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In this book Armando Ferrari presents a new concept: the originary concrete object (hereafter O.C.O.), which is aptly supported by Emilio Garroni's statement (p. 10) that “our identity is essentially identifiable with the duality of knowing and feeling, figure and background, likelihood and unlikelihood, sameness and difference, as well as of mind and body”. What is this concept? The author's theme is the relationship between body and mind “presupposing that psychoanalytical research on the modalities of mental function must be biological and ethological, so that it may be observed in its relational aspects, i.e. interaction between people and their environment” (p. 18). O.C.O. should be understood, then, as a set of somatic (senso-motorial, metabolic) functions, which joins the mental ones in the attempt to replace the dualist position with a unitary function of being, where each function complements the other. The result is that “physical events and the content of the human mind are inseparable and […] mind-body dualism could be thought of as a mystical residue”. Ferrari sees the human mind as the result of the “closure of a ring of causality in which the symbolic and neurophysiological levels are, in some way, connected” (p. 24). How does this happen? The author explains that “conscience is the unresolvable problem in the mind-body relationship. And […] for the moment we have no idea of how the physical aspects of a mental phenomenon can be explained” (p. 25).
Ferrari's suggestion for overcoming this stalemate is his O.C.O. concept. In it “the body is the object of the mind, par excellence, and its first reality” (p. 30). Why “object”? Ferrari replies: “It is an object because we concentrate on the mind's perception of the body […] and the mind's work on this perception” (p. 113).
From birth “the mind has to face what issues from a particular body, and create a unique history of stimulations and mostly