"What world will I choose for me?" The psychic split as a political metaphore.

Abstract

This paper is inspired by a dream where, suddenly, the inhabitants find themselves in a world split in two. People are isolated from each other, kept separate by a natural catastrophe. As the author tries to point out, the increasing dissociative process in Western societies is related to the psychological opposition between natural and artificial, individual and cosmos, the self and the community. The division of the world, between “inner” and “outer” space, is the expression of an economic paradigm aimed at control, profit and competitive advantage. This view denies correspondence to the natural, spiritual, social and political dimensions in which humans are grounded. The individual and collective conscience, closed in its own sameness, more and more unable to include the variance of alterity and multiplicity, is turned to suffer split consciousness, the activation of unconscious emotions, fantasies: identity obsessions, paranoic fanatism, psychic infections. On the contrary, political action, social collaboration and creativity may be integrated in the psychological realm in a transformative relational dynamic, where the human, the living,
the organic and inorganic component become nature and history, among contradictions and generations.