The war in Ukraine rages on. We are living a moment of great uncertainty and anxiety, days in which history seems to repeat itself and hope and trust waver.
Our society has thus become sick of the “war-disease”, of the dehumanization syndrome (Fornari, 1974) and has found itself trapped in the binomials: good/bad, weak/strong, life/death. While people fight each other, splitting multiplies. The closure of social networks, the propaganda, and the threat of internet suspension in Russia are just one of the many concrete metaphors of the interruption of dialogue caused by war – blocking intersubjective communication prevents access to the only “dichotomy” necessary for the mind to survive: the opposition between what is (affectively) true and what is not.
How to stay alive in this precarious state of the mind, of terror and uncertainty?
In the early days, in the face of the cruel violence and destruction of war, there circulated a sense of helplessness, a tendency to deny the danger of events or to be overwhelmed by the waking nightmare of an atomic war.
Like many other colleagues, I made contact with people from Ukraine. One particularly touching exchange occurred with a young woman, Nina, still living in Ukraine, 7 months pregnant with a baby boy. She writes to me that she and her husband have longed for this child and that now he will be born under the bombs, in a bunker in which “there is a gynecologist she doesn’t know”. The exchange between us is full of fear for the mother and for this birth, so precarious, so in danger.
The tension is reduced when I ask her what she would name her baby. I then tell Nina that the Ukrainian name is very similar to the analogous Italian one. She asks me “what does it sound like?” and I send her an audio of the name. Nina then records her voice as well: she tells me that she finds my language “unfamiliar to her but so very sweet”, then pronounces the baby’s name in her language; Nina uses a soft voice and communicates great tenderness to me. The sweetness of the music of her voice opens up the possibility of dreaming of a future for this little unborn child, and of consonance between us in which differences can exist without becoming threatening; the desire to communicate paves the way for the nascent relationship between Nina and me.
The words Freud wrote to Einstein in 1932 are echoing. Einstein asked him about the “why” of war and how to remedy it. In the conflict between Eros, creator of bonds and source of life, and Thanatos, the engine of division and death, Culture is the function-antidote to the “aesthetic degradations of war”. It guarantees the development of civilization and human communities, allowing us to overcome the natural propensity to “resolve conflicts of interest between men through the use of violence”. Freud concludes with the admonition that “we must rebel against it [war]”.
If we think about what Winnicott (1971) wrote about art and culture, stemming from the transitional phenomena and the child’s ability to play, even a simple exchange like the one with Nina can be an expression of dialoguing a new culture. Would rebellion be to make space for the other, accepting to feel crossed by feelings that are sometimes violent? In today’s panorama of atomic war, is this perhaps how a space-time can take shape in which the reality of life and its pressures can be transformed into a sustainable affective experience, even if only for an undefined and ephemeral time?
I would like to conclude with the testimony of Charlotte Salomon, a young Jewish artist who lived between the First and Second Great Wars and died in the death camps, in Auschwitz.
Charlotte, in about 18 months (between 1940 and 1942) painted more than a thousand tempera paintings with intense and bright colors, made exclusively with the three primary colors and white. The paintings are accompanied and complemented by texts that tell her story with poetic tones, sometimes ironic, even sarcastic, and supported by a musical vein. From this set Charlotte chose 781 tempera paintings that form, with the manuscripts, the novel of her life, her masterpiece: “Life? Or Theater? A Singing Play.” Charlotte Salomon’s immense work remains, full of feelings, desire for life, and hope, an expression of how strong and creative the listening for emotional truth may be.
References:
Einstein, A., & Freud, S. (1989). Why war?: An exchange of letters between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Ottawa: Shalom Press International.
Fornari F. (1974) The Psychoanalysis of War. Translated from the Italian by Alenka Pfeifer. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday.
Salomon C. (2017) Charlotte Salomon: life? or theatre? Ed. Taschen
Winnicott, D. W. 1971. Playing and Reality. Tavistock Publications. Re-edition, 2005. London &New York: Routledge.
