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.
When my love swears that she is made of truth I do believe her, though I know she lies …
In Truth and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis, Giuseppe Civitarese expounds Bionian and post-Bionian theory in a set of demanding but proportionately rewarding papers, five of which I shall discuss in subsequent sections — il menù degustazione — of this essay The English title is anomalous. In previous Civitarese collections, the English version literally translated the Italian title.1 This volume was originally titled I sensi e l'inconscio (“The Senses and the Unconscious”), implying that psychic functioning is an embodied process materially engaged with the world:
[T]here is between the body and its environment a mutual penetration, a continuous osmotic interchange of energy: the boundaries of the self stand out as dynamic states against the background of electromagnetic fields. The subject is “a field of relations” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945); it
L'intima stanza , translated as The Intimate Room ; Violenza delle emozione , translated as The Violence of Emotions ; Perdere la testa , translated as Losing your Head ; and Il sogno necessario , translated as The Necessary Dream . The first two volumes were reviewed in fort da (Spring 2014).
Page 81comes into being by differentiating itself from the real and can never completely free itself from it. (Civitarese, p. 156)
The change of emphasis indicated by the new title suggests an engagement of psychoanalytic theory with philosophy (signaled by the citation from Merleau-Ponty). The change is also provocative in that it isn't necessary to assume a post-modern perspective to recognize that through 25 centuries of Western thought, “truth” and “is true” have been applied equivocally, relative to the objects they predicate. (Consider the differences between the truth of scientific laws, the truth of mathematics, the truth of sexuality, and the truth of moral convictions.)
Truth is also relative to whether it perta