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- Herausgeber: Francesco Gamba
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
Life cycle and the events that characterize it - childhood, adolescence, work, couple formation, child birth, retirement, old age, departure from life - as seen through the eyes of the anthropologist that examines the cultural models and their mode of transmission between generations, and of psychologist, which focuses on the dynamics more or less conscious that work within families and the individual.
A book written using clear and concise language, aimed not so much to communicate certainties but to arouse interest and curiosity about the phenomenon still largely unintelligible and complex which is our peculiar mode of existence in the world.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Indice dei contenuti
Psycanthropy
Preface
Darwin
Genetics and context
The life cycle
The attachment theory
Stay alive
Fear
The defense system
The competitiveness.
Emotions.
Development
Adolescence.
Sex.
The formation of the couple.
The contracts of the couple
A child is born
Adulthood
The detachment
index
Psycanthropy
To Maria, my life traveling companion.
Francesco Gamba
PSYCANTHROPY
A 4D projection of the brief story of a human being from its arrival in the world to its departure.
Wherever he lives, a man exists inasmuch as he is a member of a social group, as small as it is.
Peter Farb
Primitive man was faced with the alternative of marrying out and being killed out.
E. B. Taylor
Preface
To find a title for a book of scientific divulgation is not an easy thing. At the beginning, I thought of entitling it "Handbook of Anthropological Psychology" but the word “handbook” seemed to recall those booklets that once you brought with you at the State certification exam to fix the memory gaps, full of idle notions disconnected from each other. The term “treatise” could seem too serious instead; that’s why I finally decided to appeal the readers’ curiosity and use the acronym Psycanthropy as title. It doesn't refer to any mysterious lunar pathology but it puts together the two main dimensions of the four ones to which the subheading outlines: psychology and cultural anthropology. The other two dimensions, as I will explain later, are genetics and ethology.
Evolutionism and genetics, that descends from the former, help us understand everything that is innate in us and has been inherited by biological way, until now considered immutable; while anthropology, through the observation and the study of the different groups of beings organized into societies, in brief of all the human groups that inhabit or inhabited the Earth, help us to understand everything that is inherited by cultural way. We mean by culture everything that is man’s work, from the material production such as canoe or plough (artifacts) to the immaterial one such as languages, myths and religions. Myths are linguistic constructions provided with a meaning collectively shared that, through stories, tales and narrations try to give a sense to what appears nonsensical in the experience of the human life, such as the existence itself; birth, illness, death, anticipating the scientific thought but using its own speculative method. The majority of the anthropologists assign to myths, and to religions, the value of well-founded elements of the material and social reality in which the human group, that produced them, operates. For this purpose, we need cosmogonic myths, in relation to the creation of the universe, or to the creation of man and all living species.
The evolutionary biologist R. Dawkins coined the term “memes”, analogous and assonant to “genes”, to take into account the method of transmission of the cultural elements through generations, analogous to the genetic transmission by biological way that characterized the human evolution.
Lastly, the ethology, risen in the 1930s, studies animal behavior. The imprinting phenomenon, discovered by Konrad Lorentz on ducks and the successive studies on primate, and especially on anthropomorphic apes, influenced enormously the psychology, anticipating by a few years what the genetics researchers effectively proved later on: whether we like it or not, we are closely related to our gorilla and chimpanzee cousins, especially to the Bonobos, dwarf chimpanzees first “discovered” and studied by the ethologist Frans de Waal.
All the human beings, since the origin of the first civilizations, meaning by civilizations social groups provided with structure and organization, used their mind capabilities to give meaning to natural phenomenons, as they were experienced in the world inhabited by them, comprehensible and somehow controllable. Our own existence and the existence of the world that surrounds us, the sun that rises and sets every day, the cycle of the seasons, the moon phases, which cycle mysteriously coincides with women's menstrual period, the influence over tides and on the growth of plants, all this and much more needed an explanation, a search for a cause that allowed to get through the anguish of not having any control over them. The fear in front of what appears incomprehensible and senseless is the motor that drove to the mythical, religious, philosophical, scientific and artistic thought. To believe with an act of faith that a god created us or that we descend from a mythical ancestor, or to discover the laws of evolution through scientific observation, provides in any case an effective answer to many of our uncertainties, just as the shaman’s ritual does when he operates on the sick person or the mystical experience that liberates from the burden of materiality and mortality.
To sum up, we can affirm that anthropology is interested in how men, organized in social groups, tried in the past just as nowadays, to have control over their destiny; while psychology focused its interest on the ways of being in the world of the individuals. Differently from ethology, biology and genetics that have as subject matter the observation of living beings in general, anthropology and psychology study human beings; an animal provided with language, even if in some cases not yet able to write, but with a reasoning mind able to communicate to his fellows and to ponder over himself or his own being in the world.
Even though some scientists succeeded in proving the existence of a certain modality of communication based on sounds of different frequencies among some marine mammals as dolphins and whales, only human beings obtained the ability to speak, to share and to hand down stories, concepts and meanings from one generation to another. So, the acquisition of the spoken language establishes an evolutionary leap of immense scope because it put us in a position to memorize and communicate a quantity of information vastly greater than that one possible with only body language or with the limited information transmitted by the sounds signals more or less modulated.
"In the beginning was the Word" so the Bible reads. In Latin "word" is Verbum which actually has less meaning of the original Greek term Logos, that includes the meanings of word, thought and reason. So it’s the "word" that makes us human and like God or, to be more precise, makes it possible to describe God as similar to us. It is not by chance that this God, in order to punish men for their presumption of building a tower high enough to reach heaven, mixes up the languages, bringing them back to an almost “primitive” state, depriving them of the capability of communicating with each other.
"Domine non sum dignus...”, "Lord, I am not worthy that Thou should enter under my roof, say but the word, and my soul shall be healed." The ancient Latin missal highlighted, in an extremely efficient way, the power of the word, especially if it is pronounced by a god. To repeat incessantly a word or a sequence of words in a ritual phrase, as it happens for mantras or in the rosary, allows us to build a bridge between the divinity and us and to appease the anguish of feeling lonely in the universe. But if it’s true that we can heal with words, as proven by the prayer and psychotherapy, we know that in turn they can also make us sick. We know the symbolic efficacy of a good wish or a blessing, but a curse or an “evil eye” could be just as efficient when pronounced by someone believed to have a certain power of a diabolic or divine investiture. In Ancient Rome these “magic” words, considered to be able to influence the reality of things and to change it, were engraved on lead or clay boards, called tabellae defixionis, and then thrown into the Tiber or into the recipient's well to damn him to bad luck. Among the tortures to which the Inquisition convicted the heretics who used a language to propagate their creed, it was contemplated, together with other terrible mutilations, to cut of the tongue. The Evil News countervails the Good News. In the melodramatic opera "Cavalleria Rusticana", Santuzza curses Turiddú dooming him to a terrible destiny with the fatal words: “A bad Easter to you!”.
As the anthropologists proved in their observations on multiple cultures, every thing believed to be true by the community is in any case real for the effects that it produces, whether they are the consequences of an evil eye, the healing produced by a shamanic ritual or a miracle bestowed by San Gennaro of Naples. As we will see later, the power of suggestion is nowadays abundantly employed by publicity and the placebo effect, for which a sugar pill prescribed as a powerful drug by a doctor succeeds in healing us, allows the pharmaceutical industry to commercialize products lacking real efficacy, achieving huge earnings.
Differently from all the other animal species, the human being has learned, with the development of the larynx and of specialize cerebral areas, to use words and with them, to assign a name to things and all phenomenons of reality. Furthermore, with the use of language it is possible to gather and divulge information, often using images such as those dating back to the Neolithic, drawn in caverns or those frescoed on the walls of Christian Churches to illustrate the evangelical stories to the illiterate masses. So, all that was learned was handed down from one generation to another in the beginning orally and later through writing; an invention that allowed us to make a great evolutionary leap to our current level of civilization.
The acquisition of language permitted us to “tell” others, orally or in writing, everything that had been culturally acquired, to share it and hand it down to the following generations, but also to lie, a circumstance impossible to be observed in the animal world. Using the metaphor of the expulsion from Eden of our progenitors for having eaten the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, disobeying the divine will, the spoken language brought along a conviction: to deceive and to be deceived; to experience an emotion, to feel it on your skin and in the bowels, just as the blush on your cheeks caused by embarrassment but to deny it or to define it differently with words.
Mystification is the term that the English psychiatrist Ronald Laing used in the 1960s to define this communicative modality pathogenic and potentially devastating when used systematically by a parent towards his own child: to verbally define oneself and the other in an incongruous manner against what we feel and perceive, inducing confusion or, worse, guilt in our counterpart.
Laing tells of a mother who visited her adolescent son, hospitalized in a clinic for mental disturbances. As soon as the boy saw her at the bottom of the hallway, he ran happily towards her, stopping wheezing in front of her and trying to hug her. But his mother instinctively drew back, stiffening for fear; her son was stuck, confused as she immediately reproached him: “Why are you afraid of hugging me?”. The boy had a new psychotic crisis and was locked up in confinement. In this regard, it’s interesting to report the results of a study on some neurological patients afflicted with aphasia, executed and mentioned by Oliver Sacks in his book “The Mind’s Eye”. Aphasia is a serious disturbance, linked to specific cerebral lesions, for which an individual loses partially or totally the capability of producing and understanding the language. Words, syntax, grammar have no more meaning to him. These people compensate for their loss of speech by increasing their ability to “reading” the non-verbal signals as facial expressions, body posture and other small revealing gestures, gathering, in this way, the genuine emotional states of the counterpart independently of what he is actually declaring. Because of this ability, they are sometimes employed by the FBI to unmask liars.
To deceive others, especially the ones whom we are sentimentally attached to, makes us feel more powerful and complacent in our narcissism. But to discover of being deceived by someone who should have loved and protected us, represents a serious trauma and causes great suffering. This explains why many individuals, surviving serious interpersonal traumas and socially isolated people as the homeless and the so called punk beast, succeed in establishing strong emotional bonds with an animal that they keep always close to them and that, not able to lie, will never betray them.
To end this preface, following a reflection on the concepts of “normality” and “context”.
We are brought to define “normal” the behaviors and the beliefs shared by the majority of the individuals in our social context. Furthermore, we tend to attribute a positive value, to these beliefs and behaviors as if they were absolute laws and consequently natural, whereas we label the ones executed by individuals who are eccentric or belonging to other communities and cultures as oddities or, even worse, barbarity. Actually, the concept of normality is derived from the model of statistics distribution that characterized the majority of the expressions of the physical, biological and social phenomenons, called Gauss’ normal curve. This bell-shaped curve (fig.1) displays the distribution of the majority of the values of the examined phenomenon (about 70 percent) around a median central value while the remainders arrange themselves, decreasing rapidly, on the right and on the left side of this central slot.
For example, if we submit one hundred, or one thousand, individuals at random to a blood test to evaluate the cholesterol level, we will find that very few of them will have a very low or very high level, the others will place themselves on intermediate levels while the majority will fall within the slot of central values considered normal indeed. But the central value so established will not represent the “normal” level of cholesterol absolutely, but only the normal one for the population of the examined individuals. If we expand this or other biological values as the blood pressure, or the presence of a certain enzyme to the different populations of the earth, we could discover that what is the normal for one community, isn’t for another. So, the concept of normality is connected, in general, with the values expressed by the majority and with the consequent social consensus.
Fig.1
We can define context all that surrounds us, from the physical environment to the social and cultural one, and that gives a meaning to our thoughts and behaviors. So, we can speak about social and domestic context, working and professional context, but also in a romantic context, for instance an evening in the moonlight that, as we know, or at least should remember, leads to a seductive behaviors with a final sexual approach. Context and normality are two concepts strictly connected: the context establishes a series of emotions, thoughts and actions that the majority, in that circumstance, considers normal. Not ending the aforementioned romantic soiree at least with a kiss, will risk to appear like a strange behavior, abnormal indeed, inevitably inducing various interpretations in relation to it. So, while we consider sane and normal to wash our private parts, closed in our bathroom, we look with suspicion or derision, if not with fear, a person busy in doing the same thing in the open at a watering hole or at a public fountain, as once some populations so-called primitive used to do or as sometimes now happens to some populations during an emergency circumstance.
Therefore, to pray collectively before a colored chalk statue of a veiled woman, imploring aid to resolve a problem, or to claim a strictly personal guardian angel, designated to protect us for our lifetime, may appear normal or, better yet, laudable. We consider insane a man who claims to see a big white rabbit close to him and moreover who claims to speak affably to him, as it happened to James Stewart in the 1950 film “Harvey”. In regards to this, Freud observed very perceptively that religion is a collective psychosis, while psychosis is an individual religion.
What we’ve just said, helps us to understand how it isn’t useful to determine a strict divide between normality and deviance, good and evil, sane and insane but to consider, instead, the social, cultural and psychological manifestations of the human being in the course of its existence as a continuum of different strategies of adaptation in a certain context, all worthy of attention and comprehension.
Darwin
In 1543, year of his death, the book “De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium” by Nicolaus Copernicus was published. This scientist succeeded in proving, with mathematical procedures, what some Greek philosophers had already foreseen; namely, that it isn’t the Earth to be at the centre of the universe but the sun, around which all the planets revolve. This revolutionary theory smoldered for almost a century, until another great thinker, Galileo Galilei, divulged it with his scientific work “Dialogo sopra i due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo"drawing the not benevolent attention of the Catholic Church that saw in this the geocentric theory, affirmed by the Bible, wiped out. The cosmic model of Ptolemy and Aristotle that had endured uncontested for centuries put the Earth at the centre of the universe; around it there were some solid sphere among which the planets were set; and the most external sphere contained the stars. Beyond it there was only God that, as a static motor, made everything move. In 1600 Giordano Bruno's assertion of freedom of thought, capable of bringing the articles of faith into question through the scientific investigation, were cause for cutting of his tongue and to burn at stake for heresy, while Galileo Galilei had to renounce his work before the Inquisition Tribunal in 1633 to escape the same fate. By now the seeds had been placed and nowadays, after a few centuries, no one is frightened to think that we and the Earth that we live in, aren’t at the centre of the universe.
Two centuries later, an analogous “copernican” revolution, that called into question much more than the old geocentric theory was the publication in 1859 of “On the Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin. In this work, Darwin formulated the results of his meticulous and acute naturalistic investigations carried out in numerous places visited during his long journey around the world on board of the brigantine Beagle. The examination of fossils and of the different characteristics of animals encountered during his explorations, especially those stationed on the Galapagos islands, convinced him that every living species has to adapt itself as well as possible in order not to die in the environment in which it lives and that this adaptation occurs through a natural selection, in the course of the evolution, of the most favorable mutations among those that accidentally occur over generations. Because of their distant position from the South American continent, Galapagos islands have been protected for million years from the external influences of other ecosystems. For that reason the animals that lived there could develop specific morphological characteristics for each single habitat and give rise to a great diversity of species. That’s why they were named by the researchers “the living laboratory, showcase of the evolution”.
So, the darwinian law of evolution represents the premiss to understanding the origin of all living species, from the first primordial cell capable of reproducing to the most complicated organisms placed at the apex of this ascent, namely ourselves: Homo Sapiens. Charles Darwin was the naturalist scientist that in the nineteenth century, with his works “On the Origin of Species” and “The Descent of Man”, lead to a radical revolution in the study of all life sciences, determined by Copernicus and Gallileo Galilei in physics and astronomy.
To accept the scientific evidence of darwinism and consequently to refuse Creationism, a pseudoscientific doctrine, adopted only to remain coherent with the book of the Genesis, which attributes the creation of the universe and of the different life forms on Earth, to God, doesn’t necessarily mean to exclude a divine intervention, but to identify God with Nature itself, as suggested by many philosophers, as Lucretius and Spinoza, and many current scientists.
Let’s try to understand, by degrees, how the mechanism of evolution by natural selection works. Almost everybody knows the concept of probability, or law of large numbers, for having played poker or bingo. We know that it is only by chance what numbers are extracted just as it is again by chance the choice of bingo cards selected by players before starting the game. Otherwise, playing the Lottery every week, we can choose to use the strategy of betting the same numbers again and again, even for many years, or betting each time on a different string of numbers, chosen at random. We probably have also heard or read somewhere, the notion that placing a chimpanzee before a typewriter for an immeasurable time, almost an infinite time, and by him hitting the keys at random, finally he could casually compose, the Divine Comedy.
Certainly, such law as the fortuitous generation of events reported into the just mentioned examples - extraction of numbers or distribution of cards and, least of all, apes that hit a keyboard - could never have been sufficient alone to generate the magnificent complexity of the living world. Therefore, it becomes necessary to take into account a second element, capable of introducing in the results of a casual production of biological mutations a selective criterion that permits to save and preserve every “useful” combination, discarding all the others. If we come back to Bingo, we notice that the extracted numbers aren’t recalled and can’t be played again, so at each extraction the successive number has a greater probability than earlier one to be extracted. Furthermore, two numbers in the same row vertically, horizontally or diagonally on the card can be useful to me in the successive extractions to obtain a third in a row, then a forth in a row and so on until I a reach Bingo. In the same way, if playing poker I already have a three of a kind in my hands, while my opponent has just a pair, I keep it, calling only two more cards. The probability, although not the certainty, of winning the hand is certainly mine. Something similar happens to the natural selection in which every little casual mutation that is produced from one generation to another is submitted to a strict examination of the context: if it is usef [...]
