Enrico Rosini, Ida Gualtieri, Matteo Maggiora, Edoardo Spinazzola

 

European often feel them as enemies.

From a psychiatric point of view, we identify peculiar Ego defense mechanisms that are able to produce this feeling that amplifies social conflicts.

In the essay The Uncanny, Freud links this word to something removed from the “unconscious” that is fearful but reflects and connotes our identity.

In this way, we need to put outside the uncanny part of us and “the other”, the “different one”, could easily become the enemy. In a parallel,the gothic medieval buildings show monstrosities in their facades. Without any architectural structural function, they may have the symbolic role to maintain the demoniac presence outside. It suggests that we can only feel safe inside the holy buildings, together with the believer “extra ecclesiam nulla salus”.

The approach described above is opposite to a phenomenological one, which confers several meanings to the discourse about the other. As human beings, we are all in a relationship, which needs a sort of ethical approach. Phenomenology is a science based on this ethics in aiming the other as an understandable human beings and this represents a sort of ethics that influences phenomenology as a science to understand the other.

 

migrants, otherness, uncanny, unheimlich, Ego defense mechanisms, relationship, phenomenology

 

 

Invited Article

Firstly published online on February 16, 2019