Massimo Recalcati and the praise of the unconscious

Philosopher, essayist and, above all, psychoanalyst, Massimo Recalcati is the personality who has contributed more than anyone to the diffusion of Jacques Lacan's thought in Italy. He is also one of the intellectuals and scholars who has most supported and maintains the fundamental importance of psychoanalytic practice against the cynical and contemporary principle of immediate usefulness. Today, in fact, only what is useful now seems to count, the rest does not exist. The progress of neuroscience, psychotropic drugs and short therapies centered on the cognitive-behavioral correction of the symptom seem to translate this principle into the practices of "treatment": what matters is the functioning of the body machine or the thought machine. The treatment time itself must be compressed as much as possible: few words and more actions! This drift seems to inexorably decree the death of psychoanalysis, with its long times and the search for primary causes, a practice that appears destined to be inventoried among the statues in the wax museum of modernity.

Also in the wake of the defense of psychoanalytic practice is the recent Praise of the Unconscious (Castelvecchi, 2024, €17.50, pp. 144, also e-book), a true pamphlet, deliberately militant, in which support for psychoanalysis finds expression in the celebration of the deepest part of our psyche as a lifeline in today's time in which individuality seems to give way to the machine .

In an era increasingly devoted to the robotization of life, praising the unconscious then becomes an act of resistance. According to Massimo Recalcati's reading, the unconscious - Freud's greatest intuition - is in fact the place in which the subject's desire manifests itself in its irreducible singularity, constantly carving out a creative, eccentric, anomalous space, a space that no educational planning can tame. The unconscious never ceases to destabilize social conformism, the uniform, is the only true antidote to the conception of man as a machine and to the narcissistic cult of the ego-master. Recognizing the existence of the subject of the unconscious also means putting the performance ideal of a strong identity in check, putting aside any form of fanaticism or totalitarian dogmatism and, as Recalcati writes, "developing, as we would say in politics, an internal democracy more vital and more interesting, where borders are able to guarantee transits and surprising encounters".

With this book, Recalcati reminds us, finally, that there is no one-size-fits-all model to which we should conform our lives : «The unconscious is today at risk of extinction, but a life without the unconscious would be a life without desire. To praise it means to think that the human being is not a machine and that there is no universal measure of happiness. The existence of the unconscious requires us not to lose our singular relationship with desire. Not giving in on one's desire, as Lacan taught, is therefore an ethical duty that commits each of us, individually, to a radical responsibility. Sometimes, even that of making friends with our deepest self, where the worst and also the most singular and best sides of ourselves are hidden."