Classical art, and in general the tradition of Western thought, has always been in search of a principle of perfection, something that acts as a model and that represents the harmony of its various parts. Reproducing reality therefore did not only mean trying to reproduce “a” particular reality, but trying to reproduce an exemplary, perfect reality. This idea of perfection and harmony is actually a “fixation” of Western thought, rather than the way in which the brain thinks about reality. The brain is “partial”, it does not see things starting from a general idea, nor does one build a general idea with experience, simply a general idea to inspire, or an idea that is useful for explaining or to predict a part of reality.
Classical Greek sculpture, for example, tried to reproduce shapes that had a fixed proportion between the various parts, so for example the ratio between the length of a big toe and that of the foot had to be tot, that the length of the leg and the thigh tot, and so on. Given the size of a part of a statue, it could therefore have been perfectly reconstructed. The model was so certainly perfect, but with respect to itself more than to reality. It would have been said that a statue, a palace, a monument could be cloned from a ruin, following pre-established geometric rules. Once upon a time there was a neo-classical painter who had become master of this technique, but at a certain point I enter a crisis, just like an obsession. Suddenly, at the sight of a ruin, or of a drawing started, he began to no longer know what the way to complete it should be, as he should have imagined the missing part. In one of his paintings he represents the “desperation of the artist in front of the ruins”: we see an artist with his head in his hands in the middle of an enormous foot and hand, ruins of who knows what colossal ancient statue. The statue that the artist should reconstruct according to logical and precise rules instead becomes a distressing “void”, something that was there but is no longer there, and will no longer be as it once was, even if he tried to clone it to the perfection. When you find the rule of perfection, you are on the verge of despair, of control anguish, a well so deep that you no longer see if there is water underneath, and there is no longer a rope long enough to pull it up. In other words,
The painter, a Swiss named Fuessli, then began to change his way of painting. Painting saved him from obsession. He begins to paint monsters, unfinished, deformed creatures, or indecipherable, unsolvable, distressing situations. From the anguish of absence, which arose from the ruins impossible to reconstruct, I move on to the active anguish of his emotions translated into painting. He then made his obsessions with him a starting point for painting, and at the same time in this way he no longer had them in front of him as an obstacle. In the therapeutic process, his obsessions do not necessarily need to be crushed, compressed, removed. They must be moved: they must not be “the cart before the oxen”, but the cart behind the oxen. Putting the cart behind the oxen you drive them forward, and so the obsession is no longer holding back but pushes forward. To do this, an act of metabolizing the obsessions must be performed, which must not be adjusted to make them harmless, but must be confirmed to make them “normal”. For example, being obsessed with the idea of dying is not an anguish that is resolved by convincing yourself that it is unlikely, or distant in time, or that if you behave cautiously it should not happen, or that you must avoid what it induces. to think about death. Rather, death will be accepted as more than possible, present every day, and destined to reach anyone. In this way the brain will no longer be able to “fix it”, and then it will make it transparent, a harmless ghost that may be a source of inspiration, of reflection but does not become a theme on which to “rationally” cultivate one’s anguish. which must not be adjusted to make them harmless, but must be confirmed to make them “normal”. For example, being obsessed with the idea of dying is not an anguish that is resolved by convincing yourself that it is unlikely, or distant in time, or that if you behave cautiously it should not happen, or that you must avoid what it induces. to think about death. Rather, death will be accepted as more than possible, present every day, and destined to reach anyone. In this way the brain will no longer be able to “fix it”, and then it will make it transparent, a harmless ghost that may be a source of inspiration, of reflection but does not become a theme on which to “rationally” cultivate one’s anguish. which must not be adjusted to make them harmless, but must be confirmed to make them “normal”. For example, being obsessed with the idea of dying is not an anguish that is resolved by convincing yourself that it is unlikely, or distant in time, or that if you behave cautiously it should not happen, or that you must avoid what it induces. to think about death. Rather, death will be accepted as more than possible, present every day, and destined to reach anyone. In this way the brain will no longer be able to “fix it”, and then it will make it transparent, a harmless ghost that may be a source of inspiration, of reflection but does not become a theme on which to “rationally” cultivate one’s anguish. being obsessed with the idea of dying is not an anguish that is resolved by convincing yourself that it is unlikely, or far away in time, or that if you behave cautiously it should not happen, or that you must avoid what leads you to think about the death. Rather, death will be accepted as more than possible, present every day, and destined to reach anyone. In this way the brain will no longer be able to “fix it”, and then it will make it transparent, a harmless ghost that may be a source of inspiration, of reflection but does not become a theme on which to “rationally” cultivate one’s anguish. being obsessed with the idea of dying is not an anguish that is resolved by convincing yourself that it is unlikely, or far away in time, or that if you behave cautiously it should not happen, or that you must avoid what leads you to think about the death. Rather, death will be accepted as more than possible, present every day, and destined to reach anyone. In this way the brain will no longer be able to “fix it”, and then it will make it transparent, a harmless ghost that may be a source of inspiration, of reflection but does not become a theme on which to “rationally” cultivate one’s anguish. or that what leads one to think of death must be avoided. Rather, death will be accepted as more than possible, present every day, and destined to reach anyone. In this way the brain will no longer be able to “fix it”, and then it will make it transparent, a harmless ghost that may be a source of inspiration, of reflection but does not become a theme on which to “rationally” cultivate one’s anguish. or that what leads one to think of death must be avoided. Rather, death will be accepted as more than possible, present every day, and destined to reach anyone. In this way the brain will no longer be able to “fix it”, and then it will make it transparent, a harmless ghost that may be a source of inspiration, of reflection but does not become a theme on which to “rationally” cultivate one’s anguish.
Perhaps Fussli’s most famous work is “The Nightmare”, in which a monster sits on the belly of a sleeping and writhing woman. Already a step forward from the artist who does not know how to go forward and is distressed without being able to look at the ruins of the perfect sculptures. The next step will be to have the obsessions next to you awake, which however no longer resemble evil monsters but fairy ghosts, as in the “bridesmaids of Hastings”: you can see a young man lying on the grass who watches the female figures pass by from below. floating and indefinite, almost ghosts.
If, on the other hand, you try to solve the riddle of “how to achieve perfection” you will end up obsessed with the fact that perfection is unattainable, yet you need to be as close to it as possible. Consuming energy in this way means blocking, despair, demoralization. Fusli paints this state in some paintings, including “Solitude at dawn”, a typical situation of the depressed subject who covers his face in front of the rising sun, tired and in pain at the beginning of the day.
A crossroads then: on the one hand the desperation at dawn, on the other the obsession reduced to a harmless and almost likeable puppet. This is the purpose of anti-obsessive therapy, both by pharmacological and psychological means.
