AUTHOR: Diego Frigoli – Founder and promoter of the ecobiopsychological thinking, Psychiatrist, Psychotherapist and Director of the School of Specialization in Psychotherapy ANEB Institute. Innovator in the study of imagery with particular reference to the element of symbol in relation to its dynamics between individual and collective consciousness.
Trauma, Dissociation and Therapy: the changing Brain
The Myth of Cura
The word “Cura” (Italian term for “care”, “thoughtfulness”, “concern”, “restlessness”, “anxiety”) comes from the name of a roman goddess Cura or Aera Cura, a character in roman mythology, whose figure is linked to a cosmo-anthropological mythical logos, handed down by Hyginus in his mythographic world, The Fabulae (Igino, 2000, pp. 282-283).
The myth tells that one day in crossing a river, the attention of the goddess Cura was attracted to the clayey mud, and pensively, without well realizing what she was doing, Cura set about shaping the mud, drawing from it the figure of a man, the first human being (Homo). While she was intent on this work, Jupiter arrived. The goddess asked him to infuse the vital spirit into the figure she moulded, and Jupiter readily agreed. At this point Cura asked to be allowed to impose her own name on the mud creature, but the god denied her, claiming that the name must have come from him, who had infused it with life. A dispute ensued, and got more complicated when Earth also intervened: the latter believed that the name should be derived from her, since it was hers the matter with which the creature was moulded. Saturn was called in to settle the diatribe: to Jupiter, who had infused the spirit, it would fall to the death of that being to regain possession of that soul; to Earth, of whose matter the being was composed, the body would return after death, but to possess it throughout its life would be restlessness, the first to shape it. The name, on the other hand, would not fall to any of the three contenders: the being would be called “Man” because it was created from humus (Zanasi, 2015).
The Being in Heidegger
This myth, surely one of the minor ones in the Latin Pantheon, would have remained unknown to the general public if it had not shaken the philosopher Martin Heidegger in his reflections on Being and Time (Heidegger, 1976, p. 191). According to Heidegger, Cura represents the core of existence and what enables Man's being to persist in life, to the point of expressing his own condition of a being able to plan his possibilities, that is, of being of the Being, as existential totality of his original possibilities, dictated by being “thrown” into the world. The role Heidegger assigns to Man is thus that of the “shepherd” of being, that is, the one who allows the unveiling of being, of which he becomes his guardian.
If existence is “being in the world”, thus being among others, Cura is the expression of Man's relationship with himself and simultaneously of the relationship between Man's authenticity and that of others. If care is not authentic, it robs others of their care by directly procuring for them what they need; it is thus directed towards objects rather than towards humans (e.g.: procuring food for those who cannot produce it) and is the expression of “being together”. Authentic care, on the other hand, helps others to take on their own care and thus be free to realize their own being (e.g.: teaching how to produce the food needed by that community) thus enabling “coexistence”.
Heidegger's ontological breakthrough is thus a true paradigmatic revolution about the premises of human nature (who is the human being) and about the totality of the happenings and phenomena in which Man lives, understood as the “world”. Since Man is the only entity capable of posing the problem of being, it is Man, whom Heidegger calls with a play on words, Dasein, i.e., Being-in-the-world, to relate to the world by overcoming the inauthenticity of his being a disinterested spectator of phenomena and its meanings, because of his condition of dejection, i.e., of being thrown into the world by alienating himself in the so-called dictatorship of yes. «We are amused as one is amused, we find scandalous what one finds scandalous. The dictatorship of yes decides the way of being in its everydayness». Existence that is based on yes is not authentic in the sense that the subject has not made it his own, but is based on an anonymous choice made by everyone but no one in particular (Heidegger, 1976, p. 163). However, from this condition of inauthenticity (which is realized in everyday life through the expression of valueless instants) the human Dasein can recover itself by gaining awareness of the finiteness of life, which shows itself to Man in its unity as being-for-death. This implies that it is possible to live authentically only if one thinks deeply about the most decisive experiences of human life – distress and death – referring them not to individual phenomena but to the totality of existence.
Distress unveils the insignificance of phenomena as such, while death represents the experience that gives fullness and meaning to human life, for without it, human beings would not reach their authenticity. At this point, a central question arises: how does Heidegger's Dasein relate to psychodynamic psychology, particularly to the “individuation process” traced by Jung in analytical psychology and to the concept of the psychosomatic Self proper to Ecobiopsychology?
The Archetype of Self in Carl Gustav Jung
Let us give some definitions before delving into this new field of study of the psyche and its archetypal depths. By “individuation”, Jung refers to a unique and individual psychic process to which each person tends in the process of bringing the Ego closer to its Self; in other words, it is a progressive integration and unification of the shadows and complexes that form the personality of the Ego towards the Self, which from the introspective point of view corresponds to the central core of psychic life, understood as the archetypal dimension. As an indescribable totality, the Self cannot be separated from the image of the Divine present in Man. It manifests itself in the psyche as the image of a higher personality (prophet, Buddha, Christ, etc...) or with symbols of totality (square, circle, sphere, cross, mandala, etc...) and represents a synthesis of opposites that can appear as the unification of opposites, like the Tao (Fun Yu-Lan, 1975, p. 103 ss.). It should be remembered that Jung gets to the conception of the idea of the Self through the discovery of the collective unconscious, as opposed to the Freudian personal unconscious, through the observation of its presence as a universal psychic container of all forms and symbols derived from the archetypes that manifest in all peoples of all cultures (Jung, 1976, p. 177 ss.).
The collective unconscious can be considered then as the psychic structure of all humankind, which has developed over time, starting from the archaic roots of the past until it integrates the socio-cultural values of this present moment, to postulate the future values, potentials and choices of humankind. In the collective unconscious operate the archetypes, which can be regarded as the innate and universal forms of thought, endowed with a certain affective content for the subject, which are reflected in the nervous system characteristic of humankind, and are transmitted hereditarily (Jung, 1976, p. 217 ss). The most important archetypes are: the Self, that is, the result of the individual's project of forming uniqueness; the Shadow: the instinctive and irrational part also containing the repressed thoughts of consciousness; the Soul: the feminine personality of Man as he represents it in his unconscious; and the Animus: the masculine counterpart of the woman's soul (Jacobi, 1971, p. 104 ss.) (Jung, 1967, p. 106 ss.). Thus Jung shifts to the unconscious level those cultural, religious, artistic and environmental moral demands common to all individuals, and the archetype, consequently, comes to be a kind of universal prototype for ideas, through which the individual interprets what he observes and experiences. The influence of Jungian work has not been limited to psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, but has extended to other fields of knowledge and culture in general, all the way to the field of religion. With the idea of the Self as psychic totality Jung not only recovered the sense of transcendence, in crisis in traditional religions due to the increasingly individualistic demands of late modernity, but with the process of individuation he offered a “way of salvation” based on the experience of transforming consciousness (Frigoli, 2016, p. 57 ss.). In addition, its constant dialogue with science, particularly quantum physics, enabled the discovery of synchronicity as an acausal principle operating in the universe, thus establishing a bridge connecting quantum physics and the collective unconscious.
The Self and the Ecobiopsychology
In spite of these undoubted discoveries, Jungian analytical psychology neglected to explore the dimension of the relationship that the archetype, as an ordering factor of psychic images, has with bodily dynamisms, starting from its influence on the physiological functions of organs and apparatuses to its complex relationship with DNA (Frigoli, 2013, p. 59 ss.) (Frigoli, 2024). In his differentiation from psychoanalysis, Jung's effort was directed towards building the complex field of analytical psychology, leaving in the shadows the relationship that the psychic energy he postulated had with vital energy.
Today, with the most recent discoveries in quantum physics, evolutionary biology and cosmology, studies of the psyche must confront new concepts such as “cognition” (Maturana, Varela, 1987, p. 44 ss.) and “in-formation” (Laszlo, 2009, p. 49 ss.), which form the basis of modern complexity paradigms as tools for studying Body-Mind and Man-Nature relations with reference to their archetypal root. By “cognition” evolutionary biology means that mind is inherent in matter at every level in which life manifests itself, and in the case of Man as far as his cells, organs and apparatuses, beyond the central nervous system (Capra, Luisi, 2014, p. 169 ss.). In this view, mind is no longer linked to brain activity, because the brain is only the final moment of a synthesis of peripheral processes embodied in our bodies, consisting of a form of proto-mind defined as “cognition.” These peripheral processes of cognition could be likened on the plane of the body to an aspect of the collective unconscious studied by Jungian analytical psychology (Frigoli, 2013, p. 60 ss.).
Alongside this conceptual revolution, according to which the mind is diffused to the whole body of Man in the form of “cognition” - which in the course of evolution, will become “primary consciousness” in vertebrates up to the reflexive consciousness of Man - the recent acquisitions of quantum physics and cosmology, make the plane of Man-Nature-Universe relations even more complex.
The Akashic Field of Cosmology
It is accepted that the fundamental principles of the physical universe are describable in terms of vibrational excitations or in-formative waveforms that pervade and incorporate the entire manifest universe up to human consciousness, starting from an In-formative Source defined as a Quantum Void Field or Akashic Field (Maldacena, 2013) (Bohm, 1993).
To describe this source of quantum “emptiness”, which is actually a “fullness” of fluctuating particles, cosmologists speak of the Akashic Field, deriving that term from the Sanskrit Akasha to define the all-pervasive space from which everything we perceive is derived and to which everything returns (Laszlo, 2009, p. 113 ss.).
Understanding the Akashic Field or Field-A reveals how the universe was in-formed, that is, how it took on its own form. All material structures of the universe, all its concrete forms, are considered entangled excitations of the fundamental state of this cosmic matrix (Aczel, 2004). Systems that appear as objects composed of matter manifest locally in ordinary space-time, but in reality they are intrinsically entangled configurations within this matrix. Thus in-formation is a prominent factor in the appearance and persistence of form-specific structured energy configurations. In the absence of in-formation, the energies present in the universe would be an accidental set of excitations of the fundamental state of Field-A. The in-formation governing structured energy configurations in space-time is holographic in nature (Bohm, 1993).
Living systems in this perspective are autonomous, higher configurations of in-formed energy, arising in the universe when favorable physicochemical environments are available. If this is the case, one consequence follows: that the archetype is not only an ordering factor of psychic images - as Jung intended - but also possesses its own organizing capacity with regard to corporeality, such that an in-formative continuum specific to this contemporaneity is structured between physical events and the corresponding psychic images. The search for this continuum, on whose theoretical-practical validity it is not the case to discuss since the current biological and physical sciences seem by now to have accepted it as the cornerstone of their development, leads to one conclusion, that Jung's collective unconscious should be considered today in such extensive terms as to contemplate the entire panorama of in-formations present in the universe (Frigoli, 2016, p. 153 ss.) (Frigoli, 2024).
The ecobiopsychological Unconscious
Ecobiopsychology, from this perspective, can be seen as the innovative reading response to this in-formative field, whose boundaries are so vast that they cannot be known, but only glimpsed through symbolic and analogical language.
What does the term Ecobiopsychology mean? Science reminds us that all nature and evolution of living forms (eco aspect) is sedimented in the DNA of Man's body (bios aspect) and awakens in the psychic images of the same as phenomena interconnected with the body (Frigoli, 2010, p. 31 ss.). Ecobiopsychology then, can be understood as the holistic gaze that allows one to look at the world, Man's body and his psyche in their in-formative hierarchy of energy and matter, structured differently. E.g., it is known that the evolution of living forms originates from the primordial sea, which shows up in Man's body in the form of blood plasma, so much so that biologists recognize the same chemical composition. In cases of urgency for psychological “transformation,” the most common dream images to express this need consist of either diving into the sea or emerging from its waters (Frigoli, 2020, p. 349).
From where do these collective images of renewal originate, if not from the emotions, connected to one's birth and the memories sedimented in the DNA, in which are found all the evolutionary stages of the transitions from the primordial sea-cradle to the development of phylogeny? (Frigoli, 2024).
The psychic, or rather in-formative, field between Man's body and his evolutionary history, when confronted with the psychic images consistent with the bodily phenomena investigated, designates the presence of an organizational centrality that Ecobiopsychology has called the psychosomatic Self, indicating the archetypal dimension acting on both the level of the body and the level of the psyche.
Given these theoretical premises, somatization and the central topics of the psychological mainstream, such as trauma, dissociation, memory, alexithymic language, etc., will take on a new point of view, that of being the expression of the history of the body and its relationship with the archetype, stored deep in the synaptic circuits. The ecobiopsychological unconscious – consisting of the subtle, almost instantaneous, non-evanescent and non-energetic connections between the forms of the universe and nature, sedimented in human DNA – obeys the criteria of analogical and symbolic thinking embedded in the logic of synchronicity. Analogical and symbolic thinking managing to combine the most diverse elements into a unified description, fulfils the function of mediating between the irrational power of the unconscious and the manifest “sense” of it, as it appears to consciousness (Frigoli, 2020, p. 348) (Frigoli, 2016, p. 151 ss.).
The ecobiopsychological therapy
As mentioned above, the field of application of ecobiopsychological treatment not only covers all somatizations, from the less severe to the more complex ones involving autoimmune diseases and cancers, but also covers all psychological disorders to which it offers a more attentive understanding of the vicissitudes of existence. In the case, for example, that muscular-tensive headaches – accompanied by neurovegetative symptoms such as photophobia (discomfort with light), lacrimation, nausea and often vomiting – are present since childhood, embedded in a clinical picture of a family climate dominated by hostility, more or less explicit aggression, the ecobiopsychological therapist will detect that:
- traumatizing emotions and affects somatized into hostile fantasies continuously ruminated in the psyche;
- such an act of obsessive rumination involved the frontal area of the head, in which the frontal poles of the brain are responsible for elaborative thought processes;
- alongside the hostile cores, deep guilt anxieties are present in these patients for removed or denied aggression, which will be expressed through accessory tearing;
- photophobia will be interpreted as the patient's difficulty with the awareness of unconscious conflict based on removed or denied aggression;
- nausea and vomiting will represent the primary expression of denial as an inability to psychically tolerate hostile fantasies.
In this complex framework, some aspects of somatization may be explored by usefully resorting to post-Freudian psychology, e.g., the theme of conflict and its psychic representations; others to archetypal psychology, e.g., the unconscious choice of the head to express the knot between “emotion” and ”awareness”, since archetypically speaking the head has been constructed in the phylogenetic path as the seat of awareness. If in the case of muscle-tensive headaches the removed or denied fantasies concern the general theme of unconsciously experienced aggression as dangerous, on the level of explicit expressiveness, going to the depths of understanding these clinical pictures, the therapist will also have to explore the metaphors with which such patients describe their discomfort, because in them are hidden the “specific fantasies” of existential vicissitudes not processed at the conscious level. Quite different will be, for example, to speak of one's headache as a “burning pain” or “constricting like a vice” or “piercing as if so many pins were pricking me” or “like an unbearable weight crushing me, etc.” because the choice of such terminologies, springing from the depths of the unconscious, hints at different emotions, each of which will refer to analogical meanings to be traced back to very specific traumas (Frigoli, 2020, p. 350).
Through analogy and symbol, therefore, Ecobiopsychology deals with patients' clinical history, their traumatic vicissitudes, painful events of existence, dreams, behaviors and habits, trying to build a coherent field based on the importance of the archetypal Self as an ordering factor of bodily events and psychic images parallel to them. This coherent field of images, derived from emotions originated, according to neuroscience, in the depths of the body, then represented in feelings activated by the limbic system, to become ultimately speech through activation of the cerebral cortex (Damasio, 2012, p. 140 ss.) (Damasio, 2018, p. 170 ss.).
Thus, knowledge by images is empathic in nature, much more primitive than conceptual knowledge; it is organized ontogenetically and phylogenetically through the right hemisphere, which matures earlier than the left, due to its greater connections with the primitive centers of the brainstem and limbic system. Mc Gilchrist shows that the right hemisphere tends to see things as whole, and sees them embedded in contexts with other things through the construction of total gestalts or in-formative networks. Preferring novelty and uncertainty it prefers metaphor over literal meaning, and mediates interpretation of the world by making use of empathy, analogy and symbol rather than literal specification of definitions. Therefore, it can be said that the right hemisphere is more interested in non-literal and connotative meaning than the left hemisphere, which specializes in the “denotative” language proper to science (Mc Gilchrist, 2009) (Shore, 2019).
Given these premises, the ecobiopsychological therapist, in the intersubjective encounter with the patient, will be able to experience attitudes and emotional styles intended to repair the traumas that were experienced by the patient as unbearable and unspeakable, so that the same can be made representable in new constructs accessible to language. If health is represented by a dynamic balance of the subject belonging to the web of life, illness should always be considered an “in-formative disequilibrium” with which the therapist should be able to confront in order to repair it (Biava, Frigoli, Laszlo, 2014, p. 51 ss.).
This means that all information must be decoded in the dual code of sign and symbolic meaning in order to bring the system-man back into balance with himself and the webs of life. The therapist working according to this criterion must confront the sub-symbolic universe of the patient's body, allowing it the possibility of expression in the nonverbal symbolic universe of images, up to the verbal symbolic of language, in order to find among these different domains of human experience that in-formative “coherence” expression of typical arche activity. It is only through knowledge of these steps that it may be possible for the psychotherapist to lay the foundations of a new epistemological framework in which mind, body and nature are part of a single in-formative field, described by quantum physics as Field-A.
In therapy, it is necessary the communication between patient and therapist takes place from right brain to right brain, because it is only in this way that dismantling of the patient's anti-totality defenses can take place. Because of the plasticity of the brain, it is necessary for such repair to take place more than by the technical vocabulary, by the therapist's metaphor, analogy and symbols, the only tools that can repair the patient's implicit experiences dissociated by trauma.
From all that has been expressed so far, there emerges the need for new “informational therapies” that are able to enable a complex approach to the patient in which pharmacological and nonpharmacological interventions (use of biological substances), complementary medicines and psychotherapy can intersect and intervene harmoniously on the individual, taking into account the entire information network and the inseparability of mind and body. Such an assessment would make it possible to create ad personam interventions, in which treatment is aimed at neghentropically reordering, through precise messages, the entire psychosomatic system, integrating unconscious emotions with conscious ones.
The relationship is thus the cornerstone of informational therapy, on the condition that it does not limit itself to exploring only the Ego complex, but aspires to focus on the search for the self, always reflecting that the treatment of the stormy emotions that are generated when the soul is confronted with the history of the body, can be alleviated when the connections between affect and image, between present and past, are recreated, the only ones capable of allowing the Ego to no longer feel estranged from the commands of the Self.
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Translated by Dr.ssa Raffaella Restelli - Human Sciences scholar, linguist and psychologist enrolled in the British Psychological Society with which she actively collaborates. Graduated in Modern Languages and Literatures at the Catholic University of Milan and in Psychology at the Newcastle University, UK. Ecobiopsychological counselor. Collaborator of ANEB Editorial Area as a translator.
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