Intercorporeality and the Fabric of Ethical Life

Mitchell Wilson (MW) offers a deeply personal and moving testimony—one that, at first, calls for silence, as if silence were the only response worthy of the question he poses to himself and to us: Why show up? Why make oneself available?

The text powerfully illustrates that writing—especially psychoanalytic writing—is always autobiographical (Civitarese, 2024a, 2024b). It recounts the profoundly difficult relationship with a father who abandoned him at the age of four and was only found again on the threshold of death. The central question is: to go or not to go to his deathbed? To take responsibility for the bond with a man who is dying and has failed his life?

Two elements in the text particularly struck me: the ring, and the powerful yet creatively ambiguous phrase MW writes at the end, about the handshake.

Regarding the ring, I immediately associated it with the Italian word fede (faith) or “vera” (the feminine singular adjective for “true”), which both also means “wedding band”—an obvious symbol of marital union. In this case, the ring was lost. It was the graduation ring from the University of California, Los Angeles, though, not the marital ring, for a degree which the father, it seems, had never made much use of in his life. But it's hard not to reflect that alma mater also refers to the university—a lot of understatement or indirectness going on here—. The missing ring thus seems to stand in for both the father's broken bond with his mother, his wife (and the mother of his son), and his son—something that, paradoxically, can only be recovered at the very end of his life, through the shared narrative1 of it having been lost

or stolen—which now makes of it at the same time a symbolic theft