Genesis of a Legend. Diego Armando Maradona and the City of Naples

Journal title PSICOTERAPIA PSICOANALITICA
Author/s Giovanni Starace
Publishing Year 2026 Issue 2026/1
Language Italian Pages 14 P. 63-76 File size 72 KB
DOI 10.3280/PSP2026-001004
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The essays analyses and explores the origin of the narrative of a heroic figure, yet intimately connected to the culture he encountered. Diego Armando Maradona, a hero who came from a poor neighborhood of Buenos Aires, quickly became an adopted son of the city of Naples. A mythical narrative is born where reality becomes imagination in the encounter between an individual story and a collective history. It takes on a timeless character: transforming sensory and emotional experiences into meaningful symbolic objects. In according to the author’s thought, in Maradona’s case, a careful construction of a story, enriched by all the ingredients of postmodern spectacularization, created a unique myth, in a conjunction of mutual identifications between his figure and the character of common people, between elements of the past and the present. The author has adopted an exposition in which thought and emotion constitute a single, living, and pulsating material, in order to achieve a deep understanding of the events.

Keywords: myth, identifications, Maradona, symbolic constructions.

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Giovanni Starace, Genesi di un mito. Diego Armando Maradona e la città di Napoli in "PSICOTERAPIA PSICOANALITICA" 1/2026, pp 63-76, DOI: 10.3280/PSP2026-001004