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It is most encouraging to find a Jungian analyst addressing a seminar of sociologists, architects and town-planners at the Goethe Institute in Rome. Pignatelli goes straight to his main point: modern cities provide for men's physical and economic requirements but ignore the ‘biology of the psyche’, the source of their emotional life. Skilfully guiding his audience on a tour of the Expulsion-from-Eden myth, he explains how the three archetypes—of father, mother and
wholeness—were the original psychic forces driving men to found cities, and shows how the city both met and represented man's need for a temenos inside which he drew support from communion with other men as well as with himself and his unconscious depths.
Pignatelli quotes Quasimodo: ‘Each man stands alone at the heart of the earth/pierced by a sun-ray/and suddenly it's evening.’ Today man's existential, inevitable solitude becomes a distorted loneliness as traffic, noise, the uniformity and anonymity of reinforced concrete, all crush the city-dweller, leaving him isolated, unsupported and neighbourless amidst the multitude. Pignatelli gives a nice example of what can happen when technology eliminates the human factor: an ‘express’ posted Rome to Rome can now take up to a week, whereas Jung could write to Freud in Vienna and receive his reply in Zürich within four days—there was a human chain of communication linking postman, clerk and railwayman in personal responsibility. The absence of personal involvement in the processes of everyday living, the enthronement of the idols Money and Success, all build up frustrations which explode in the gratuitous violence so common in cities in the West, and the segregation of the ‘shadow’ elements in society only compounds the malady.
While acknowledging that many studies have been made in terms of optimum space, colour, green areas, Pignatelli is refreshingly mistrustful of utopian projects and solutions imposed from above. He insists that valid answers can be reache