole, which, I will attempt to show, is the acceptance
of being.




                                                                ly
                                                          on
Being towards death
                                               e
                                            us
     Why do we believe it important to investigate the existential meaning of
death, the final moments of a human being?
                                         al

     My aim is to highlight the deeply evolutionary significance inherent in
                                     ci


the process of discovering one’s death as a possible event.
                                er



     Please note the following points: i) the meaning of ‘existence’ in the ety-
                           m




mological sense is not equivalent to the meaning of ‘reality’ as has been
maintained over the centuries by traditional ontology, based on the concept
                   om




of ‘being as a simple presence’; existence means ‘possibility of being’; ii)
the terms ‘Dasein’ and ‘human being’ are generally considered synony-
               -c




mous, likewise the terms ‘object’ and ‘entity’.
         on




     Dasein, as long as it is, brings with it a ‘not-yet’ which will be; a constant
deficit, a ‘non-totality’ which only death puts an end to, and, in addition,
      N




Dasein has always existed in such a way that the not-yet belongs to it even
if it has yet to become, that is, be what it is not yet (Heidegger 1971). A con-
crete example will make what we have said more comprehensible: the
unripe fruit ‘moves towards’ ripening. But in this ripening process, what is
not yet, is not gradually added as if it were something not present. The fruit
itself moves towards ripening in such a way that this moving-towards is in
the nature of being fruit. Whatever is added cannot, of itself, cancel the
unripe state of the fruit if the fruit itself does not proceed toward its ripen-
ing. The not yet of the unripe state does not mean the absence of something
extrinsic which, indifferent to the fruit, can simply be added to it. The not-
yet constitutes the fruit in its particular state of being. The fruit itself, when
ripening, is the unripe state. The not-yet is already included in its being, and
not fortuitously, but as its constituent element. Similarly, Dasein, as long as
it is, is always, already its not-yet, its possibility of being insofar as it exists.
134                               Paolo Milanesi



     Whatever constitutes ‘non-totality’ in the human being, one’s permanent
ahead-of-himself is not something which has not-yet-become-accessible,
but a not yet that Dasein, insofar as it is the entity that it is, always has to
be (ibid.).
     Can we say that death is the end of Dasein? Yes, but we must clarify
some basic points. The death of Dasein cannot be characterized by an end-
ing that is valid for other objects connoted as mere presences; it is not a dis-
solution, a coming to completion. The death of a human being is not ade-
quately delineated by any of these ways of ending.
     Dasein, in the same way that, as long as it is, is already constantly its
not-yet, is also therefore always already its end. The ending proper of death
does not mean a being at the end of Dasein, but a being-for-the-end on the
part of this entity. Death is a way of being that Dasein assumes as soon as




                                                             ly
it is. Human beings, at birth, are already old enough to die and this phenom-




                                                        on
enon is placed on an existential level (ibid.).
     Death is by no means something not yet accomplished, it is not an ulti-

                                                 e
mate deficit, but, is first and foremost, a looming existential imminence, the
                                              us
way of being in which the human being is for-his-death.
     Every Dasein must face death alone. To the extent that death ‘is’, it is
                                           al

always essentially ‘my’ death which must be faced alone. In this case what
                                      ci


is at stake for Dasein is being purely and simply in the world. Death is, for
                                  er



Dasein, the possibility of no-longer-being there (in an existential sense) and
                              m




since, in this case, Dasein is incumbent on itself, it defers completely to the
more real able-to be. Dasein does not create this possibility except occa-
                       om




sionally in the course of its life. If Dasein exists, it is also already ‘thrown’
into this possibility. Dasein tends to have no explicit or even theoretical
                   -c




‘knowledge’ that it is consigned to death and that it therefore is part of its
              on




being-in-the-world. The being thrown into death reveals itself to him in the
most original and penetrating way in the emotional state of anxiety (ibid).
           N




     Anxiety in the face of death is therefore anxiety ‘before’ one’s own being
possible. One’s own being possible can also be generated in the face of
other experiences, such as for example a successful mirroring of oneself
which may generate a distressing circle of discovery of one’s being in the
world; in fact, human beings become distressed to discover their being in
the world and their ‘pure and simple being possible’ which is also inevitably
the ‘being towards one’s own death’. Anxiety should not be confused with
fear of death; anxiety is by no means a depressive, contingent, casual emo-
tional state of the individual. Since anxiety is the basic emotional condition
of Dasein, it is Dasein’s way into its existence as a being thrown for its own
end into one’s own, authentic being possible. Thus, the difference becomes
clearer between being-towards-death as opposed to simply passing, pure
ceasing to live, and finally the ‘lived experience’ of death.
     Being-for-the-end is not the result of sudden, occasional deliberation,
                          Death, anxiety and metaphysical experience                         135



but I would re-assert that it is an essential part of being in the world of
Dasein, and is revealed thanks to anxiety (ibid). The observation that, in
fact, many men do not know anything about death in this sense cannot be
adduced as proof that being-towards-death does not belong universally to
human beings, but rather serves as proof of the fact that Dasein, generally
speaking, conceals this experience by fleeing from it and taking refuge in
an inauthentic life, trivialising anxiety as a fear and weakness that should
not be in the nature of a self-confident human being (Heidegger, 1976).


The metaphysical experience

    Heidegger has shown us that through anxiety, our own being possible is




                                                                  ly
realised, the very real acceptance of one’s being in the world and, therefore,




                                                           on
the pure and simple ‘being possible’ of human beings. We could also say:
‘finding oneself in one’s own being which simply is’. Taking Elèmire

                                                e
Zolla’s work (2016) it is interesting to explore the possible processuality of
                                             us
this anxiety and with it the becoming of the pure and simple being that sim-
ply is, if one can reach it.
                                          al

    When perceiving and the percept, the subject and the object, merge and
                                      ci


absorb each other, what can be defined as a ‘metaphysical experience’ (ibid)
                                 er



takes place. This experience is well represented in poetry, for example it is
                            m




the sea into which Leopardi of the Infinite and the Solitary Life (2016) gen-
tly sinks:
                    om




     ‘Then I sit so motionless I almost lose myself, and forget the world: and it seems
               -c




     to me my limbs are so still, no spirit or feeling can ever stir them again, and their
         on




     primal calm is merged with the silence of the place.’
     N




    ‘Metaphysical experience’, a name that should not be confused with the
thing, is a statement that Elèmire Zolla (2016) adopts to define this ‘mistak-
ing of the I with the being’, which Leopardi allows us to glimpse in exis-
tence, thanks to his admirable poetic synthesis.
    The metaphysical experience is achievable only by disengaging from
everything that normally keeps us bound to an existence based on the reality
of the ego cogito, to get to dwell ec-statically in the truth of being, where
simplicity reigns (Heidegger, 1976 ), and where the ‘unified’ human being
can affirm ‘I am’, but no longer ‘I am this’, ‘I am that’; not because he has
suffered a loss, on the contrary, he has achieved vertiginous growth, in fact,
when ‘I am’ can become ‘I am being’, we witness the flowing of contact
with simple and pure being, deconstructing and allowing thought to enter
into a questioning capable of attempting and allowing oneself be involved
in the ‘thing’ of thought, abandoning the fear of crashing into ‘the thing’
itself and sinking: there is an abyss between ‘philosophising’ about sinking
136                                      Paolo Milanesi



and letting our thoughts actually sink (ivi, p. 75). At the same time, the sub-
ject-object dichotomy is overcome to go beyond it, to where the sensations
of the world exist, but the individual does not suffer them, does not oppose
them, simply notices how they emerge and disappear, without intervening
with feelings and judgments, without contaminating them with gossip and
comments (Zolla, 2016);

       ‘And the truth of being will perhaps acquire language and that thought will be
       its expression and at that point perhaps language will become ‘silence’ and not
       a hasty enunciator of chatter’ (Heidegger, 1976).

      Plotinus writes (1997, p. 285):




                                                                          ly
       ‘You were already the whole, but, since something extra has been added to you




                                                                   on
       over the whole, you have become less than the whole by the addition. This addi-
       tion was not positive (after all, what can you add to something that is all?), it
       was entirely negative. Whoever becomes someone is no longer the whole; it

                                                         e
       adds a negation to it. And this lasts until the negation is discarded. Therefore,
                                                      us
       you grow by removing all that is other from the whole: if you remove it, the
       whole will be present to you… It needs to come, to be present. If it is not pres-
                                                   al

       ent, it is because you have distanced yourself from it. Distancing yourself does
       not mean leaving to go elsewhere, since it is there; but means turning away from
                                              ci


       it, when it is present’.
                                         er
                                     m




      And further:
                             om




       ‘We must not think of a particular form, we must strip the soul of a particular
       form, discard all things. Then, in a momentary flash, the metamorphosis of the
                        -c




       ego takes place: ‘then the seer no longer sees his object, because, in that instant,
                  on




       he no longer distinguishes himself from it; he no longer represents two things,
       but somehow has become something else, no longer itself or to itself but one
             N




       with one, as the centre of a circle coincides with another centre’ (ivi, p. 435).

   We notice a kind of explosion and total loss of individuality.
   When we identify with the cosmos, we overcome the innate abstract ter-
ror that lies at the root of our being, we eradicate the torment that arises
from feeling surrounded by a universal, indistinct, terrifying disorientation,
and sense of alienness. Only by becoming one with the cosmos can we
emerge from anxiety. Under penalty of falling into psychiatric diagnoses or,
even more simplistically, attributing the cause of this torment to an unsatis-
fied need for love; it should be noted that the only adequate love is the one
that erases the person, in some respects canceling them, and fuses them with
the cosmos (Zolla, 2016).
   I believe that in these reflections, we can intuit the seed of a
projection/possible becoming from the Heideggerian ‘thrown-ness’ and
from the anxiety related to contact with one’s pure and simple being.
                      Death, anxiety and metaphysical experience           137



    Let us now consider other cultures and other worlds.
    Our conventions exclude from the norm the habit of entering different psy-
chic states, such as the trans that allows the Balinese to penetrate her flesh
with Kriss without causing bleeding, or as happens in some exercises in
southern India, where one can be pierced without pain and walk freely on
burning embers (ibid.). Most of our certainties and convictions topple if we
observe certain phenomena, such as the idea that there is a clear and objective
demarcation between health and disease. If anything, we can define physical
health as the state of the body that allows the psyche to open up to a pure
awareness of being, and the psyche, in turn, can be said to enjoy health when
it spontaneously transforms into such awareness. Jung (2004) noted that
Buddhists favor hallucinations, making them complex works of art, in order
to break the yoke of an illusory ‘world-consistent sanity’ and argued that even




                                                             ly
mental dissociations and schizoid states are part of meditation.




                                                       on
    From the perspective of a metaphysical experience, mental illness is
often a sign that one has dared to raise profound questions about being in

                                            e
the world without fully realising it, without identifying the right formula-
                                         us
tion. Illness is like a shadow with the light behind it; the madman dared to
knock on the door that opens onto the higher levels of being and pays for
                                      al

the audacity of having glimpsed them unprepared. The distance of meta-
                                  ci


physical experience from ordinary life can terrify, or perhaps, as Heidegger
                             er



(1971) claims, always terrifies through a sense of anxiety. When the possi-
                        m




ble illuminative sense of obsessions and compulsions is revealed, the dis-
ease is seen as a sequence of signifiers from which the signified is subtract-
                 om




ed and which consequently opens the doors to the ‘significance’ that lies
before the opposition signifier/signified. Yes, because the condition of pres-
              -c




ence to one’s pure and simple being is the place of ‘significance’, the base
        on




from which man begins to ‘signify’ the world by giving expression to being
(Milanesi, 2022), thus building his own way of being in the world, his
     N




‘identity construct’, behind which a pure and simple being is concealed,
whose contact terrifies because it is the other side of the coin of ‘nothing-
ness’, in its turn, the source of being. Therefore, any phenomenal experi-
ence of contact at this level exposes one to the terror of ‘nothingness’, the
terror of not existing. Thus, psychosis may be seen as an access into this
level of being and therefore an unconscious request for knowledge that
forces patients and those around them to face questions that daily life nor-
mally suffocates and hides.
    Some speak of ‘Implicit Psychosis’ or ‘White Psychosis’ (Green, 1992)
founded on ‘psychic structures’ oriented towards a state of hyper-normaliza-
tion, a constitutive and ineliminable state in humans which is comparable to
anxiety. The ‘mad’ alternative is that the madman is out there (Riva, 2022).
    Non-dualistic truth looks like chaos, and defenses are erected to hide it
from view. When a fissure opens in the defences and metaphysical reality is
138                                Paolo Milanesi



glimpsed beyond them, one rushes to fill the crack with an ideology or a
delirium. But for an instant something is seen, a revelation is conferred, a
window is opened. The paranoid who the instant intuit their rigid ‘world
system’, or the schizophrenics who for the first time abandon themselves to
their hallucinations, knowing that it is ‘their own delirium’, can experience
the thrill of revelation, like Dostoevsky’s auras during his seizures (Zolla,
2016). If they are subsequently cured, the truth emerges as the motionless
pillar of stillness, also the source of a possible subversion, Unity. Are men-
tal disorders perhaps attempts to investigate unity? The apathy of the schiz-
ophrenic could be a paradoxical reaction to the painful issue of one’s open-
ness to the sway of the outside world. Paranoia would guarantee a recursive
circularity to explain the universe. Delirium would bring order to the chaos
of existence. The patient who perceives his mental processes as alien and




                                                              ly
feels influenced and invaded by thoughts that appear to be extraneous




                                                         on
forces cast into his inner world, is one step away from the enlightenment
where mental processes become objects among other objects in the external

                                                  e
world (ibid.). The loss of a sense of identity is a step towards metaphysical
                                               us
experience: it could be avoided by addressing the anxiety and disorientation
that accompany it. The estrangement typical of certain mental illnesses
                                            al

could be an excellent starting point for the metaphysical experience. Could
                                       ci


it not be that contractures or hysterical convulsions anesthetise the body as
                                   er



in the Indian exercises mentioned above? All they lack is the metaphysical
                               m




goal. Schizophrenia discloses profound metaphysical truths, such as the fact
that Unity confers unity to the smallest parts of the existent (ibid.); things
                        om




do not exist for themselves but by virtue of the unity that ontologically pre-
cedes them and is projected onto them (Heidegger taught us that the being
                    -c




of things precedes the simply present thing, which is the conditio sine qua
               on




non of the existence of simple presence itself) (Milanesi, 2022). If these
stimuli are unfamiliar, patients are overcome with dismay when, for exam-
           N




ple, they see the face in front of them not as a complete and expressive total-
ity but see only an eye, a tuft of hair, a lobe, a pore, and are astonished, inert,
or tremble with dread at those details that loom so large and are overwhelm-
ing. (Zolla, 2016).
    At this point it might be useful to trace a connection between what has
been said so far on an existential phenomenological level and what we can
call ‘psychological thought’. Perhaps psychology, in the sense of psy-
chotherapeutic treatment, or treatment through words, came into existence
when philosophy at a certain point in its historical evolution abandoned its
ancient origins and, from being the exercise of life and spiritual exercise, it
became the profession of teaching and the theoretical systematization of the
world, losing interest in life itself to become only theoretical knowledge and
has settled on a terrain that, day by day, is eroded by the sciences.
Philosophy has therefore evaded the question that human beings have
                      Death, anxiety and metaphysical experience            139



always sought an answer to, the question of the meaning of one’s being in
the world, of one’s existence, of one’s being born, growing up, working,
producing, consuming, growing old and dying; a life cycle that often flows
by without identifying or following any profound or recognizable trace of
oneself, and which leads one to say: ‘I have chosen to live like this’ and ‘I
have given expression to this with my life’. We all suffer from this failure
and perhaps through suffering we may discover on opening onto the prob-
lematisation of the meaning of one’s existence; it is a problematisation to
which we would naturally be inclined given that we have a conscience, but
instead we live unthinking lives which we do not pay the slightest attention
to, dulling our presence to ourselves through work and the escape routes
that society, in a thousand ways, provides, or we are left to suffer the pain
of an unanswered question.




                                                             ly
    In the first case, the question is interred and no one is concerned with it,




                                                       on
also because we, in the first place, are not concerned with it; work, con-
sumption, family, sex, football, TV, Facebook, Instagram etc., and life pass-
es by without too many questions.
                                            e
                                         us
    In the second case, when the question of meaning will not leave us in
peace and keeps returning, explicitly or through various crises, we find a
                                      al

possible answer through so-called ‘psychological thinking’, which, in my
                                  ci


opinion, may be classified and categorised as psychopathology.
                             er



    So, either one goes to the pharmacy for an antidepressant - naturally only
                        m




on medical advice - or one goes into psychotherapy, either to adapt to the
world we live in, since one cannot change the world, or to find oneself and
                  om




find what is causing emotional pain, respectively.
    No one knows the answer to the ‘meaning of life’ but it is one thing not
              -c




to have answers, it is quite another to move further and further from the real
         on




problem whose roots are precisely in this great existential dilemma into
which we could venture, at the very least recognizing it as the origin of our
     N




manifest discomfort; and it is another to move concretely towards a resolu-
tion of the discomfort itself and symptomatologic suffering, considered as
annoying obstacles to a ‘happy life’ instead of manifestations of deeper
meanings.
    ‘Psychological thought’ proposes intervention through the use of various
forms of psychotherapy. Interventions vary from proposals for adaptation
(cognitivism) urging us to adjust our ideas and reduce our cognitive disso-
nances in order to create more in harmony in the context we live in, to pro-
posals for the adaptation of our conduct (behavioralism) which follow the
same direction as above in preferring adjustment; this is regardless of one’s
feelings and ideas and experiences which, if discordant, are tolerated only
if confined to the private sphere and cultivated as an eccentricity, only pro-
vided they have no public repercussions. Thus we have a paradox in which
authenticity, being oneself, knowing oneself, which the ancient oracle of
140                               Paolo Milanesi



Delphi indicated as the way to health of the soul, is seen as pathological,
just as being self-centered or being unable to adapt, problems to which
behaviorism and cognitivism are able to give concrete answers to through
the acquisition of techniques that reposition man at the level of a perform-
ance required by society. It therefore appears evident that ‘being oneself’
and not giving up the specificity of one’s identity is pathological. In fact,
both cognitivism and behaviorism, as conformity psychologies, assume
compliance as their ideal of health, which, from an existential point of view,
is the typical trait of disease. For their part, people take on board the models
on which cognitivism and behaviorism are based and reject any in-depth
individuative study that is not functional to the world they live in.
    Psychoanalysis, or perhaps we should say ‘psychoanalyses’, which are
also expressions of ‘psychological thought’, move in the direction of inves-




                                                             ly
tigating oneself, one’s deepest self. In a nutshell, this is accomplished by




                                                        on
drawing attention to the extent to which we have tricked ourselves into
seeking compromises between our inalienable desires, and the limits and

                                                 e
demands made on us from the outside which we cannot flee from, retracing,
                                              us
in a way, the story of our progressive, deep, implicit adaptive movements.
If analysis works well, it sheds light on this aspect, but it also sheds light on
                                           al

what we do not want or cannot accept about ourselves, on what ‘compen-
                                      ci


sates’ for our weaknesses that we never wanted to consider, and also, final-
                                  er



ly, on what is a true ‘expression’ of ourselves that we have not yet had the
                              m




courage to express. If well conducted, all psychotherapies achieve their
goal, whether with patients who prefer not to analyse themselves deeply,
                       om




and are satisfied with finding a suitable way to adapt, whether with those
who wish to delve more deeply into themselves independently of adapta-
                   -c




tion. In any case, the more deeply one delves into self-knowledge, however
              on




much one may have adapted to society and have overcome this or that
symptomatic pain, the more one comes into contact with the very essence
           N




of pain that can never disappear but can only be ‘accepted’ because it is
bound to the meaning of one’s existence, of one’s ‘being thrown into the
world’. For those who touch this deep level there is no remedy in the phar-
macy and perhaps not even in psychotherapies and psychoanalyses. None
of us inhabit the world as such, rather, we inhabit ‘our own vision’ of the
world; Being-there, in fact, is ‘being in the world’. Further, a sense of our
existence cannot be found if we do not first clarify a vision of the world
which is responsible for our way of thinking and acting, of rejoicing and
suffering. Can psychotherapy tackle this? Can this be extracted from
between the lines of a request for psychotherapeutic help? Certainly, such a
request can manifest itself in infinite forms and should not be listed and
classified in psychopathology in a nosographic sense. Someone who makes
this request, which is, on close inspection, most of mankind, is not ‘sick’,
but is looking for meaning. It would be interesting to study the possible evo-
                      Death, anxiety and metaphysical experience            141



lution of psychotherapies (in particular those psychoanalytically oriented)
towardss forms of ‘existential treatment’. This paper would like to be a first
step in this direction.
    Similarly, it would be interesting to undertake a study of psychopathol-
ogy from a phenomenological and existential point of view. I have only
touched on this aspect here. A huge task. Therefore, I will simply reiterate
my belief that the root of all distress is bound to one’s ‘being in the world’,
the origin of the very sense of being.
    Therefore, so that psychopathology (also nosographic psychopathology)
and a phenomenological-existential vision do not remain confined to being
different and irreconcilable hermeneutics, we must clearly focus on the fact
that there is an underlying sense of being in psychopathology (classical psy-
chopathology) which is mis-understood as the very essence of psy-




                                                             ly
chopathology, whereas what we call psychopathology, as this paper argues,




                                                       on
is in its essence an existential malaise which is as yet unrecognised as such.


                                            e
                                         us
Wakefulness and sleep
                                      al

    On the divide between wakefulness and sleep, upon waking or in drowsi-
                                  ci


ness, a trace of the sleeping being hovers above both wakefulness and
                             er



dreaming; this torpor persists or is heralded as an indeterminate, unified, uni-
                        m




versal being, beyond identification and without either positive or negative
emotion, and yet it has consistency, a ‘how’ rather than a ‘something’. So,
                  om




there it is; the metaphysical experience can also be viewed as the flow of this
experience that is somehow present in sleep without dreams (ibid.).
              -c




    On close inspection, wakefulness is permeated with drowsiness; it gazes
         on




discontinuously on a background of sleep. Normal work and inspired work
are both performed in a dreamy, enraptured, ‘sleepy’ state. When we are in
     N




this state of apparent non-presence, where are we? One can be efficient
while being, apparently, elsewhere, lucid beyond reflected attention. In this
enthusiastic impetus, one could say that the most intense vigil matches the
deepest sleep. One could exclaim: ‘I have lost the notion of space and time’,
a commonplace of lovers, of sportsmen during a performance, of artists,
perhaps even of the psychoanalyst who is about to capture a patient’s
essence, or anyone who is so engrossed in what they are doing that they are
like sleepwalkers caught in ecstatic rapture. The term ecstatic or ‘standing
outside’ for Heidegger (1971) is the meaning of existence, the ex-sistere of
human life in its ‘ecstatic’ nature, exposed to its ‘not yet’, which is to say,
that in ecstasy one is in a state of ‘possibility of being’. Could this ‘I of
sleep’ be the ideal identity? Freeing ourselves from the idea that self-aware-
ness is superior to abandonment and possibility? On the other hand, being
precedes consciousness ontologically; how many times have we found our-
142                                     Paolo Milanesi



selves, as psychoanalysts in sessions, but also in everyday life, once the
noises of reason have been removed, immersed in oneiric thoughts in wake-
fulness (Bion, 1967) which always, distant and faint, accompany us con-
stituently as a possibility of being.

      ‘In the metaphysical experience there is a being that slightly transcends the state
      of deep sleep which it asymptotically approaches’ (Zolla, 2016; p. 47).

    Those who meditate, eyes closed, immersed in an experience where
everything and nothing merge, are not dissimilar to those who venerate
nature, enraptured, eyes wide with ‘ecstasy’ at the landscape, swallowed up,
nullified in space. In both cases, identification with a daily way of being
ceases, and as one gradually dis-identifies with it, it becomes difficult to




                                                                         ly
distinguish interiority or, the opposite, a projection into exteriority, or to say




                                                                  on
whether objects are located inside or outside the epidermis. The adoration
of nature is a metaphysical experience where, although there is a certain

                                                        e
separation from nature, there is no difference in meaning between getting
                                                     us
lost in interior or exterior space (ibid.). In turning their attention and mov-
ing towards objects that are in the so-called external world, human beings
                                                  al

do not leave the inner sphere in which they are initially enclosed; Dasein,
                                             ci


by virtue of its primary way of being, is already always ‘outside’ the object
                                        er



it encounters in a world that is already always open. Pausing at an unknown
entity does not mean abandoning the internal sphere, since, even being out-
                                    m




side at the object, Dasein is clearly inside; that is, it exists as a being in the
                            om




world it knows. And, again, the acquisition of the known is not a return to
the ‘enclosure’ of consciousness with its conquered prey, since even in
                       -c




learning, preserving and retaining, the knowing human being, the Dasein,
                 on




remains outside (ex-sistere) (Heidegger, 1971).
    The fusion can be described as immersion in interiority or as losing one-
            N




self in external nature, and the subject is able to experience it as a state of
blissful and dreamy stillness, or as a challenging goal, or in other ways, but
in and of itself it is a pure, naked presence.

      ‘Whose presence? A naked presence is not an entity entrenched in itself, in its sep-
      arateness: it is everyone and no one. Presence to whom? To another naked pres-
      ence, which mirrors it and is mirrored by it, and which is the totality of being,
      whose body is the universe , whose creation is nature’ (Zolla, 2016; p. 48).

     It would be interesting to explore how far this idea of presence differs
from the concept of ‘presence’ in Michele Minolli’s work (2015), but this is
not the place; here, I will simply say that presence, in the Minollian sense,
keeps its referent solidly in the I-Subject (ibid.), perhaps for fear of ‘losing
it’, but in so doing, does not open the way to becoming in the being which
simply is, and which dwells outside the dichotomous distinction of subject
                         Death, anxiety and metaphysical experience                     143



and object and beyond an understanding based on logos and ratio. Perhaps
we should talk of ‘presence to being’ and not ‘presence to the self’.
    This cursory sketch deserves a more detailed study. Here, we could use-
fully mention a temporal point of view on presence, a ‘temporal presence’.
One can stand before a simple presence just for the sake of standing before
it, nothing more; this phenomenon would be ‘curiosity’ in its most basic
sense. To be sure, this attraction towards something new is a pull towards
something hitherto unseen, in such a way that the presence (in the sense of
present time) seeks to avoid any possible expectations. In this sense, curios-
ity refers, completely inauthentically, to the ‘possibility of being’ (which
implicitly and essentially has future reference) so that a ‘possibility’ is not
expected, but in the longing a ‘false presence’ is created based on the expec-
tation of something, but something that we continually flee from




                                                                ly
(Heidegger, 1971).




                                                          on
    There is, therefore, a modification of the expectation in continuous pur-
suit, a modification which takes place in fleeting present time; this is the

                                               e
temporal existential condition of dispersion where one is never oneself. A
                                            us
sort of dispersive inability to pause or linger that gets tangled up in itself
and assumes the characteristic of never-being-still.
                                         al
                                     ci


     ‘This mode of present is diametrically opposed to the ‘moment’. In that, Dasein
                                er



     is everywhere and nowhere. This, on the other hand, brings existence into the
     situation and unlocks the authentic Da (There)…’ (ivi, p. 650).
                           m
                   om




     ‘Curiosity is stimulated not by the endless expanse of what we have not yet
     seen, but by a projective form of temporalisation belonging to the present that
     springs forth and flees…’ (ivi, p. 651).
               -c
         on




    Thrown into being-towards-death, Dasein reacts by fleeing in the face of
this being thrown. The present springs forth fleeing from its authentic future
     N




and from its having been authentic. In other words, being overwhelmed by
being-thrown in the world, one loses oneself in the ‘world’; a phenomenon
I would call ‘flight into the present’.

     ‘The present, which is an existential sense of overwhelming involvement, for its
     part never reaches any other ecstatic horizon, unless, in deciding, it recovers
     from perdition and can, staying in the moment, unlock its situation and with it
     the original ‘borderline-case’ of being-towards-death’ (ivi, p. 651 652).

    It would be interesting in another work to investigate the clinical repercus-
sions of this phenomenon of flight in the present, and in particular, the signif-
icance of the ‘here and now’ of the ‘moments’ of a patient-analyst session.
    Could metaphysical experience be the acknowledgment of Dasein,
which, let us not forget, is always in relation to one’s being, to one’s being
in the world as the original condition of the thrown-ness taken in the pres-
144                                  Paolo Milanesi



ent? In metaphysical experience, we overcome anxiety which, by ‘disori-
enting’, unlocks Dasein, and lays it bare before its own being in the world
as such.
    I spoke earlier of the ‘unconscious identity construct’ that is, the result
of the stabilisation of a way of being and living in the world following the
meanings assigned to Heidegger’s thrown-ness and from nothingness.
However, identity is not to be understood as something ultimate that can
constitute an essence, it is always a question of ‘content’ of which we can
say that ‘it is mine, but it is not me’. There is being, and there is ‘the being
which is’ (the soul which is tension towards being);
    JG Fichte (Zolla, 2016) began his lessons by saying:
      ‘Gentlemen, look at the wall!’. And after a pause: ‘gentlemen, look at your-




                                                                  ly
      selves looking at the wall!’




                                                             on
    Some of the listeners, acting as disembodied witnesses, may have been
surprised and have thought: ‘Who is looking at the wall?’. We could say that
                                                    e
once the being that is, the soul in its tension towards being, has obtained
                                                 us
detachment, rest follows; this state whose referent is being, pure witness to
the fact that it ‘is’, through its mere presence acts, but, at the ‘unconscious
                                              al

identity construct’ level, anxious terror may be unleashed (instead of calm)
                                          ci


for the imminence of the loss of identity itself. If there is insufficient stabil-
                                     er



ity, that distance will not be borne and will become intolerable. The soul,
                                 m




within the body and the self, repeats incessantly: ‘I am not this body, this
                          om




identity, this content’. These moods, feelings, images, thoughts are outside
me, ‘they are mine, they are not me’; this simple statement of truth will lead
to the separation of the soul (of the being that is) from the content, which
                     -c




includes, as I said, that same unconscious identity.
                on




    It is easy to imagine in these experiences which herald the loss of one’s
            N




individuality, that psychopathology would ascribe to them the phenomena
of de-realisation or de-personalisation, misrepresenting the deep meanings
of being-in-the-world which evidently assume different tones and dimen-
sions if studied from a phenomenological and existential perspective.


Conclusions

   There is a procedural passage in existence: the vehicle is anxiety, and the
shores through which it moves are the world closed in on itself, and the
‘universal’ world. In the first world, the other is in terms of the self; in the
second world, the other is, initially, for the self, and subsequently, in the
processuality, is lost, just as the self is lost, in the sense that there is no
longer a referent that ‘loses or holds’ and located at the ‘centre’, but both
are part of a whole that ‘is’; the other is lost together with the self, and both
                         Death, anxiety and metaphysical experience                        145



strangers finding themselves, are free to be.
    One can ‘disengage’ or ‘emancipate oneself’ from the other using ‘for-
mulas’ that imply false ‘separations’, where one is always ‘in terms’ of the
other, by opposition or by removal or a split. Another possibility is keeping
the other in a prospect of the Whole and of the universal being, as the
ancient philosophers themselves indicated.
    To do this, however, it is necessary to put a stop to the tendency to seek
certainty in the presence of the other, of the object, but giving up ‘believing’
in objects implies abandoning subjectivity, abandoning the ‘unconscious
identity construct’. Only by discarding our form and our name will we
attain the truth, as Shakespeare (1997) explained in Richard II:

     ‘whatever I am,




                                                                ly
     neither me nor anyone who is only a man




                                                          on
     will ever be satisfied with anything, until
     he is appeased by being nothing’.


                                               e
                                            us
   or Edmond Jabès (1989):
                                         al

     ‘I had to understand him, follow him step by step, in his wandering as a beggar
     and to succeed, I had to erase my life with the stroke of a pen; so long as listen-
                                     ci


     ing requires self-abandonment to its advantage.
                                er



     -Renunciation of oneself?
     -The uniform erasure of body and soul. Reaching for nothing.
                            m




     -To dissolve into nothing and disappear forever?
                    om




     - Count on nothing. Finally being nobody.
     Finding the origin which is emptiness. From the beginning.
     Nothing is the key. It opens onto the unknown.
               -c




     Oh nothing, before the sun.
         on




     Birth of man’.
     N




    Even Heidegger thinks that being is the other face of nothing, consider-
ing man guilty in its foundation as being the null foundation of a nullity
(Heidegger, 1971); being and nothingness coincide on this original level,
just as absolute individuality and absolute universality coincide in the
‘monad’ of metaphysical experience, which cannot be ‘touched’ by any
word. Words are signifiers that can denote certain meanings but not the sig-
nification itself which, as we have said, is more original and is located
beyond the opposition of signified and signifier (Zolla, 2016).
    It is the signified that brings the thing to our notice and pulls it from
nothingness drawing on the significance inherent in being thrown; Dasein
is, or signifies, and the things come to life and so ‘they are’ in their turn, and
everything that is situated at a lesser level than being is unreal in proportion.
146                                           Paolo Milanesi



                                             REFERENCES

Bergson, H. (1946). Pensiero e movimento, Bompiani, Milan, 2000.
Bion, W.R. (1967). Analisi degli schizofrenici e metodo psicoanalitico, Armando, Rome, 1994.
Goethe, J.W. (2013). Faust, Rizzoli, Milan.
Green, A. (1992). La psicosi bianca, Borla, Roma.
Hadot, P. (1996). La cittadella interiore. Introduzione ai ‘pensieri’ di Marco Aurelio, Vita e
    Pensiero, Milan.
Hadot, P. (2001). Esercizi spirituali e filosofia antica, Einaudi, Turin, 2005.
Hadot, P. (2002). La filosofia come modo di vivere, Einaudi, Turin, 2008.
Heidegger, M. (1971). Essere e tempo, Longanesi, Milan.
Heidegger, M. (1976). Lettera sull’umanismo, Adelphi, Milan, 1995.
Heidegger, M. (1997). L’essenza della verità, Adelphi, Milan, 1997.
Husserl, E. (1992). L’idea della fenomenologia, Carlo Sini (edited by), Laterza, Rome-Bari.
Jabès E. (1989). Uno straniero con, sotto il braccio, un libro di piccolo formato, SE, Milano.
Jung, C.G. (2004). La psicologia del Kundalini-Yoga, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin.




                                                                                 ly
Kierkegaard, S. (2020). Il concetto dell’angoscia, SE, Milan.




                                                                            on
Leopardi, G. (2016). Canti, Einaudi, Turin.
Marco Aurelio, I ricordi, Trad. it. edited by F. Calzamini-Mussi e C. Carena, Einaudi, Turin,
    1986.

                                                               e
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). La Fenomenologia della percezione, Il Saggiatore, Milan, 1965.
                                                            us
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1960). Elogio della filosofia, Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1990.
Milanesi, P. (2022). Alle cose stesse. Un contributo del pensiero di Martin Heidegger alla
                                                         al

    metateoria dell’Io-soggetto. Psychoanalytic Research, 33(1). https://doi.org/10.4081/
    rp.2022.540
                                                    ci


Minolli, M. (2015). Essere e divenire. La sofferenza del’individualismo, Franco Angeli, Milan.
                                              er



Montaigne, M. (1953). Essais, ed. Thibaudet, Paris, trad. it. Saggi, Milan, 1992.
Nietzsche, F.W. (1995). La nascita della tragedia, Gius. Laterza, Rome-Bari.
                                         m




Platone (Opere). (1966). Edited by G. Giannantoni, It trad. Various Authors, Laterza, Bari.
                                om




Plotino. (1997). Enneadi, Utet, Torino.
Rilke, R.M. (2017). La vita comincia ogni giorno, L’orma, Rome.
Riva, M. (2022). Comunicazione personale, first conference of the OttoCentro Cultural
                           -c




    Association, Reggio Calabria.
                   on




Shakespeare, W. (1997). Riccardo II, Einaudi, Tutin.
Zolla, E. (2016). Archetipi Aure Verità segrete Dioniso errante. Tutto ciò che conosciamo
    ignorandolo, Marsilio Editori, Venice.
               N




Conflict of interests: the author declares no potential conflict of interests.

Ethics approval and consent to participate: not required.

Received: 13 September 2022.
Accepted: 28 December 2022.

Editor’s note: all claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily
represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, editors and reviewers, or any
third party mentioned. Any materials (and their original source) used to support the authors’ opinions
are not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
©Copyright: the Author(s), 2023
Licensee PAGEPress, Italy
Ricerca Psicoanalitica 2023; XXXIV:725
doi:10.4081/rp.2023.725

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) which permits any noncommercial use, distribution,
and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
