Io vivo fra le cose

Investigating and knowing yourself and your own being in the world through observation and a special osmosis with things. This could be the slogan of this article. In reality these are things that were officially discarded because they no longer worked or were outdated, some thrown away, others lost. Things that, in contact with the annihi-lating atmosphere of abandonment, have sometimes disintegrated, worn out, discolored, peeled, smoothed, to the point of becoming something else. And in any case fragments of life that had belonged to us. “When things were things we felt less alone” seems to be the re-frain that hovers like a voice-over for the entire duration of the text. We could define Geminiani as the anthropologist of the tides, be-cause most of the things he collected in the past decades come from off-season beaches. The author comes to theorize empirically on the existential vacillation of our times. That restlessness which, according to him, the standardization of the market of things, and the end of that cheerful and bizarre biodiversity of objects that had characterized the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, contributed to strengthening in people; because an ephemeral object transmits a feeling of precariousness and, in an al-ready liquid society, can aggravate the symptoms, unlike those things belonging to the domestic landscape of childhood. Things destined to last and be passed on to subsequent generations, things capable of looking back at us like living creatures. Talking about things and him-self, without too many filters, is a person who has intensely experi-enced the loneliness of an abandonment which must be considered as “voluntary” exile due to a lack of self-esteem and an excess of impres-sionability: a film that is too photosensitive to be able to expose him-self in the full and dazzling light of a youth that did not contemplate him.

Keywords: things, fragments, scraps, empathy, marginalization.

Gabriele Geminiani, Io vivo fra le cose in "PSICOTERAPIA PSICOANALITICA" 1/2024, pp 138-149, DOI: 10.3280/PSP2024-001010