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To introduce the new concept presented in Armando Ferrari's book, it is worth quoting a statement by Emilio Garroni: 'Our identity is the duality itself—considered as unity—of knowing and feeling, shape
and background, reality and unreality, identity and difference, as well as of the body and mind' (p. 10). Ferrari's notion of the concrete original object (COO) could not be better introduced. But what is this notion?
The main issue here is the body/mind relationship, starting from the assumption that
psychoanalytical research on the mind's functioning modes is to be carried out in a biological environment, so that the observation of mental functioning can take place in its proper context of relational functions, namely of interaction between the individual and the environment (p. 18).
The COO notion is therefore to be regarded as a series of interacting somatic (sensorimotor, metabolic) and mental functions, attempting to overcome any dualism by proposing a unitary picture of the human being in which all functions are complementary. It follows that 'the physical event and the mind's content cannot be separated and … the body/mind dualism could be considered a mystic residue'. Thus Ferrari regards the human mind as the result of the 'closing of a causal link where the symbolic and neurophysiological levels are somehow connected' (p. 24). But how can this be achieved? 'In fact', he specifies, 'the insoluble problem in the body/mind relationship is conscience. And … at present we have no precise idea of how to explain the physical aspects of mental events' (p. 25).
In order to overcome this impasse, Ferrari proposes the notion of the concrete original object, whereby 'the body is the mind's main object, its primary reality' (p. 30). Why does Ferrari speak of an object? Let us quote the author himself: '"Object", because our attention is focused on the mind's perception of the body … on the way the mind wor