“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Keep going. No feeling is final.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

Emotions are intense, acutely onset, short-lived affective reactions triggered by an environmental stimulus, according to Perls: “…although modern psychiatry treats emotions as if they were an annoying surplus that needs to be released, they are the very language of the organism; they modify basic arousal depending on the situation at hand. Arousal is transformed into specific emotions, and emotions are transformed into sensory and motor actions.” Fritz Perls, The Gestalt Approach: An Eyewitness to Therapy, Rome, 1977, p. 33

Of the emotions we experience as individuals, I believe fear is among the most important in the growth process. It can have a blocking effect on an individual, manifesting as withdrawal, escape, or avoidance. It is closely linked to anxiety, anger, sadness, loneliness, guilt, and shame. During counseling sessions, when one of these emotions emerges repeatedly, I always ask the person what they are afraid of. I hypothesize that it is the underlying emotion upon which certain responses form, and sometimes become chronic, to the point of sustaining a total identification, in which the person recognizes themselves or is recognized by the emotion—for example, “I am an anxious person” or “he is an angry person.”

To begin, I would like to share some situations that have struck me during my professional experience.

Years ago, a young woman, whom I’ll call Donata, came to counseling. She told me she wanted to start a program because her family was worried about her. I asked her why, and she replied that the problem was her “angry behavior.” Donata appeared armored, with a very rigid body and a low-pitched voice. Her words seemed subdued. Curiously, her manner was blunt, as if she were ready to start a fight at any moment.

I chose to start from her motivations, asking her to give me an example of her angry behavior. Donata described a situation in which a car cut her off while she was driving. This drove her crazy, she told me, and she followed the other driver to his house to insult him. The sessions with Donata continued until she became aware that her anger was an immediate response to fright, to fear, and she also reclaimed the projection of her family’s fear of her behavior as her own. Donata’s story also revealed repeated episodes of fear during her childhood; indeed, she had lived in a dangerous and distressing environment.

The second experience I’d like to share concerns a training course on conflict and burnout in work groups, which I attended years ago with healthcare staff at a hospital in Turin. The course also included nurses from a department that had changed significantly over the years, from a child neuropsychiatry department with minors suffering primarily from neurological diagnoses to minors admitted with psychiatric problems (after this statement, I should write another article, because I personally have serious doubts about considering minors psychiatric, but since that’s not the topic, let’s take this definition in quotation marks and take it for granted). The staff members of that department reported frequent episodes of anger in a young boy who was admitted there at the time. I asked them how they felt emotionally in that situation; they didn’t know how to respond, so they told me what they did. By talking about it and doing awareness work, we understand that they were doing a lot, they tried to use various protocols but they were unaware of the fear and frustration they were experiencing, with the risk of fueling a field that amplified their fears, the same fears that perhaps the boy was also experiencing, to paraphrase Perls: organism and environment are connected, they influence each other.

The final episode concerns a session during a training weekend at our counseling school. A student asked me and the group if she could experience herself as a client in a session. A classmate acted as her counselor, and she later received supervision. Tiziana, the student’s name here, reports wanting to work on her anger. In the session, she shares a specific episode: one afternoon, she returns from work and takes care of the housework. A few hours later, her husband returns. She realizes that her husband doesn’t have the children with him, and screams, demanding an explanation and insulting him. Interestingly, neither she nor the counselor are curious about the emotion that triggered the outburst of anger, yet the fear of not seeing the children was “obvious” to the observers.

These experiences, briefly touched upon, are similar in some respects—while each individual retains a subjectivity that opens them to the complexity of their experiences and histories—that is, they highlight a similar response to fear, when fear is not recognized and anger somehow becomes functional as a response to stop being afraid. The paradox is that in these cases, the experience of fear is recognized later, meaning one becomes frightened of one’s own anger, as happened, for example, in the third situation I described above. An imbalance, we might say, occurs between these two emotions. The common experience they encountered was the experience of danger and therefore finding themselves unexpectedly in a situation beyond their control and predictability. In the first case, the car cutting Donata off; in the second, the boy refusing treatment because he doesn’t understand the reason for his hospitalization and, in my opinion, is crying out for relational and emotional attention; in the third, not seeing the children at home when Tiziana assumed they would return with their father. The situations reported could be further explored and problematized, shedding light on the fixed gestalts and no longer functional creative adaptations of the subjects involved. Instead, I allow myself to use these examples to highlight the theme of unheard and unacknowledged fear.

Many authors claim that our society is afraid of fear, as if it were more of an obstacle than an important emotion for our growth, as it is capable of immediately signaling our blocks with a whole series of physical sensations, for example: breathlessness, or wide-eyedness, or desensitization, etc.

I invite readers to do an experiment and ask themselves and/or the people around them what they are afraid of?

Often when I share this question, I get responses like: no, I’m a little worried. Yet we live and have lived through years in which fear has perhaps been the queen of emotions, the pandemic being a striking example. The entire debate that has taken place, at least in Italy—because I don’t know the situation in other countries well enough to be able to comment on it—has revolved around reason, about what was right or wrong to do, and above all about who the enemies were, without giving any space to the emotion that drove all these actions, namely, fear. So that’s why I’ve previously shared a few fragments of experiences that highlight, in a reduced context, what we’ve experienced and what I believe we’re still experiencing exponentially as a society. It is clear that this could have happened because some aspects were already present in a form: habitual or ideological or unconscious and therefore introjected into our society, for example the medicalization of the experience of pain and suffering, or the attempt to schematize, protocolize, make an objective and objectifying procedure with a lot of related cures and treatments every issue not only health but also existential ones, using the logic of reducing the complexity of the human experience, just think of the quantity of drugs and psychotropic drugs that our society uses; to put it in the words of Natoli: “Aside from the different ways of expressing pain and the different therapeutic proposals that arise from the way it is represented, the common trait that characterizes the contemporary experience of pain is linked to the persuasion that man can technically dominate it and that, in any case, technique is the objective and, in the common belief, even natural way to dominate it.” Salvatore Natoli, L’esperienza del dolore, Milan, 2004 p. 377.

Or again, the attempt to make certain issues the prerogative of a single body of knowledge or discipline, for example: treating emotions as if they were the domain of psychology, forgetting that art in all its forms, philosophy, pedagogy, literature, and other fields of knowledge and scholarship have profoundly probed the human soul and have much to teach us and share about emotions.

Or even the attempt to make society politically correct and therefore perhaps a desire to erase any criticism that could break the pre-established political, social and economic balances, in this sense it becomes interesting to report some reflections of Goodman which seem current: “Spontaneity and instinct are subject to severe censorship, and yet creative gifts and sexual efficiency are demanded on command. It is a complete picture of what Freud called ‘the malaise in civilization’ (…) Reich demonstrated that this type of anxiety induces dreams of destruction, self-destruction, and explosion to release tension, to feel something, to feel free. (…) The psychological climate explains, I believe, the singular attitude of Americans in the face of the escalation of the war in Vietnam. The government’s declarations on the aims of the war contradict each other from one week to the next and are belied by its actions. Its predictions are disproved and ridiculed by events. Military commanders lie and are exposed by the next day’s news. Yet a large part of public opinion continues to succumb, prey to a fascination that paralyzes it. This paralysis is not indifference, because deep down, people talk about nothing else.” Paul Goodman, La società vuota, Milano, 1970 p.147

That said, what are the possible prospects?

The experience of dialogue:

During the pandemic, I found myself struggling. I had no existential categories or previous experiences to guide me. I felt fear and realized I was simultaneously immersed in a crisis situation, along with my loved ones, my clients, and my colleagues. What sustained me was the desire, probably out of necessity, and above all the opportunity I had to confront my fears. I followed my feelings, accepting responsibility for the choices I made.

I believe that the very responsibility of connecting with one’s emotions and therefore one’s inner world and expressing it intentionally is the key to one’s growth. This, however, remains an individual choice, perhaps the crucial dilemma of existential experience: assuming one’s responsibility for being in the world with one’s gaze projected toward a horizon marked by one’s own finitude.

In this sense, I report below a fragment of a dialogue between two colleagues, which moved me and then guided me in navigating the uncertainty we were and perhaps still are experiencing:

• • J.: I wish they would make this vaccine mandatory for everyone, so we can put an end to all this diversification etc…
  • X.: Do you know that if that happens I will leave?
  • J.: But where? What are you saying?
  • X.: I’m too scared, I don’t want to be given this vaccine. If I have to, I’ll find out in which other countries it’s not mandatory and I’ll stay there until it’s necessary.

• Silence…and emotion…

• • J.: I didn’t understand…for me, however, the fact that I did it makes me feel calm and I feel like I can hug you without fear.

• Surprise and emotion.

This exchange contains everything: “Two people are in contact when the situation makes sense to them, that is, when a Gestalt is formed of which both are part with their specific intentions (…). Contact implies quality: in practical terms, contact means an exchange endowed with meaning and quality, an exchange that has value for people’s lives (…). Contact means sufficient closeness for something to happen, but at the same time sufficient distance for something substantial to happen.” Paolo Quattrini Fenomenologia dell’esperienza, Milano, 2007, pp.185-6

Well, we could therefore hypothesize that if the environment somehow fuels and sustains our fears—think of the power the media have to influence us, numerous studies show how the perception of danger is stronger in our Western society than in the past, when, paradoxically, compared to human history, we live with more security—it is also true that it is precisely in the exchange with the environment through experience and dialogue that we can listen to our fears and find meaning, experiencing them as compasses that orient us in the process of awareness and growth: “If you are in the present, you are creative, you are inventive. If your senses are alert, if you keep your eyes and ears open, as all small children do, you will always find a solution.” Fritz Perls, La Terapia Gestaltica parola per parola, Roma, 1980, p.11

Bibliography

Borgna E., (2009) Le emozioni ferite, Milano, Feltrinelli Editore.

Goodman P., (1970) La società vuota, trad. it. di M. L. Mazzini. Milano, Rizzoli Editore.

Illich I., (1976) Nemesi Medica. L’espropriazione della salute, trad. it., di D. Barbone, Milano, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore.

Natoli S., (1986) L’esperienza del dolore. Le forme del patire nella cultura occidentale. Milano, Feltrinelli Editore.

Perls F., (1977) L’approccio della Gestalt. Testimone oculare della terapia, trad. it., di J. Sanders, Roma, Astrolabio.

Perls F., (1980) La Terapia Gestaltica parola per parola, trad. it., di B. Draghi, Roma, Astrolabio.

Pizzimenti M.-L. Rivetti, (2020) ABC Gestalt. Manuale pratico, Milano, FrancoAngeli.

Quattrini P., (2007) Fenomenologia dell’esperienza, Milano, Zephyro Edizioni.