We learn the models of being-with the other and with the world from the relational home in which we have lived, from the relational experiences that our body has had and from those that have been missing. Thus we learn to live in the body that will lead us to be there in the world.
These “intercorporeality” and relational contacts constitute the individual identity and are the ground of our taken-for-granted contacts, i.e. of those basic competences (breathing, eating, speaking, moving) that will constitute our ontological certainties. The taken-for-granted ground is built up within stable relationships where it is possible to experience and assimilate the various experiences. If this should be missing – disturbed mothers do not transmit this certainty – experience must be continually updated/checked, as though having the ground under our feet were not to be taken for granted. In fact, the serious patient has the precarious, discontinuous sensation of always being on subsiding ground: if we draw near to their bodies, we recognize the distressing experience of this lack. Control and rigidity become attitudes that are necessary to calm the anguish of collapsing or breaking up. Goodman affirms that if in the course of maturing these basic certainties are interrupted precociously, the individual does not reach the contact competences necessary to identification and to the sense of one’s own integrity. In fact, what is lacking in the serious patient is the ground(ing) of the granted safety, of stable, safe contacts that allow her/him to build a ground from which new figures can emerge.
Valeria Conte