Seveso, March 28-30 2025
Representatives from various fields of knowledge and professions (philosophers, theologians, psychologists, psychiatrists, educators from schools and social services) gathered in Seveso, at the Ambrosian Pastoral Center, including members of the ROR, co-organizers of the conference. The themes addressed were the crisis of the self and psychological distress in the patho-plastic society, that is, one that generates pathologies, causes them and produces them. What questions and what operational suggestions does this situation of widespread malaise raise, especially among young people, also from a multidisciplinary perspective?
The participants shared a first essential consideration: psychological, educational or social distress is not the only theme to focus on. The latter is often perceived as a problem to be solved or to be “cured”, as a diagnosis to be formalized urgently, when instead, especially if thought of together with the crisis of the self, it presents itself to us as the symptom of a deeper crisis, which pertains to the very ontological dimension of man.
What underlies and originates these problems, to the point of producing pathologies, is contemporary nihilism. If, in fact, values are not fixed points, the very identity of the subject disappears; the lack of identity constitutes its fluid character, replaced by many masks (consumer, patient, student…). Moreover, if there is no longer a subject and everything becomes a “right,” even in refusing truth, one no longer knows what right is.
Often, moreover, in such an ideologized context, the crisis of the self is traced back to patterns of the self, in which the person is identified with the problem they are presenting: these are “partial” models, which generate a label, the result of reference not to the specific history of the self but to the narrative that others give of it. Thus “from history one passes to the idol” but, fortunately, everyone’s history is always broader and more articulated than the idol itself: therefore these approaches are to be avoided.
Nietzsche was right about passive nihilism: he spoke of it as a disease. Spiritual acedia causes the loss of desire and hope. Nihilism itself is, fundamentally, the loss of desire. It is necessary to orient desire toward the beyond, toward otherness, in other words toward God, so as not to fall into an infinite and self-sufficient desire. Positing the hypothesis of a “beyond” is what today more than ever represents the task of the adult and the educator.
Desire, then, is linked not only to human fragility but also to relational gifts. Science and technology cannot satisfy the desire for infinite love that dwells in the heart of every man. From this perspective, even the non-recognition – if not the refusal – of the theme of “symbolic dependence” in the context of relationship, which in Christian faith finds its foundation in Filiation, is an effect of contemporary nihilism. Such negation, in fact, causes the loss of the gift dimension in relationship. The paradox of the gift, whereby those who give themselves do not lose themselves but gain the goods of relationship, origin and destiny of each of us, must today be re-meditated and put forward as an end.
Relationship is what remains for us to reconstruct the identity of the self in the patho-plastic society. However, we must first understand what relationship is, because we no longer perceive it completely. Often relationship is conceived as a “reference to” but relationship is much more complex, since it is in itself a subsistent reality: it is what emerges from the reciprocal action of those who are in relationship. Precisely the concept of reciprocity opens new perspectives for reflection in an era when the self is fused into the network. What I am for others, who I am, is decided by “who I am for you” and “who I am for others”.
Nihilism annuls the difference between normality and abnormality in a given context and this is linked today to how relationships in the network are delineated and managed. If, however, pathology is produced by the network, how can the individual solve their problems individually? The therapist is not enough; one must also turn to other significant people.
Having said this, the current debate does not offer convincing answers, because it does not perceive the denial of truth as a problem. Instead, we must place psychological distress at the center of our attention, not to label it but to transform it into an occasion for recovery. The crisis of the self, the lack, the malaise, which we so often see around us without response, must therefore be primarily understood as the expression of an ontology rather than a pathology.
