Ontopsychological research

Ontopsychological research has demonstrated that it is impossible to know the world of life not on account of an intrinsic limit of human nature or rationality, but due to a problem of consciousness, which deforms man’s approach to knowing himself, others and the world. In other words, the worlds of life lies outside the reach of consciousness, because consciousness exists in one realm, reality in another.

Concert of Antonio Meneghetti at the National Opera House in Riga

CONCERT BY MAESTRO ANTONIO MENEGHETTI

Riga – Maestro Antonio Meneghetti performed in Riga for the first time, with a concert for piano and synthesizers held at the prestigious venue of the National Opera House, a treasure of Latvian architecture inaugurated in 1863. The Maestro’s previous performance was held exactly four months ago, on 8 December 2006, in the Sala Petrassi at Rome’s Parco della Musica, the largest auditorium in Europe and recently declared the most important auditorium in the world. The Rome concert was held under the patronage of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia, one of the world’s oldest musical institutions (founded in 1585), which thus recognizes the Maestro’s musical and artistic validity on an international level. On the stage of the Main Hall of the Latvian National Opera House, Maestro Meneghetti performed on piano and electronic keyboards, interpreting his profound knowledge of classical music in modern tonalities. Meneghetti has received the Italian government’s Prize for Culture three times and is a member of the academic senate of the International Academy of Modern Art. His artistic approach stems from the consummation of the teachings of the most highly regarded academies. As Meneghetti himself affirms, “In music one must decide whether to live in spaces of advancement, without destroying what came before, or create a new universe.” Indeed, his music, which has made him a famous concert artist who is in demand around the world, rigorously takes all musical backgrounds into account, from percussion techniques to the spirituality of Gregorian music and from the metaphysics of Indian music to polyphonic choral music, without overlooking classical orchestration and its composition and decomposition. Based on these conditions, Meneghetti has developed his own musical art that respects classical academic precepts yet is also connected to seeming improvisation. The latter is a divergence that, according to the artist, is the quintessential “instrument” with which one can go beyond the “two horizons” that Bach considered insurmountable and with which musical pathos can be grasped, moment by moment. According to Meneghetti, “With the movement in the ‘third horizon’ music is not invented but rediscovered with the person who is capable of listening to it. Music is the action of the soul; it is an order of life that lyrically courts our sentiments.” Meneghetti’s concert attracted music lovers from around the world – Italy, Brazil, Russia, Germany, England and the Baltic countries – as well as ministers, politicians and important social figures in Latvia. For all enthusiasts who are constantly in search of innovative musical experiences, this concert in Riga was unquestionably a unique experience not to be missed in order to gain first-hand knowledge of the music of this eclectic artist.

Ontopsychology
Ontopsicologia Editrice
News from International Association of Ontopsychology

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.

The telegram sent to the European Ontopsychology Association

The telegram sent to the European Ontopsychology Association by the President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano

“The Convention entitled ‘University Instruction and Professions: Towards a Europe of Knowledge’', promoted by your Association, is an occasion of reflection and comparison on a topic of cultural and social significance. Innovation, search, and education are determining factors of growth, cohesion, and integration for coping with the challenges of an open and globalized society in continuous evolution. With this awareness the President of the Republic gives the organizers and all the participants in the meeting a cordial salute and wishes everybody good work.”

Book Fair

During the four days of the Book Fair, the exhibition booth of Ontopsicologia Editrice publishers was an example of this. In addition to the very latest editions of certain “cornerstone” publications in the field of Ontopsychology (Pedagogia ontopsicologica – Ontopsychological pedagogy, Sex, power and grace in femininity, The leader’s psychology, Sistema e personalità – System and personality, Oneiric handbook, Cinelogia ontopsicologica – Ontopsychological Cinelogy), offering fully revised and updated contents, together with graphic presentations made even more attractive, what set apart the publications on display were the two latest new entries: Conoscenza ontologica e coscienza – Ontological knowledge and consciousness and Scheda storica sulle teorie della conoscenza – A review of the theories of knowledge in history.

ONTOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AND CONSCIOUSNESS

“All my scientific work can be viewed as an exploration and demonstration of the capacity to know what is real in a true and reversible manner (from the concept to the object and vice versa). In addition to my philosophical and theological competence, I have tested each of my positions through the clinical experience of individual and group psychotherapy. On the strength of decades of work and consistent results, I feel safe in asserting that I have the authority needed to demonstrate the capacity to know and judge of our intelligence. The error that mires our critical consciousness is not found in the nature of our intellectual faculties or those of our will. The error resides in the process of reflection, in the formulation and determination of the consciousness. Once this has been revised, philosophy and science are rendered authentic points of reference in the evolution of true existence.”

The style and the lines of arguments are not easy. But even Aristotle or Kant might envy the simplicity of the explanation. All of Ontopsychology, from clinical practice to art, is put to use on addressing the critical problem of awareness. The familiarity of the world, between intellect and ontology, allows Meneghetti to manoeuvre his intellectual attitudes in masterful fashion, without ever losing sight of Parmenides’ rule: being is, not being is not. Existence, to the extent that it constitutes awareness, either coincides with the principle or has never existed. Today philosophy no longer exists: all that remains is thought based on fragmentation and failure, and thus approximation and nihilism. Meneghetti opens the argument.

THE INTEGRATION OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND ONTOPSYCHOLOGY

By Albert A. Krylov

It is important to underline that the problem of individuality is not underestimated in Ontopsychology, but it is brought to the fore as the most important aspect for contemporary and future psychology.

Academician Professor Albert A. Krylov, born in 1935, is doctor of Psychological Sciences, professor and is medical training. Between 1967 and 1969 he was the Chairman of the Engineering Psychology Department of Leningrad University. Since 1976 he has been Dean of the Faculty of Psychology and holds the Chair of General Psychology. He has authored more than 100 scientific papers, and has a very large number of students both in Russia and abroad. He was awarded the honorary title of “Distinguished personality of Russian sciences”.

“One of the fundamental paradigms of our time is the systemic approach in the human being’s knowledge and activity. To understand such principles, we have to refer to Smuts (holism), Bogdanov (tectology), L. Von Bertalanffy (general theory of systems) and other researchers.
The process of integration of scientific knowledge can be considered a concrete phenomenon of the systemic approach. The integration of scientific knowledge is necessary to formulate complex laws and find profound connections in the universe, so as to understand the latter as a unitary system. Of course, such a path also presupposes a permanent passage towards new and higher levels of analysis of the data taken from every single science. From such point of view, psychology has an important characteristic inside the manifold existing sciences: the human being is surveyed both as the subject and the object of knowledge. Together with sociality and work, cognitive capacity is one of the fundamental expressions of the human being’s essence.
Mankind’s development, the comprehension of the world, the comprehension of man’s ego, the creation of sciences as forms of general consciousness and all the socio-cultural and spiritual richness of mankind are connected to this. Starting from what stated above, there are reasons to presuppose that the integrative processes in psychology have a deep specificity.
According to our opinions, it is possible to underline three general movements of psychological integration. Of course, the criteria that we have used to analyse the integrative psychological processes cannot be considered the only possible ones. Nevertheless, the model that we have proposed has a high degree of generalisation.
The first movement is connected with psychology itself, with factors of development of psychological knowledge. If we use Wundt’s conception as the starting point in the process of formation of psychology, we can see that this theory involved a change of conception of the same object of psychology. We can consider what follows: the pure elements of consciousness (structuralism); consciousness as a mechanism of adaptation, internal and external conditions (functionalism); personality and psycho-energetic equilibrium (psychoanalysis); behaviour (behaviourism); psychic reflection and psyche as the propriety of the physiological substratum of the brain (one of the most diffused conceptions to our days).
Cognitive psychology has also been acknowledged as scientific movement of contemporary psychology. So, we can conclude that the first movement of the integrative processes of psychology connected to the immanent properties of psychological knowledge has had, and still has, an important meaning for both a general and an applied knowledge in a concrete sector.
The second movement of integration in psychology is connected to the fact that psychological knowledge is always widely used by other sciences. The process of development of many sciences and their practical applications is directly connected to theoretical and applied psychology. The result given is the change of the social role and the importance of psychology.
The first Russian scientist who clearly showed this phenomenon is G. Ananiev.
In his main work, Man as object of knowledge, B.G. Ananiev has proved that, among all sciences somehow connected to the study of the human being, only psychology can be considered a general methodological and scientific centre. So, psychology acquires the properties of a systemic factor, which underlines the general practical and scientific sector of man’s knowledge (system). Thus, psychology actively assimilates the data belonging to other sciences with the primary aim of their psychological comprehension and the future “psychologisation” of the spheres of practical application.
One of the first successful attempts to apply Ananiev’s ideas (dealt in the book above mentioned) is the foundation of the first laboratory of Engineering Psychology in Russia, in 1959. Created by Ananiev’s student B.F. Lomov, this laboratory has had in Russia the same importance as V. Wundt’s laboratory in the worldly psychological panorama. The activity of the laboratory proved how successful the integration of psychological knowledge can be with the technical sciences in the field of design, as well as the richness of the methodological and scientific arsenal of psychology. All that we have said about engineering psychology can generally be applied to all the branches of psychology (social, legal, political, clinical etc.). We have enough elements to affirm the importance of the psychological integration for the real knowledge of the world and for the human being’s practical activity.
The third branch of the psychological integration can be considered as a unity, with the meaning above mentioned. According to our opinion, this branch of integration has two levels. The first is a compiling level, which we describe in general terms as a certain psychological phenomenon used by some science to construct new theoretical concepts. Going back to psychology, these concepts widen the knowledge of the human being’s substance and nature. Nevertheless they remain independent and do not form another level of integrity in psychological concepts.
That is how, for example, the Russian scientist V.I. Vernadskij elaborated the concept of noosphere as part of the biosphere, organised by the biochemical energy of man’s creative process. Another Russian scientist, the ethnographer L.N. Gumilev, proposed the original idea of ethno-genesis, with the basic concept of the change of the behavioural stereotype in people, as a result of some cosmic (solar) influences. In psychology, such elaborations allow us to draw the conclusion that a person’s development is not caused by nature alone but by biosphere as well. It is not caused solely by society but also by the noosphere. Not only by mankind, but by ethno-sphere as well.
It is natural to presuppose that the integrator can be the psycho-sphere which includes the bound psychic energy (people who live in a given period of time) and free psychic energy, which can originate from some famous people who lived in the past. The psycho-sphere is open to the Cosmos. With such an approach it is unlikely that we would be satisfied with a concept of psychology as a science that studies the function of reflex of the brain. Probably, a conception of psychology as science of the human being’s spiritual essence and variety of forms of psychic reflection is closer to the truth. The basis of such model is Ananiev’s elaboration, published in the book Man as object of knowledge, from which we differ in some points.
The third level of psychological integration can be called constructive or creative. First of all, its result leads to the construction of a unique and new theory, based on the theoretical conceptions of sciences which do not seem to have anything in common. Secondly, it leads to an adequate method and an instrument which guarantee the success of practical activity. All of this undoubtedly allows us to consider the historical and current experience of all the psychological movements in the world.
This means that we are talking of a level of integration which corresponds to a new movement of psychology, a new psychological school. The school that most of all responds to our needs is surely Ontopsychology, founded and developed by the Italian scientist Antonio Meneghetti. In the figure on the side (according to P. and D. Schultz’s chronological model which shows the development of psychological schools in the world) we have a scheme of the integrative process up to the third millennium. It is dearly necessary to give a brief explanation of the positions that we have used in analysing A. Meneghetti’s Ontopsychology. First of all, we start saying that the word “Ontopsychology” was coined a long time ago. In Ananiev’s conception, for example, it is explained like a branch of psychology that studies ontogenesis, i.e., the development of the individual as a totality of organic properties (regarding the organism only). In Meneghetti’s theory, the term “Ontopsychology” has a new meaning: it is the development of individuality as a whole, it is the psychology of the being in the human being.
Ontopsychology is based on some fundamental concepts, like “semantic field” and “In-itself”. As a concept, the semantic field is different from the term used in philology. It is the basic information that life uses within its individualizations (the Ego as agent individual and personality).
The “In-itself” is the haecceity of Being. In its principal form, the ontic In-itself is what regulates the human being in the form specified by the intentionality of Being. Based on the common being, the ontic In-itself is in relation with the cosmos, the universe and life. Based on the individual being, the ontic In-itself is in relation with the human being as historical haecceity.
The main result of the ontopsychological practice is to individuate the ontic In-itself. In explaining some basic concepts of Ontopsychology, we did not mean to give a complete treatise on the subject. Clearly, we have a new deep knowledge, that allows for the integration of psychological sciences as well as the integration of psychological knowledge with other sciences. In conclusion, there is still one thing to consider. All over the world, Wundt’s laboratory is considered of great importance for the birth of psychology as an independent science. This was surely helped by some external factor connected to the need to develop knowledge of man, a need that neither biology nor physiology could fulfil. We must also say that internal factors played an important role. A new theoretical concept was proposed, together with a method and instruments of research.
The laboratory became an international centre of training for professional psychologists. Specific monographs and an issue have been published; international congresses of psychology are regularly organised. We cannot forget Wundt’s work and personality.
If we look at Prof. Meneghetti’s work at the International Ontopsychology Association, we cannot help finding a substantial resemblance with Wundt’s laboratory, considering that Ontopsychology has a new important element, as it is successfully confirmed in practical activity. With this, we can be sure that Ontopsychology will have an important role in the integration of sciences.”

(Article published in the journal New Ontopsychology, no. 1/2001, Psicologica Ed., Rome)