European knowledge ...

European knowledge is like the oil in Arabic countries: one has to know how to extract and refine it. However, the issue is the following: does reversibility exist between what is taught at university and what the professional world demands? Can professors really teach the practical meaning of work? The answer offered by the ontopsychological viewpoint: FOIL Management.

The Convention, held at the office of the European Parliament in Italy last May19th, has been Supported by the Office of the European Parliament in Italy, the Ministry of Education, of University and Research, Rome University “La Sapienza”, Faculty of Sociology, the Region of Lazio, the Province of Rome and the local Government of Rome, in addition to the Consent of the Presidency of the Italian Republic. It represents the nth leaf of the profitable collaboration between the European Ontopsychology Association and Rome University “La Sapienza” I Chair of Sociology, as the chairperson of the debate, Prof. Paolo De Nardis, director of the I Chair of Sociology and president CATTID, Rome University “La Sapienza”, pointed out1. It is a very topical and impelling subject for the future of our old continent: the European harmonization of the regulation of professions and respective courses of study. The main theme is the need to have an extremely concrete relationship between instruction and working experience, a stronger need in Italy than in the other European countries. It is an important possibility for comparison and the proposal of the ontopsychological view regarding culture, work, and making the young responsible for their own life2.
“The institutional” interventions have emphasized a series of successes, reforms, innovations (also with some disagreement), but everybody has come to a standstill before the evidence that university, studies and formative courses can give something, but not all. Although several efforts have been made, we have felt the sense of an incomplete, vain answer.
Let us try to understand why.
Although the Italian didactics Reform of the “3+2”, has increased the formative profiles – offering “slimmer” courses which are more easily put into practice in the work market – it has obtained a favourable opinion, but a lot of problems have arisen for which several solutions have been suggested. For example, it has been said that a lot of formative profiles risk being dispersive for young people if not based on a precise cultural design. They have also said that the “3+2” has reduced the distances from the work market and professions, but Italy is still suffering from a University which is not a top priority in the government political programs and that only by investing in education, the real structural heart of the problem, will we be able to define an accurate and European profile of professions. Moreover, several disciplines from the five year bachelor’s degree are in the three year courses, and in this way, the student is “bombarded” with information and has no time to synthesise what he is learning.
Actually, if we look at the problem from the ontopsychological viewpoint we can identify where the difficulty is: the institutions keep on encouraging individual welfarism, which causes the mitigation of responsibility in the young. Nevertheless, today, what are the choices and the opportunities for a young person? It is the development that creates the professions, and not vice versa, i.e. there is no course at the end of which our life can be settled. To nurse the infantile idea that there is a prearranged road made of guaranteed stages in our life, which soon become demands – such as degree, open-end contract, and retirement – for the young is equivalent to digging a grave that, before being professional, is psychological. Therefore, the truth is that institutions are not able to keep pace with what instead the individual by himself is able to produce.
Posing the question correctly, the ontopsychological education gives a suitable answer too. The time of education needs a culture of value, a specific forma mentis that goes beyond learning seen as a deposit of knowledge and technical abilities, these are certainly necessary, but are not sufficient unless the individual also has a foundation of conscience, health and functionality. Without these requirements, the world of work is probably only a pipe dream or a place people reach through cooptation and nepotism. Education is a setting up of personality: there is a similitude between to be able to do and to be able to be. It is therefore essential to include a space dedicated to the study and development of personality in any instruction. It is indispensable to promote knowledge, which is the mainstay of the person’s functional evolution to the elaboration of construction and social responsibility. At this point, the question comes up: What is the personality? In addition, how can we speak of personality without facing the topics of what are the psyche and the unconscious too? Could this gap actually be the determining factor that often causes young people to confuse illusions with motivations? Their own emotional deficiencies with concrete existential prospects?
Besides, we must not forget Europe. Italy has adopted with the 2005 communitarian law (carried out from 25 January 2006) the directive on the professional qualifications. Today, where working in France or Germany is like working near home, we speak about the necessity of harmonization, i.e. to create some legislative systems regulating education and work in a compatible way between one State member and another. In this sense, the establishment of the triennial bachelor in Italy could be in contrast with a few movements of the professions reorganization on a European scale. The institutional architecture of “3+2” has only a superficial homogeneity that, not only in Italy but also in other countries, has actually led to different solutions.3 However, here there is another problem: other foreign university structures, even though prestigious or connected to valid business stages, are looking for answers too. As if it were not enough, the problem related to the professional orders is still open. The comparison between the Mediterranean systems (supporters of orders and colleges) and the Anglo-Saxon one (where associations carry out this role) attests that now the difference is no longer so distinct and consequently it is necessary to rewrite the common rules here too. We go back to the bureaucratic solution.
The ontopsychological viewpoint shows an answer “dramatically” concrete and true on this point too: to teach the young that there is another world beyond the one they see “from the keyhole” of their home which claims them, that there are countries (for example, the Baltic ones) full of practical possibilities, resources, availability for realizing an entrepreneurial project in a few days. The solution is to give the young a universal humanistic culture (in which Europe is immensely rich) which shows them an overview of truth without illusion? and that, in last analysis, makes them responsible as builders of their own existence. So the culture must recover an ontological dimension that enables everyone to control the logical reason of truth, i.e. to know the way of doing, to know the logic. The institutions should help in this sense, putting some instruments at our disposal, giving a general survey of truth. Anyway, the individual has the greatest responsibility regarding his own existence.
We can agree that it is necessary to have a minimum of common European cultural base on which every State may prepare itself as it likes, and that the continuous learning and the adaptation to the various social systems of reference is very important too, since technology advances very fast on all the professional levels and the professional categories. However, we do not agree on the excessive bureaucratization of knowledge and on the fact that people think of waiting for the final solution always coming down (Italy or Europe indifferently). We are all waiting for answers, but what is the question?
The ontopsychological education catches the end of a skein again: does reversibility exist between the contents taught at university and what the professional world demands?
Can professors really teach the practical meaning of work?
Once again, there is a realistic, tangible, and accomplishable answer: FOIL management. There are twelve modules, entrepreneurs from every field and “apprentices leader” together in the same classroom, everyone with his own wealth and problems. Up front, an educator whose role is “to watch over” this circularity of osmosis, in a continuous feedback of people who are already in the world of work, that allows hic et nunc to verify the realistic advantage (what is not useful is modified) and the reversibility of the subjects dealt with. This allows measuring carefully which contents to deal with and to which depth. However, there is a further ingredient: there where one can discover a specific attitude, the entrepreneur himself becomes the object of formation and put himself in the teacher’s shoes. Therefore, not only a continuous adjustment and updating of the programs content, but also a direct transmission from those who are out there every day, risking, investing with responsibility and sacrifice their own time and money. And the effects are evident and speak for themselves: the project not only suits any profession, but it is also “exported”, with a certain flexibility (the program is three-quarters mutual and for a quarter changes in accordance with the country where it occurs), in other countries (Baltic Republics, Brazil, Germany), in a formative process of a really international and interdisciplinary nature. The purpose is to create a sort of European university, maintaining the aspect related to the subject of psychology unchanged. The method used by FOIL is the ontopsychological one, an interdisciplinary methodology suited to any profession, in whichever nation. Once the research is finished, maybe the FOIL Management course will result in a diploma. This didactic experimentation could replace a lot of American MBAs and give a European connotation.4
European knowledge is like the oil in Arabic countries: one has to know how to extract and refine it because the world of work includes some operators that allow for individual accomplishment to a purpose that is greatly social for everybody. The fact that the FOIL Management project, originating from a private initiative, is also able to open the way to the public institutions can depend on everyone who is reading too. In fact, one thing is sure: the answers are there, it is enough to want them and start working on them.

1 An important Convention on ‘Cinelogy: Cinema and the Unconscious’ has held at the Conference Room of the Rome University “La Sapienza”, Faculty of Sciences of Communication on 26th May 2005, in which cinema has been analyzed by the ontopsychological point of view. Cf. New Ontopsychology Review, n.1/2-2005, Psicologica Ed., Rome, pp. 38-45.
2 Next to the exponents of the Italian university world – such as Prof. Renato Guarini, Chancellor of the Rome University “La Sapienza”, Prof. Mario Morcellini and Prof. Luciano Benadusi, Deans respectively of the Faculty of Sciences of Communication and the Faculty of Sociology of the Rome University “La Sapienza” – have also intervened at the debate, after the thanks by the Officer of the European Parliament Dr. Orazio Parisotto, MP Stefano Zappalà, a member of the European Parliament and reporter both of the Directive for the Acknowledgment of Professional Qualifications and the Directive on the Public Contracts, and FOIL, in the persons of Dr. Pamela Bernabei (Consultant Coordinator FOIL and A.I.O. - International Ontopsychology Association) and Dr. Luca Morotti (FOIL Consultant), with the contribution of Andrea Pezzi, a famous television presenter, as an expert in communication and mass media, as well as operator of Ontopsychology.
3 For example, it is enough to say that “3+2” is the Bachelor Master (BM) in Europe, because it is the English model of Bachelor and Master, but in England, the Bachelor is not so professional a level as the triennial degree is seen to be in Italy.
4 Concerning this, the myths of the American universities and the English ones of Oxford and Cambridge ought to be exploded. Some research has underlined that the latter are the universities with the lowest level of knowledge. On the contrary, in the German school, – for example - theory is side by side with practice by work experience in a company, and a young person has to demonstrate having carried it out in order to find a job at the end of his studies. This is interesting, because a young person gets into the habit of a condition of sacrifice and responsibility. Acting, instead, like the French young people with their protest against the Contract of First Employment means not caring for risk and living on the illusion that the enterprise is obliged to give one a job.

How to use the dictionary searching psychology

Every existing dictionary gives an explanation of the conventional meaning of a specific term. The convention is usually determined by:

1) current use;
2) the decision of a group, of a fact, of a people, of an initiator;
3) the historical-linguistic origin of one’s own or another’s linguistics.

Though I consider this procedure valid and define it as the culture of the linguistic etymon, I do not feel it is sufficient when one investigates to carry out science on the existential processes that cause human reality.
In particular, from the time that analytical introspection on the mental processes in the great science of present-day psychology started, a large inadequacy between sign and fact, between image and content, between word and intention, can be seen. By ‘great psychology’ I mean the analytical- synthetic aptitude searching into the basic processes of intelligence when it structures its own humanistic universe: man as protagonist in the world where it occurs.
Today, in fact, current psychology does not have a dictionary that represents the basic episteme of sense. My culture, and in particular my ontopsychological experience, have given me evidence between linguistic use and the meaning of the intentionality of nature. A person speaks and uses images, which, though they are codified by traditions and historical structures, do not coincide with the socio-biological interactions of existence.
While the known logical-linguistic system can work for several patterns of behaviour such as thejuridical, the political, economic, historical, mathematical one, etc., it is seen to be entirely unsuitable when psychological science is formed: it lacks the ontic relation, thus the functional rationality.
Psychology, which is science on the logos or topics of the psyche, cannot exist if it lacks the meanings objectifying its research. So long as psychology investigates with systems founded on apparent consciousness or on stereotypes of common linguistics, it will be able to dialogue, but it will not be able to observe the intentioning res in the phenomenology.
The interpretation of dreams, not yet exact when facts and symptoms in the different psychological (or psychoanalytical) schools are compared, is the demonstration of the linguistic dichotomy between nature and culture, between organismic intention and conscious rational image. Not to mention the unfailing persistence of symptoms that therefore go against many psychological theories.

In Ontopsychology a congruous correlation between organismic and conscious reflection is known. This is due to the fact that Ontopsychology has understood the order of meaning that forms the codes of existential interaction.
Science is such if the word conveys a form of quantum of action.
The task of my work hypothesis on the hundred or more epistemological words of psychology, is the recovery or re-organization of the quantum of sense and of action that presents itself within the conveyer (word, or gesture or sign of the living operator).
I will set this task through two criteria.

1) The linguistic etymon of a root common to the two mother tongues of the Italian language.

This language has a good history and possesses sufficiently superior and rationally evolved syncretistic orders. The Italian language springs from two great mothers of the civilisation of the sign: the Greek and the Roman civilisation. So I will trace the root of every word I define with an essential reference, which begins the specification of a mode of existential action.
Since the fathers of our language (Greek-Latin) fashioned the sign on ontic emotion, I consider that
creating this dictionary also on the linguistic etymon is the same thing as authenticating the sign on the living act.

2) The experience of the mediation between the existential ontic and verbal consciousness.

By ‘verbal consciousness’ I mean the entire complex process of configuration and identification which we experience as definite images: form, image, word, thought, fantasy.
By ‘existential ontic’ or reflection I mean the entire process that is formed in the individual in the interaction between being and time in worldly space, between individuation and environment, between personal organism and one’s surroundings.
The processes of this interaction between the Self and others, constitute the infinite variable of energy interaction through which the subject, in accordance with his individual thematic selection, lives, becomes and changes either wholly or in a single part as far as his entire psychic field is concerned.
Psychic, in man, is everything that acts and changes form while remaining distinct and different from its own effects or precipitates (chemical, physical, electric, thermic, magnetic). The soul or the In Sé, or the intellect, or the mind, is unity of action in a universe of pure causality, which in advance of all its precipitates is specified as intentional energy: it gives the drive that makes things happen. It can not bedepicted in any way, and yet it is known through a haecceity of presence. It is evidence without image.
Through the observation and the understanding of the semantic field I have been able to measure and identify many of the metabolisms that alter the organismic constant (the entire psycho-organics) of the subject. Thus, one has the rational possibility ofrecognising, distinguishing and measuring in reality all those innovative drives of the nucleus (or unconscious) of the subject being examined. Hence a particular emotion, an instinctive or environmental drive, can be recognised and foreseen in its subsequent development (in what time and in what place) long before its externalised expression in gesture or behaviour, in word and in way of thinking. It is objective consciousness open to anyone who can bring his own Iso and subsequent variants to consciousness.
With this knowledge of the semantic field – conditio sine qua non for Ontopsychology - the entire journey from the sign to the cause and vice versa can be travelled. Hence this knowledge is certain and is entitled in that it highlights the reversibility between sign and reality. The continuous clinical experience by operators working with the ontopsychological method and my personal clinical experience prove the causal connection of reversibility: that sign bears reality and the reality bears that sign.

The method of my interpretation is a continuous paraphrasing of the action in all its modes and
relations. The constant is always action, in which man and object, in their intrinsic and reciprocal modes, are the elementary phenomenology. Who acts, how it acts, what it produces, is the ultimatestructure of any existential logos, and, consequently, of any form of sign.
All of this becomes clear in that Ontopsychology has specified the prime and elementary criterion of one’s own autoctisis: the ontic In Sé.

Chair of Ontopsychology in Russia

The high vaults of one of St. Petersburg’s oldest buildings seemed to have grown in their proportions. Outside the windows, the life of the large city flows gently by, but here in the silence of the University corridors, everything was ready for the important event.
On May 27, 2004, in the great hall of Twelve Colleges building – the main administrative building of the St. Petersburg State University– in the presence of Prof. Antonio Meneghetti, the University Chancellor, L. Verbitskaja and the Dean of the Department of Psychology, L. Tsvetkova, in addition to several hundred others, including the teachers at the University and students from Russia, Italy, Europe, and Latin America, the official inauguration of the chair of Ontopsychology took place.
Everything that happened that day, the speeches, the special atmosphere and at the finale the entrance of a young woman wearing a dress that symbolized the Russian flag while the national anthem played, emphasized the importance and worldwide significance of the event.
This was the result of over ten years’ analysis and review of Ontopsychology in the Russian Federation and in the Psychology Department of St. Petersburg State University.
In 1989, Prof. A. Meneghetti met luminaries of the psychology school of St. Petersburg including B. Lomov, A. Krylov, and J. Zabrodin. This was the beginning of a great task. In 1998, the collaboration led to the opening of a course of study specialized in Ontopsychology in the department of psychology at the State University of St. Petersburg; in the same year, the first group of eighteen Russian students started their studies.
In 1999, this project of collaboration in the Russian Federation and the countries of the former Soviet Union took on an international status. A contract between the International Association of Ontopsychology and St. Petersburg State University was signed. This opened a new stage in the collaboration and the Russian students were joined by the first group of fifty Italian students. Later, in January 2000, a group of thirty Brazilian students joined. A baccalaureate program and an Ontopsychology workshop were also started.
In 2003, the Department of Psychology opened a separate seat at the AIO headquarters in Scandriglia (Italy); in the same year, the master program in Ontopsychology was opened under the leadership of Professor N. Grishina. The objective of this master program is to prepare highly qualified specialists in Ontopsychology. With the support of a government budget, the start of this program was an essential step for opening the chair. The Russian Ministry of Education recognized Ontopsychology as a “new scientific/practical approach within modern psychology which represents the synthesis of developing approaches and individual differences and aims at an integral description of human life and the development of human individuality.”
The basic theory of Ontopsychology is included in the new edition of the “General Psychology Manual” approved by the commission for methodical review of the Russian Ministry of Education and suggested by the Ministry of Education for all university departments in which psychology courses are taught and for all higher education institutes in the Russian Federation.
In February 2004, the Scientific Board of the Department of Psychology decided to open the chair of Ontopsychology. In March 2004, the Major Scientific Board of the University (the main organ of power in St. Petersburg State University) supported the decision of the Department of Psychology following the presentation made by Dean Larisa Tsvetkova. On March 29, 2004, the Chancellor’s decree to open the chair of Ontopsychology was officially published.
The chair is the structural cell on which the Department is based. Essentially, the chair is the mediator between the educational process (typically of a university) and the process of scientific research (conducted by the Academies).
The chair is only opened if the scientific orientation that it represents is considered important for opening new horizons in science. The chair ensures the legality and seriousness of the scientific research, assuming a function of overseeing and advancing scientific knowledge.
The chair of Ontopsychology has the following functions: first, to ensure the scientific nature of the teaching of Ontopsychology and organize it professionally (the program of ontopsychological studies was formally accepted by the Method Committee of the Department of Psychology of St. Petersburg State University in November 2001); second, to organize the methodical work of the study disciplines, scientific research, preparing scientific and pedagogical frameworks and improving their specialization. An important point is that the chair becomes the scientific core for other departments and institutes, representing Ontopsychology in the scientific sphere.
Therefore, the chair has a twofold duty, on the one hand it organizes and oversees the study process (confirming study plans, choosing basic and specialized scientific programs; training teachers, etc); on the other hand, it organizes and oversees the legal process of scientific research considered of real value for the overall advancement of human society.
The teaching staff will include major specialists from the Department of Psychology at St. Petersburg State University and excellent representatives from the psychology school of St. Petersburg, including: N. Grishina (instructor and head of chair scientific programs), L. Tsvetkova (instructor and dean of the Department of Psychology), S. Manicev (instructor and head of the chair of organizational consulting), J. Filimonenko (instructor of the chair of Ontopsychology), V. Dmitrieva (instructor and director of the chair of Ontopsychology). Teachers and Ontopsychology consultants graduated in Russia and Italy participate in the organization and teaching process.
Over 200 students (from the Russian Federation, Italy, Brazil, the three Baltic Republics and Ukraine) have studied in the programs so far.
We can identify a few main issues for the chair’s future.
The first is training specialists in this field to solve the major questions of contemporary psychology through an interdisciplinary approach, particularly the relationship between the existential development of the individual and his effective inclusion in society.
The second theme is the development of all scientific activity, both through experiments and through analysis of results garnered from graduates theses, some of which, in the opinion of the committee of state certification, are worthy of a doctorate.
The subjects studied pertain to complete research on the human personality over the course of our lives: psychological and professional growth, the development of creative potential, leadership capacities, how Ontopsychology can ensure depth in scientific research and so forth.
The third important issue is the growth of scientific and cultural projects with the universities in the Russian Federation and Europe which have appreciated the project and are ready to work together, while ensuring the scientific nature and high organizational quality of the work.

Exchange with other Institutions

The Association keeps contacts with international organisms, among which the O.N.U, the A.P.A. (American Psychological Association), I.I.A. (International Informatization Academy), W.F.M.H. (World Federation for Mental Health), I.A.A.P. (International Association of Applied Psychology), I.C.P. (International Council of Psychologists), S.I.P. (Sociedad Interamericana de Psicologia), W.F.M.T. (World Federation for Music Therapy), E.F.P.P.A. (European Federation of Professional Psychology Associations).

Beyond this, the A.I.O. keeps constant contacts with many other national and international institutions of research, and it has signed protocols of agreement with some of these.

ontopsychology

INTERNATIONAL ONTOPSYCHOLOGY ASSOCIATION

Constituted with its own statute in January 27, 1978.

The Association has a non-political nature and it doesn’t work for the sake of gain. As for the aims of the A.I.O., here follows a part of the article n° 2 of the Statute: " The aim of the Association is the scientific research on the psychic activity concerning the anthropological phenomenology both in the conscious and unconscious field, together with the perspective function of the being. The Association, other than describing the general aspect of the Ontopsychological praxis, individuates the process of observation of an attitude or complex for the psycho-social and psycho-biological authentication. According to the theoretical presuppositions of Ontopsychology, it organizes courses of psycho-pedagogy: explicitation of the human unconscious according to the intentionality of the individual and personologic a priori sense in environmental gestalt, explicitation of the birth and development of the Ego as an organismic and social function of the positive in-self of the being; it promotes and supports OntoArte, that is, each expression of art as aesthetical learning of that form which specifies the being in unique perspective for the perceptive individuation, even through its own school".