Massimo Fagioli was not only a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, but also an important Italian writer and intellectual.
He is known for the Theory of Birth.
According to the idea of Fagioli every human being is characterized by his reaction at the time of birth, when energy of light strikes his retina for the first time; there is the activation of photosensitive neurons that spread the electrical impulse to the whole nervous system and to the motor neurons, allowing, through the contraction of respiratory muscles, the breath and the first wailing.
The reaction of the newborn to the light stimulus and to the new reality in which he is catapulted is a disappearance fantasy, disappearance of the external new world that hides light, air, cold, noise etc.
This is the baby’s first mental reaction, their first thought.
Afterwards appears in the newborn an idea of existence of themselves, they recreates in their own mind the intrauterine sensation of the contact of his skin with the amniotic fluid; this is called by Fagioli “fantasy-memory”, it cannot be a pure memory because perception only begins with birth.
This first idea of the newborn, to make simultaneously “disappear” the inanimate aggressive world and to make “appear” the memory of the sensation is followed by the immediate and spontaneous search for another human reality, the breast.
Luminous stimulation, disappearance fantasy against the material world, recreation of intrauterine sensations, hope-certainty that a breast exists, are the fundamental steps at the origin of human thought; before this dynamic takes place there is no psychic reality and there is no human time.
This sequence of reactions is typical of the human being, the whole animal kingdom is subjected to light stimulation at birth but in no other animal formation of a “psyche” takes place.
There are no races and there are no a priori differences between people, only this dynamic or birth identifies, characterizes and distinguishes a human being; because it is the matrix of the fantasy, the thought and the language, and of what in adulthood clearly distinguishes man from animals.
As the newborn immediately needs the breast and the relationship, so every human being necessarily looks for a relationship; each time a relationship begins the newborn and then the man achieves a new birth, in a continuous cycle that makes every human being different.
This is the basis of equality and differences between human beings.
Sources:
http://guzman-tierno.blogspot.com/2015/04/teoria-della-nascita.html
