Abandon yourself to love at all ages. To do this it is necessary to be ready to take risks and accept its world and its complexity, even outside what we consider “rational”. We must allow ourselves to be fertilized by the madness of the other. It is convinced Umberto Galimberti, philosopher and psychoanalyst, who spoke with a meeting on Plato and love at the Festival of Sexology organized by Giunti Psychometrics.
Professor Galimberti how has Plato’s concept of love changed nowadays?
“The change that has had the greatest impact is that due to the advent of information technology that affects everyone but in particular young people who already start looking for sexual content online at the age of 12, convinced that sexuality or rather pornography is what they see there. , while in reality the contents conveyed on the net have nothing to do with real life. When we refer to platonic love the idea is that it is just looking into each other’s eyes and that there is no erotic implication. reality, it is not at all like that. Indeed, love according to Plato includes a very powerful sexuality, based on a rigorous conjunction between body and soul. According to Plato, love is madness in the sense that we are possessed by this feeling, there is a yielding of the ego, it is love that governs you and nothing can be done about it “.
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So what is love for our boys?
“Premature sexuality at 12-13 years old is perceived as completely disconnected from emotionality and a resonance of the soul. Today’s adolescents live it separately, but this is not good because it becomes an anonymous and insignificant gesture that leads to an impoverishment of the emotions. Starting to experience sexuality at 12-13 years with the thrombus-friend or offering your body in exchange maybe even just a phone top-up means that you are bargaining with sex without any emotional participation. But a disjointed sexuality from the soul it becomes boring and insignificant. It is something very far from the madness that characterizes love according to Plato. Sexuality left to its solitude does not interest anyone. It does not really take your soul. “
What impact does sexuality experienced online have on today’s young people?
“The fact of not procrastinating sexuality as it happened in the days when I was a teenager makes desire extinguish because you have already done everything too soon and this makes us unable even in subsequent love choices. Desire is lack, but if I already have everything at 12-13 years then the spring of life dies out. Therefore, once sexuality is cleared, then you have to invent another taboo to regain desire. This is an emotional disaster because being in front of another person and looking into his eyes it’s much harder than having a screen in the middle. ”
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There is hope for these hyper-connected young people: can parents play a role in showing them that another form of love is possible?
“The most important thing is to talk to your children, but not when they reach adolescence because it is already late. The problem is how we made them grow, what model of a couple we showed them, how many words we exchanged with them, not only for tell them to wear the t-shirt but to know how they are and what they feel. Have you ever asked your children if they are happy? well when they were little then they will be able on their own to avoid everything that is not in keeping with the educational model they have received.
Is loving today after Covid-19 even more an act of madness?
“I do not know if people are still able to enter this state of madness as Plato meant it. Love should not be made with everyone as it is today. Once upon a time it was only made with that person who was able to intercept your madness . Then I trust you so that you enter my madness but above all you help me to get out of mine. The ego that enters into a love story, however it ends, comes out different from how it entered, because it was fertilized from the madness underlying our rationality. Unfortunately, the formula has now established that makes sexuality a normal thing, which is done when a drive arises for which sooner or after Covid does not change much. Even the desire remained unsatisfied during the lockdowns they have keeping people away is actually something that has to do only with physicality but not the madness of love as Plato understood it “.
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From children to parents: how is love transformed when desire becomes saturated, idealization disappoints, addiction is emancipated and madness is extinguished?
“It becomes a form of solidarity, it is impoverished because it becomes everyday life and this weakens love. It shows all the shadows that were not previously visible when the partner was idealized. However, despite this, my theory is that without love, life does not This is why I am convinced that even if there is an extramarital love, not only of a physical type, but that has traits of emotional purity, it is okay because life cannot be a desertification of emotions “.
In the society in which Plato lived, homosexuality was not considered an alternative to heterosexuality, as it has been considered until today. Are we also getting closer to this conception?
“Plato, like Socrates, argued that where lovers are denied their relationship, this depends on the ignorance of the people, the dictatorship of the rulers and the inability to understand that wherever love is directed, it is above all an emotional relationship. We must stop thinking that homosexuality is a perversion: nature generates people in different forms and ways. Homosexuality is also a way of being in the world and there is nothing strange “.
Why then, if already in Plato’s time there was no such taboo, it took us so long to clear homosexuality?
“It’s a cultural question. Since religions conceive sexuality only with a view to procreation, everything else is cursed and banned. Thanks to the struggles made by women who fought for the birth control pill, today certain issues are less demonized, but beware, it is often more a form than a substance. We are afraid of appearing as fundamentalists and we want to be ‘politically correct’, but then in reality it remains an underground racism “.
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