Between wishing and refusing to know: pain, body and identity
Journal title PSICOTERAPIA PSICOANALITICA
Author/s Elisabetta Fattirolli, Maria Grazia Pini
Publishing Year 2025 Issue 2025/2
Language Italian Pages 17 P. 53-69 File size 137 KB
DOI 10.3280/PSP2025-002004
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In this work, the authors offer reflections on the complex relationship between knowledge and pain, starting with the clinical cases of two young girls in early adolescence. Knowledge is understood as the possibility of coming into contact with one’s own emotional experiences: contact with the full range of one’s emotions and passions. This embodied, experiential knowledge leads to an enrichment of the entire personality. The paper regards the cases of two girls who, on the basis of their history and personal characteristics, deal with pain, knowledge, and the guilt associated with it in different ways. For one of the two girls, the path to listening and finding meaning in her emotional life is extremely complex, partly due to the severe trauma she has suffered. She rejects knowledge and seeks an anesthetic escape into another world, impoverishing her entire personality and using her body as a canvas on which to concretely engrave unthinkable and unspeakable suffering. In the other girl, who also had a traumatic experience, there is a defensive knowledge and a tendency to conform to what she thinks one should be, which risks keeping her imprisoned in a false self and inauthentic relationships.
Keywords: knowledge, pain, emotional experiences, traumatic experience, adolescence, body.
Elisabetta Fattirolli, Maria Grazia Pini, Tra rifiuto e desiderio di conoscere: dolore, corpo e identità in "PSICOTERAPIA PSICOANALITICA" 2/2025, pp 53-69, DOI: 10.3280/PSP2025-002004