You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Informed by the unique lessons for our generation of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the things we are all being reminded of is the intimate link between our minds and our bodies. We are all re-evaluating this privately, in a profound and personal way. COVID provides a helpful background to Lombardi's argument and writing. He is a training analyst of the Italian Society, who early on wanted to become a surgeon, like his father, whom he assisted at the operating table.
As far as the psyche - or as Lombardi more accurately defines it the soma-psyche - is concerned, Rene Descartes, and before him Plato, have a lot to answer for. In trying to make room for Galilean Science in the seventeenth century Descartes took the radical step of severing the mind from the body. Ever since, and including in psychoanalysis (at its origin devoted to the drive theory, and sexuality), we have been re-evaluating Descartes. Analysts have done this from the perspective of what patients tell us. From intensive work with patients, Descartes just seems wrong.
Lombardi smells a rat as far back as Plato, quoting his Phaedo (p. 21):
“We make the nearest approach to knowledge when we have the least possible intercourse or communion with the body, and are not surfeited with intercourse or communion with the body, but keep ourselves pure”.
That is not what patients tell me, says Lombardi, even though patients might try it - indeed ‘trying it’, that is, defences against primitive, undigested feelings, might be what have brought them into treatment in the first place.
Plotinus, who followed Plato later, took this even further. A. A. Long (2015) reminds us that Plato's influential mind philosophy (the everlasting intellect, letting go of the body and embodiment as much as possible) catalysed a huge derailment in Western experience. Descartes clinched this. In a desperate error, this supplanted the Greek thinking of Homer in the Iliad, which was on a better track. There we find a more ordinary ‘down to earth’