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Reviewing La Violenza delle Emozioni [The Violence of Emotions] (2011) represents a valuable occasion to talk about emotions at this historical moment when sentiments and bonds seem to be marked by precariousness, fluidity, and instability. As Baumann (2003) emphasizes, this milieu distinguishes the post-modern era, an age in which loneliness and indifference are at the basis of the “living disease”; therefore, underlining the centrality of psychical life is for psychoanalysis an irrepressible task.
This book offers many points of discussion and reflection, as it is rich in theoretical references and literary, philosophical, and artistic allusions, so much so that reading it aroused in me a sensation of pleasant dizziness but, at the same time, urged me to focus on some points overlooking others, though all were interesting and stimulating. As you will see, I was captured mostly by the clinical issues, sharing with Civitarese an admiration for Ogden's creative thought, an echo of which you will hear in what I am about to say.
And so here I am wondering about emotions, and I discover that the term “emotion” is a fairly recent one: we cannot find any trace of it before the 19th Century, although, ever since Greek philosophy, we have always heard about passions, in the sense of strong, violent emotions as in the title of this book, The Violence of Emotions, which reminds us of the well-known The Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram to Statement by Piera Aulagnier (1975).
Aulagnier's type of violence can be contained by the maternal message; the mother's unconscious desire becomes performative for the infant's defenseless ego. In Civitarese's view, emotions are perceived as being dangerous, as passions that may burn, smother, and consume when the soothing function of a containing object has not been introjected. Here, too, the relationship with the primary object, the mother, is called into question. Therefore, it appears that it is not possible to proceed without a