Una memoria pre-biografica? Ricordo e oblio come esperienze somatiche

Abstract

Human beings’ relationship with time seems to be quite conflictual: on the one hand, they seem to be attached to their memories; on the other hand, when this relentless, even painful yet natural time passing comes to a halt, the very essence of being in the world loses its meaning.
Building upon this observation, the article draws on Bessel van der Kolk’s psychiatric research, recent psychoanalytic studies, and Husserl’s concepts of Körper and Leib, to analyse traumatic memory as a somatic condition. Then, the article suggests looking at forgetfulness as a somatic experience as well.
Trauma, acting like a foreign body, disrupts both our physical-physiological and psychological-existential equilibrium, dissociating the two aspects of our experience originally lived as one, and interrupting the temporal continuity of that experience. The integrity of the Self, relegated to a pre-verbal dimension, requires to be recovered from its somatic dimension. Indeed, in the body the original and constant contact with the world occurs, and there resides immediate evidence of time. The forgetfulness granted by the somatic dimension, then, does not entail a trauma to vanish, but rather a kind of “digestion,” which allows memories to be sedimented and their meaning to change in view of the future, unfolding a new time for life.