Man has coined the term introspection, which, for the etymologist, means ‘to look inside oneself’, while, for the psychologist, it is the observation that individual consciousness makes of itself to indicate the examination of its interiority, feelings, thoughts, aspirations, beliefs, etc., to understand who he is. But neither introspection nor the old metaphysics, conceived as the ‘science of substance, of the first principles that transcend material reality’, could achieve appreciable results, since introspection and metaphysics were based on dualism and, consequently, on innatism; they could not arrive at objective knowledge of man, at once a social and sapient animal, a product of knowledge and producer of knowledge insofar as he is endowed with an exceptionally plastic brain whose functions make him aware of himself and of the world in which he lives.

Introspection has for a long time been the only method of investigation of philosophical-metaphysical psychology, which set out to know and explain substance or, to use the jargon of psychologists, who hide their ignorance behind a foggy and mystifying language, ‘the states of consciousness as states of consciousness’, ‘the conscious and unconscious activities’, ‘the psychic processes of man’.

To understand means not only to comprehend but also to contain within oneself; intelligence indeed is of very little use if we do not have memorised notions necessary to explain, in their development, all kinds of events, natural phenomena, or social facts. And every single notion requires a large number of stimuli, of sensations, memorised first, processed afterwards.

The complexity of the physico-chemical and biochemical processes that lead to knowledge – always given by a set of notions coordinated and utilised by the mind or psyche – of the most elementary of objects, facts, or phenomena, can be compared to the complexity and multiplicity of operations required to design and construct a large building, the construction of which required many and different types of labour, the use of machines and a great deal of energy.

The by-no-means singular history of the concept of Psyche reconfirms, if there were any need for it, the principle characterising class society, that all progress is at the same time a regress, and this in many fields, from that of social relations to that of theoretical knowledge.

But what on Earth is this mysterious Psyche which no one has ever been able to define and yet constitutes the foundation of two disciplines which boast a scientific character continually asserted and never demonstrated, and which take their name from it, Psychology and Psychiatry, the former a science of the Psyche and the latter a medicine of the Psyche? It is stated in the Italian Medical Encyclopaedia USES:

‘The history of Psychiatry is but the history of the search, on the part of a science, for its own object, a search compromised from the outset by the very same field of investigation and by instruments that turn out to be inadequate for analysis from one of the poles of a split reality’.

In their mental confusion, the doctors of the psyche are at pains to pass off psychiatry as a science, always in search of ‘its own object’, unknown because it does not exist; a search compromised from the outset by the very same ‘field of investigation’, the psyche or mind of man, and by the ‘inadequate instruments’ for analysing ‘one of the poles of split reality’. The ‘split reality’ is the human being composed of soma and psyche, or body and mind, or matter and spirit.

Therefore, what a crude mystification this medical psychiatry is, can be deduced in the first place from the fact that a science is the organic and systematic complex of objective knowledge of a determinate event or phenomenon and, therefore, makes it comprehensible. Even Psychology, no less than Psychiatry, does not know its object (psyche or mind) of which it proclaims itself to be a science.

In Homer (8th century B.C.), the psyche is still only vital energy, physical vigour, which, at the death of the individual, leaves the body to reach Hades, the eternal abode. In the Odyssey, some of these souls, after having drunk the black blood of the victims sacrificed by Odysseus, regain consciousness and speak with the hero; in Aristotle (4th century B.C.), the psyche is substance (a term indicating a reality in itself, whose existence is independent from all others), principle and final act (entelechy) of every organic body, and therefore it stands to the body as seeing to the organ of sight and cutting to the axe. If the organism has the function of living and thinking, the psyche (the soul) is the explication of this function.

Aristotle distinguishes between three parts of the soul: 1) the vegetative, peculiar to all living beings that feed and reproduce; 2) the sensitive, to which belong sensation and movement, peculiar to animals; 3) the intellectual, which is proper to man. The superior soul also possesses the specific functions of the inferior soul: and thus, the intellectual soul possesses the functions of the vegetative and sensitive souls, the sensitive those of the vegetative. The vegetative and sensitive soul would be parts not separable from the body, whereas the intellectual soul would be a part separable from the body and, therefore, is another kind of soul.

Friedrich Engels writes in Dialectics of Nature:

‘For all the naive materialism of the total outlook, the kernel of the later split is already to be found among the ancient Greeks. For Thales, the soul is already something special, something different from the body (just as he ascribes a soul also to the magnet), for Anaximenes it is air (as in Genesis), for the Pythagoreans it is already immortal and migratory, the body being purely accidental to it’. Such a split is now definitive in Aristotle’s dualism, in his idealist conception of an Unmoved Mover that moves the universe and of the intellectual soul, whose nature is different from the body and separable from it.

The Aristotelian conception of the psyche (soul) – substance, activity, final act – was the foundation of Psychology until the nineteenth century.

‘The concept of the Psyche, which for centuries had been the object of psychology’, one reads the Encyclopaedia quoted above, ‘was considered unscientific when, in the second half of the 19th century, scientific psychology came to be interpreted as a natural science in the modern sense of the word and a place among the sciences regarded as exact began to be claimed for it. This modern psychology as a natural (and especially “physiological”) science, of which the most important proponent, and not only in Germany but throughout the world, was Wundt, was no longer understood as the old philosophically founded psychology, as the science of the soul (Greek Psyché), but as the science of consciousness and its contents. Wundt formulated the “principle of the pure actuality of the psychic” (not of the soul), that is, he identified the object of psychology with the processes and states (acts) of consciousness and declared only such an object to be scientifically legitimate. Thus the concept of the soul as philosophical-metaphysical was excluded from the domain of scientific psychology, that is, psychology understood as a natural science (...) This “psychology without a soul” (...) radically rejected the ancient traditional link between psychology with philosophy (...) This unscrupulousness, typical of the period when Positivism dominated, excluded a metaphysical hypothesis so full of presuppositions such as that of the existence of the soul, and considered it entirely superfluous. In contemporary psychology, the term “psyche” is increasingly rarely used and has been replaced, to indicate the totality of conscious and unconscious activities, by that of mind or psychism’.

The ‘metaphysical’, i.e. idealist, conception of the soul, thrown out the door by the vulgar, flatly anti-dialectical materialism of a Wundt, who conceives consciousness abstractly, ‘physiologically’, has quietly re-entered through the window with the very modern sorcerers of the age of capitalism’s decay. Therefore, in a medical Encyclopaedia of such vast size we encounter such delirious logorrhoea: ‘Science of the soul’, ‘natural science of consciousness and its contents’, ‘principle of the pure actuality of the psyche’ and, dulcis in fundo, psychism to indicate ‘the totality of conscious and unconscious activities’.

There is a reason to regret the exclusion of the metaphysical hypothesis of the soul, ‘so full of [mystifying] presuppositions’. A psychological science ‘of unconscious activities’, but what a ingenious trick! To change the name of the psyche by calling it mind or psychism, what enormous progress for scientific knowledge! Pirandello would say: but this is not serious! Instead, the metaphysical hypothesis of the soul, which continues to permeate the fantastic kaleidoscope that is this ‘psychological science’, is a very serious thing for psychologists.

Wundt identifies ‘the object of Psychology with the processes (acts) of consciousness’. But what ever is this mysterious consciousness of which Psychology is supposedly the science? Is it perhaps the awareness that each of us has of our own needs, of ourselves, and of the world, an awareness that, if it has as its material presupposition the cognitive activity – activity is the ongoing function of an organ or of the entire human organism determined by physico-chemical and biochemical processes – of the encephalon, descends from the position of the individual in a particular system of social relations? But not at all! Consciousness, for many modern and contemporary philosophers, is the relationship of the soul with itself, a relationship intrinsic to man, interior and spiritual, which would allow him to know himself in an immediate and privileged way and, therefore, to judge himself. Consciousness, just like mind or psychism, is something equally mysterious for psychologists and psychiatrists, inventors of psychic activity, psychic processes, and psychic structure.

‘Apart from its moral meaning, consciousness is not susceptible of definition insofar as it designates the subjective and incommunicable aspect of psychic activity of which one can only know, outside oneself, the manifestations of behaviour’ (Henri Pièron).

Yet, already for Thomas, beyond its moral meaning, consciousness is simple awareness. The name consciousness, he states, means the application of science to something; whereby conscire is simul scire, similar to knowing; and therefore consciousness is the amount of acquired knowledge that we also use to affirm that we exist.

For Descartes, consciousness is the entire spiritual life of man in all its manifestations, from feeling, to reasoning, to willing; its sphere therefore is that of the Ego, as a thinking subject or substance. This consciousness, indefinable for psychology, characterises subjectivism, the most reactionary form of idealism.

Subjectivists, prisoners of the anarchy of mercantile production and of the antagonism of individual interests inseparable from such an economic regime, know only one method of investigation-introspection, namely the observation that the so-called individual consciousness would make of itself in order to analyse and study its own psychic processes. Consequently, ‘the subjective aspect of psychic activity’ (read, in Marxist translation, the antagonistic interest of the individual buyer-seller) cannot but be incommunicable. The psyche, conceived idealistically as an autonomous reality and opposed to the body (Aristotle’s intellectual soul), just like knowledge, necessarily becomes among subjectivists an imponderable something of which only the external manifestations of individual behaviour can be known.

This is a demonstration of how bourgeois social science is incapable of freeing itself from the old metaphysics nor of escaping the external, and therefore fallacious, manifestations of phenomena in order to investigate their real substance, that is, the relation of exploitation of the proletarian class, the nucleus from which today’s social order has developed.

For dialectical materialism, on the contrary, consciousness – but also the psyche, as we shall see – is a concrete and fully definable reality. Marx and Engels write in The German Ideology:

‘The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process’.

A dialectical-materialist explanation of the psyche or mind entails first of all an investigation that takes the encephalon as its object, which was first discussed 26 centuries ago when the physician-biologist Alcmaeon (born in Croton in 540 BC) had the brilliant insight:

‘The centre of organic and mental life must be located in the brain (...) Alcmaeon discovered, thanks to the courageously scientific practice of dissection, that the function of perceiving is in man indeed distributed in the various sense organs, but is coordinated by a central organ, and precisely by the brain. With this discovery, Alcmaeon not only made progress of fundamental importance for Greek biology, but also found a decisive confirmation of his own gnoseological point of view (...) And the Crotonian made this consequence explicit by declaring that, if sentience is a property of all living organisms, the function of understanding, i.e. of reducing experience to a meaningful synthesis, and of becoming conscious of sentience itself, is proper to man. The value of these assertions can be fully understood if one remembers that a generation later the doctrine of the centrality of the heart led Empedocles to exactly antithetical conclusions’ (Storia del pensiero Filosofico e Scientifico).

We quote again:

‘Three points (from the Corpus Hippocraticum) we would especially like to highlight. Firstly, the theory of perception, which merely takes up the Alcmaeonian theory of the centrality of the brain, but deepens it by distinguishing between the phenomenon of sensation that is produced in the peripheral sense organs and its perceptual recognition that only takes place when the stimulus has been conveyed to the encephalon’.

And finally

‘Essential was the recognition of the brain as the central organ of sensitivity and thought; a view derived from Alcmaeon of which Hippocrates made bold use: on the one hand, he proposed the analysis of the brain as the organ of thought, perception, and life, as an alternative offered by scientific thought to traditional beliefs and superstition’.

Therefore, neither an extraordinarily brilliant intuition nor an equally brilliant discovery is enough to make science, which always proceeds hand in hand with the development of the productive forces; if this development is inadequate, an intuition, a discovery as brilliant as one likes, precisely because it is ahead of its time, remains an isolated event. This is why so many ingenious intuitions of the Greeks of the 4th and 5th centuries BCE, whose great scientific value is appreciated today, did not constitute knowledge for millennia, while in the history of thought metaphysics held precedence over objective knowledge.

The manifold functions of the human encephalon, especially the cognitive one, have, in the last few decades of our century, become the preeminent object of investigation for neurophysiologists, neurobiologists, and neuroendocrinologists, many of whom like to place the prefix psycho before their qualification, without taking into account that their investigation is concerned with nerve cells, as the prefix neuro indicates, and certainly not with the psyche, which is nothing more than the name of the highest function of the plastic encephalon.

The results, however, are meagre and even disappointing also because of the metaphysical method that leads each of these ‘scientists’, depending on their personal specialisation, to examine not the human brain in its marvellous complexity as a specific and plastic organ, but now this and now that particular aspect of it: physiological, biological, endocrine, etc.

The results are all the more disappointing because of their subjectivist conception: narrow-mindedness (idealism), over-specialisation (a narrow little garden that prevents one from seeing the vast world of scientific research) and self-interested class prejudices preclude them from any unprejudiced theorisation. Very rarely do we encounter any scholar who really, and not just in words, takes into account that man, as a social and sapient animal, is an ensemble of interdependent organs whose normal harmonious functioning ensures physical health, whereas no one has ever realised that mental health is ensured by the objective knowledge of reality and by its use for the benefit of the organism, provided that the environment has such a wealth of resources and stimuli as to allow it to develop all its potential qualities.

To this day, however, the man of sound body and mind has never existed, and this for the very simple reason that the conditions suited to a specifically human existence he will still have to create for himself. The adjective ‘mental’ and the noun ‘mind’ refer here to the totality of cognitive functions of the encephalon. Generally speaking, the brain is studied not as a marvellous organ due to its complexity and multiplicity of functions, among which that of the control and regulation of the entire organism is pre-eminent, but compartmentally and isolated from the rest of the body; and the result, in the best of cases, is the conception of man as machine (machinomorphism) or man as animal, the ‘naked ape’ (zoomorphism), almost never, however, as social man, dialectically understood, the synthesis of the evolutionary process of hundreds of millions of years.

Engels writes in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

‘[T]he metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the woods for the trees’.

As a consequence of such a mindset, both anti-dialectical and anti-historical at the same time, the brain is investigated in its fixistically conceived specificity as a genetically determined organ; therefore, one does not even ask, through how many millions of years of uninterrupted adaptation, through how many mutations the specific brain of Homo sapiens has been formed, how and why the frontal lobe and the neocortex developed, the decisive influence that social life has had on this development, the upright gait, the specialisation of the hand that enormously expanded labour activity and increased cooperation between members of society, the refinement of the vocal chords right up to the acquisition of articulate speech which has dramatically increased its capacity to communicate.

The extraordinary ability to adapt to the environment by modifying it, due to the exceptional plasticity of the brain, consisting in learning with ease and in being continually modified by experience, has made it so that man now masters nature, but to the total benefit of capitalism.

Steven Rose writes:

‘Specificity determines the characteristics of the species and the population; plasticity, the irreplaceability and inimitability of the individual, and the social evolutionary capacity of the human species, allowing essentially the same brain which once served the cavemen to enable today’s humans to operate in the vastly more complex environment that they have themselves created.

‘Specificity may lay down the equivalence of identical twins, but plasticity distinguishes them, makes each the sum of his or her own unique experiences. If the brain were not plastic in this sense, individual humans would be almost totally and comprehensively programmed, like ants or bees. Just as it has been argued that consciousness increases as we approach human, so too must plasticity. The uniqueness of the human is greater than the uniqueness of the dog or the monkey precisely because of this enhanced plasticity’.

The encephalon is not just a generic organ like the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, etc., to each of which particular vegetative functions are assigned; it, as a specific organ, controls and regulates the entire organism and, as a plastic organ, all the functions of cognitive and conscious life are peculiar to it:

1. reception of stimuli (visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory) that reach it from the external world and of the drives that reach it from our visceral world, stimuli and drives on which depend the sensations that make us aware of the incessant changes taking place within our organism;


2. memory and processing of sensations into data and notions that constitute the knowledge acquired by the individual: the aforementioned data and notions then, further processed and coordinated, become the organic totality of knowledge we have about certain facts and phenomena;


3. perception (sensory awareness of external objects or events that have given rise to more or less numerous and complex sensations);


4. noetic activity or mind or psyche, i.e. the utilisation of knowledge and experiences which become consciousness (of ourselves and of the surrounding world, of the continuous enrichment of our cognitions) and feelings, multifaceted labour activity and extremely versatile industriousness, multiform intelligence, imagination and desires, verbal and symbolic communication, judgement and dialectical thought.

It must also be added that the encephalon, as a genetic organ (specific encephalon), is only potentially a human brain, which is determined by the quantity and quality of learned notions, that is, from the knowledge and experiences acquired, from the environment in which the individual lives. Homo sapiens is not only born but is essentially made.

But how is there such a conspiracy of silence as if the synonymous terms brain and encephalon were a dangerous taboo? The answer is simple. To admit, after discovering it, that the psyche, or mind, exclusively designates the highest function of the plastic encephalon, the noetic activity, which consists in using acquired knowledge, a use aimed at the satisfaction of material and spiritual needs, at survival, would also be tantamount to demystifying all ‘humanistic culture’ so permeated with Judaism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Christianity, etc., and above all to dealing another blow to religion, the last resort of bourgeois society in order to save itself from ideological ruin.

And this is precisely the purpose of learning, to use knowledge to satisfy needs and keep the organism intact: the plastic encephalon provides this. Just as it is true that needs, desires, and aspirations determine the impulse to act, the motivations for all our behaviours, it is equally true that external and internal stimuli are at the origin of feelings, of our mood in every circumstance, and this regardless of whether or not these stimuli reach the threshold of consciousness. This last statement leads us to emphasise that our encephalon possesses much more cognition than we are aware of possessing, it knows much more than we are aware of knowing. And knowledge, which derives from the need to perform acts useful and necessary for personal survival and for that of the species, which, in man enslaved to Capital, has also become an instrument for the production of consumer goods and domination, is already in many animals not only instinctual but also a product of learning.

Part of this acquired knowledge, together with hereditary knowledge, serves the central nervous system to autonomously control the functioning of all the body’s organs and intervene promptly whenever some danger threatens us in defence of the organism by stimulating the functions of the neurovegetative, neuroendocrine and, as far as the latest investigations on the subject suggest, immune systems. When this automatic and autonomous intervention is not sufficient on its own to ensure our integrity, then through the ‘mechanisms’ of suffering, pain, fever, etc., the individual acquires awareness of his or her own pathological changes and, consequently, performs a whole series of voluntary acts – e.g. resorting to the doctor and the help of medicine – for safeguarding his or her own physical integrity. Of the notions acquired, only those necessary for our voluntary behaviours reach the threshold of consciousness, that is, they become conscious knowledge.

Finally, there is a third part of knowledge stored by brain cells and processed by the plastic encephalon, stimulated by the needs of the individual to find the solution to any problem; it happens that the solution appears suddenly, so at least it seems, and in a more or less clear way, during wakefulness or perhaps in sleep, which shows that the brain never grants itself rest. The solution to any new problem, be it theoretical or practical, never appears suddenly – theology feeds on sudden illuminations, whereas objective knowledge smiles at them – but is always the result of a more or less lengthy process of data processing that only in its completeness becomes usable. Imagination, inspiration, and fantasy have an identical explanation.

The body of knowledge in our possession, it is worth emphasising, constitutes the inexhaustible mine from which imagination, fantasy, and so-called ‘creativity’ draw abundantly; and the appropriate choice allows for an unlimited number of original, i.e. new, compositions, which are arranged as in a construction game or, if you like, according to the technique of the installer who chooses from a large number of components those suitable for composing a whole. Let us add that the brain of the installer, like that of every worker, up to those of the poet, novelist, musician, etc., are well trained to perform such work, which for the layman is somewhat prodigious. The above also clarifies for us the value of the expressions ‘composing on the spur of the moment’ and ‘designing on the spur of the moment’. A work composed on the spur of the moment presupposes that the elaboration and coordination of notions carried out by the human brain have reached a very advanced stage, therefore the work can flow forth from his hands in an almost final form.

The validity of what we have stated regarding cognition explaining intuition, inspiration, creative virtue, imagination as well as composing on the spur of the moment is confirmed by certain famous dreams. Very famous is that of the German chemist Friedrich A. Kekulé who, having dreamt of a snake biting its own tail, finally discovered that the arrangement of the atoms in the benzene molecule was a closed ring. This shows that the cognitive activity of processing and coordinating acquired notions and the subsequent noetic activity called upon to correspond to the needs of the individual continue even during the hours of rest.

This unceasing activity of the plastic encephalon sheds full light on the uncertain sensations of knowledge in our possession, of which however we have no exact consciousness, which has led to imagining the existence of an Unconscious. We first encounter the notion of the Unconscious in Leibniz, who emphasised the importance of imperceptible or small perceptions. Obviously, the great Leibniz could only vaguely perceive the phenomenon, which is to the credit of his scientist mentality, since knowledge of cognitive processes that begin from the neonatal period was unknown in his time, a limitation that conditions any scholar and researcher but at the same time leads ideologues to the most delirious mystifications. Such mystifications we encounter in the conception of the Unconscious after Leibniz.

‘It was only with Schelling that the Unconscious became the fundamental element of a metaphysical construction, that is, one of the essential aspects of the Absolute as the Identity of nature and spirit (i.e. precisely of Unconscious and consciousness). “This eternal Unconscious”, said Schelling, “which, like the everlasting sun of the realm of spirits, conceals itself behind its own unclouded light, and though never becoming an object, impresses its identity upon all free actions, is simultaneously the same for all intelligences, the invisible root of which all intelligences are but powers, and the eternal mediator between the self-determining subjective within us, and the objective or intuitant; at once the ground of lawfulness and freedom, and of freedom in the lawfulness of the object”.

‘Even more radically, Schopenhauer considered Unconscious that will to live which constitutes the noumenon of the world. “The will”, he said, “considered purely in itself, is Unconscious, and is a blind, irresistible urge, as we see it appear in inorganic and vegetable nature and in their laws, and also in the vegetative part of our own life”. And as a synthesis of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, Schopenhauer’s Will and Schelling’s Unconscious, Eduard Hartmann presented the principle of his philosophy: a principle which he precisely called the Unconscious and of which spirit and matter would be two different manifestations’ (Dictionary of Philosophy, Turin 1971).

With Freud, the Unconscious then becomes the foundation of a new ‘science’, Psychoanalysis or Depth Psychology, one of the last pearls of decaying capitalism, which Psychology and Psychiatry immediately incorporate. He proclaims that:

‘[P]sychic processes are in themselves unconscious, and that those which are conscious are merely isolated acts and parts of the total psychic life’.

Such originality allows him to invent the aggressiveness of man dominated by the Death Instinct, and therefore also responsible for the Great Massacre that was the First World War. Again and again, bourgeois sirens repeat themselves ad nauseam.

The Unconscious and the Preconscious, having by now become so fashionable given also their mystifying function, if we want to express something objective with these two terms, they must be referred to this and that group of notions possessed by the encephalon but which the mind has not yet acquired or has not yet fully acquired. It is these notions, and even more so the belief in the existence of the soul, of a nature different from the body and separable from it, and in metempsychosis which led Plato to Innatism.

Today, not only do we ignore which physico-chemical and biochemical processes take place during memorisation, but we also ignore the biochemical processes that determine ‘short-term memories’ and ‘long-term memories’; however, we know that the former refer to almost insignificant events whose recollection would be of no utility while the latter concern useful and significant facts and therefore the persistence of memory is aimed at the preservation of life. A severe emotional trauma, for example, is capable of permanently modifying the personality of an individual by sensitising him or her to subsequent similar experiences. Furthermore, we know that memory processes are at the foundation of cognitive processes, which are the exclusive prerogative of the plastic encephalon.

Plato was unaware of all this; no less than twenty-three centuries had to pass before neurophysiology, neurobiology, and neuroendocrinology began to investigate the brain, a microcosm as immeasurable as the macrocosm named universe, in search of feelings, consciousness, and thought.

Whence, then, was knowledge born? For Plato, from the Soul having contemplated the Ideas, of which sensible reality is an imperfect reproduction, before its birth in the hyperuranian world, its primigenial abode; in its unexplained and inexplicable fall into the prison of the body, the Soul forgot what it had previously learned. Sensible reality evoked memories in it, all that it had learned in the hyperuranian world, therefore knowing was reduced to mere reminiscence. Obviously the philosopher, a follower of Pythagoreanism and theoriser of Idealism, could not tell us how the Soul could see, learn, forget and, finally, remember; he unknowingly attributed to it certain functions that are proper to the peripheral and central nervous system.

Knowledge, which grammar classifies among abstract nouns and the dualists attribute to the Idea, to the intellectual soul, to a god external to the world is, instead, a peculiarity of living matter in all its manifestations and, like life, is the result of chemical-physical and biochemical processes. It, in the DNA strand, is the set of information that allows organisms to replicate according to the laws of invariance and diversity; DNA is made up of only four fundamental organic molecules (adenine and guanine, belonging to purines, and thymine and cytosine, belonging to the pyrimidines), but differs from one species to another and for the length of the double helix and the arrangement of the four aforementioned molecules (letters).

In instincts, it is the hereditary knowledge from which descends that complex of acts (reactions and behaviours) useful and indispensable for the survival of individuals and the species to which they belong; in superior animals, i.e. capable of learning in which behaviours are also acquired, it becomes the capacity to solve the elementary practical problems that every new situation presents, i.e. noetic activity; in man it finally becomes consciousness (of ourselves and the surrounding world, of the continuous enrichment of our knowledge) and feelings, complex labour activity and extremely versatile industriousness, multiform intelligence, imagination and desires, verbal and symbolic communication, judgement and dialectical thought.

The history of knowledge, from DNA to the most evolved encephalon, for the physiologist, the biologist, and the biochemist, means that life has had a common origin; that inorganic and organic matter, in its marvellous infinite variety, is always composed of the same primary elements, the atoms, but differently coupled.

The great miracle of life manifests itself particularly in reproduction. The dialectical materialist investigates its secrets. For millions of years, plant and animal creatures reproduce themselves, thus ensuring the survival of the species, evolving to adapt to the dynamically changing environment and by evolving generate new species; for millions of years, living matter has realised its perpetual motion: the great dream of scientists and inventors is a peculiarity intrinsic to it; it is the law that dominates the entire universe. Still largely unexplored are the treasures of knowledge contained in the least specialised cells, let alone in the germinal, endocrine, and nervous cells.

Highly complicated and multiform physico-chemical processes millions of centuries ago have generated organic matter from inorganic matter and, subsequently, the first forms of life which, later, transformed vegetal living matter into animal living matter. Through a very long series of evolutionary processes, for the most part unknown, from unicellular organisms multicellular organisms were gradually generated, increasingly evolved, until arriving at man: from inorganic matter to protozoa, to multicellular beings, and finally to our plastic encephalon.

This process, which has been going on for many millions of centuries, reproduces itself in every new creature, but in an extremely short time, no more than a few months: the ovum, already at the first division, undergoes a double differentiation; the two daughter cells are different from the mother cell and, at the same time, different from each other; at the second division, the two pairs of daughter cells are still different from their respective mother cells and simultaneously all four are different from each other so that, in the end, the initial ovum has become a fully formed creature capable of independent life.

The plastic encephalon represents the culminating point of the evolutionary process of living matter becoming self-aware, the maximum of specialisation that the central nervous system has reached in Homo sapiens: maximum of specialisation due to the many billions of neurons – irrefutable demonstration of how quantity transforms into quality even in what are cellular capacities – of nerve cells; which do not reproduce, otherwise the stored knowledge would be lost. This observation alone would be enough to show that living matter has such and so many resources that we are not even able to imagine.

In man, much more so than in animals, it appears evident how the quantitative development of the central nervous system corresponds to a qualitative growth in functions, how the quantity of knowledge transforms also into a qualitative growth in behaviours; it also appears evident how knowledge and noetic activity interpenetrate one another, are incessantly and reciprocally now cause and now effect of one another.

Engels wrote over a century ago in Dialectics of Nature:

‘In animals the capacity for conscious, planned action is proportional to the development of the nervous system, and among mammals it attains a fairly high level. While fox-hunting in England one can daily observe how unerringly the fox makes use of its excellent knowledge of the locality in order to elude its pursuers, and how well it knows and turns to account all favourable features of the ground that cause the scent to be lost’.

We still read:

‘[A]ll activity of the understanding: induction, deduction, and hence also abstraction (...) analysis of unknown objects (even the cracking of a nut is a beginning of analysis), synthesis (in animal tricks), and, as the union of both, experiment (in the case of new obstacles and unfamiliar situations). In their nature all these modes of procedure – hence all means of scientific investigation that ordinary logic recognises – are absolutely the same in men and higher animals. They differ only in degree (of development of the method in each case) The basic features of the method are the same and lead to the same results in man and animals, so long as both operate or make shift, merely with these elementary methods. On the other hand, dialectical thought – precisely because it presupposes investigations of the nature, of concepts themselves – is only possible for man, and for him only at a comparatively high stage of development (Buddhists and Greeks), and it attains its full development much later still through modern philosophy – and yet we have the colossal results already among the Greeks which by far anticipate investigation!’.

Dialectical thought and consciousness represent the maximum of noetic activity, the qualitative leap that differentiates man from the entire world of living things and marks the gulf that separates him even from higher mammals. Thanks to dialectical thought, man is able to foresee the result of his actions over long distances, but also to ascertain it day by day, and thus to plan his own life. And he would reach the goal he sets himself from time to time if he were not thrown back into the worst animality by the capitalist mode of production, anarchic by nature, by which he has been reduced to a mere cog.

In the animal kingdom, it is precisely the inability to foresee that leads to a very high waste of nourishment. By forcing man into such an improvident behaviour, class society keeps him bound hand and foot to his original animality, prevents him from obtaining his humanity.

If the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor... could not foresee that destroying forests to obtain agricultural land would bring the desert into those regions, we are well aware that we are destroying and poisoning not only the surface of the planet, its lands and waters, but also the atmosphere. Capitalism, which has profit as its only god, whatever the cost, concerned only with immediate practical results, never takes into consideration the deleterious effects of its activity upon nature. Louis XV used to repeat: Après moi le deluge. Capitalism is already the flood that submerges everything.

‘The normal existence of animals is given by the contemporary conditions in which they live and to which they adapt themselves – those of man, as soon as he differentiates himself from the animal in the narrower sense, have as yet never been present, and are only to be elaborated by the ensuing historical development. Man is the sole animal capable of working his way out of the merely animal state – his normal state is one appropriate to his consciousness, one that has to be created by himself’ (op. cit.).

Such a state best suited to his consciousness can be none other than communist society.

The relationship between cognitive activity and noetic activity is as complex as the relationship between man and his environment, whose resources he uses and at the same time modifies to satisfy his needs. Any of our tasks, except for the stereotyped ones that the brain automatically controls, is programmed by the mind which then directs its execution. And the programme commits the encephalon to concentrate its cognitive activity in the processing of data and the acquisition of notions that allow the solution of those specific problems that, moment by moment, ensure the life of individuals. And if the brain does not have in its memory the notions indispensable for the processing of the required knowledge, then the human being, as noetic activity, decides to carry out the necessary research work to obtain them, thus plans material activity for the attainment of the pre-established ends.

The brain, thanks to its high plasticity, not only can be educated but is also capable of educating itself. We can state without fear of being contradicted that Homo sapiens, whether an ordinary mortal or extraordinary and highly versatile genius, is always the manifestation of his activities and of his brain more or less specialised by learning: the activity-brain combination characterises higher animals and human beings even more so.

It is clear from the above that the dualism of body-mind or soma-psyche or spirit-matter, together with the relationship that derives from it and is never determined, is a fantasy of idealists that has as its foundation the division of labour into manual and intellectual and of societies into antagonistic classes, a dual division that will end with the death of capitalism.

The organic inability of psychologists and psychiatrists to define the psyche or mind is the first but by no means the only reason why they deny Psychology and Psychiatry the dignity of Sciences; they do not even know the object they deal with, and yet this inability rather than a demerit constitutes the premise and foundation of the gigantic mystification that are these two bourgeois pseudo-sciences.

Just as health indicates the normal harmonious functioning of the body’s organs, so disease indicates the dysfunction of one or more organs due to infections, degeneration, or hereditary defects; diseases of the central nervous system or encephalon are the object of study and treatment by Neurology; the psyche or mind is not an organ, therefore ‘mental illnesses’ do not exist. All manner of suffering, mystifyingly called mental illness, is the product of the degradation, the dehumanisation of man, who in capitalist society is raped from birth, and before. It follows that Psychiatry is another damned bourgeois fraud.

Psychologists and psychiatrists, modern sorcerers, the former, as psychotherapists, claim to modify the behaviours and states of consciousness whose origin they do not know, the latter, as doctors, to cure psychic and behavioural abnormalities, as if the being of men were not the real process of their life. From the beginning of Civilisation, state institutions have forced humans, with material and spiritual oppression, to submit to the roles imposed on them by relations of production as a sentence without appeal, to be subjected to the abuses of that class – yesterday slave owners and feudal lords, today the bourgeoisie – which, for its time, represents the whole of society, of which it is the economic and political power. It is precisely the enslavement to these roles, and the ensuing subjugation and humiliation, that determines the growing social maladjustment that psychiatrists define as psychic and behavioural abnormalities.

The Marxist definition of consciousness demonstrates in the clearest way how dialectical materialism is the only method capable of making us aware of the place that any phenomenon or a determinate group of facts occupy in the overall nexus of things, in other words, of theorising. This definition explains to us moreover the social and evolving character of knowledge, of the behaviour of human beings, so different from each other also because of the diversity of roles that in capitalist society rain down on us like a fatal necessity. Fate is a consequence of mercantile production, of the commodification of man whose value corresponds to the profit that Capital proposes to draw from them.

Individual diversity has nothing in common with bourgeois individualism, a product of social relations founded on competition, emulation, rivalry, hostility, that is, on alienation, even though, immersed in this society, the many have not the slightest awareness of it. The ideological knowledge that we acquire from the environment in which we come into the world from the cradle intervenes to mould us as future citizens, that is, to educate us, to programme us according to a determined purpose. This automatic and uncritical knowledge, bestowed upon all members of society and which society continually produces for its own defence and preservation, using for this purpose an army of ideologues specialised in a myriad of particular branches, must necessarily present itself with the prerogative of objectivity and universality, as if objectivity and universality were qualities intrinsic to it; it must repeatedly present the economic-political order of society to us as given by nature, the best that can be imagined and, in any case, the only one possible. A materialisation of social and ethical-religious values aimed at the maintenance of the status quo, which in man would be innate while, on the contrary, they characterise the three civil societies, historical in that all three are founded on the division of labour, private property, and class antagonisms.

The ‘automatisms’ inherent in the aforementioned knowledge condition the behaviours of ‘normal citizens’, for whom the ruling class manages to guarantee a minimum of survival; they are also at the origin of the communis opinio. How it is possible that the dominant ideas in every age are the ideas of the economically dominant class is explained to us by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology.

If societies were something static, then nothing would intervene to put them in crisis, at the same time putting their knowledge into crisis; instead, societies are complex, dynamically evolving organisms that are born, grow, and die amid the contradictions inherent to them. Particularly dynamic and rapidly evolving, then, is bourgeois society, which is increasingly enveloped in irreconcilable contradictions. On this point Marx and Engels write in the Manifesto of the Communist Party:

‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind’.

The ideological knowledge that bourgeois society provides us with serves to mould alienated human beings, the majority of whom are therefore incapable of facing the adversities, risks, and dangers to which it daily exposes us. And when these arrive, especially if unexpected and unforeseen, many collapse mentally, and this because their knowledge proves to be of no use. Every one of our behaviours is indeed the response, not always appropriate but almost always mediated by knowledge, to the stimuli that come to us from the external world or from our visceral world: a response aimed at the satisfaction of the needs and, therefore, at guaranteeing survival. But it is precisely unsatisfied needs, the feeling that survival is in danger, that trigger in fearful individuals internal conflicts that lead the weakest to take refuge in alcohol, drugs, suicide, madness, etc.; that also trigger external conflicts between the individual and the state society, which has sufficient means at its disposal to crush him.

Conflicts do not admit of individual or fringe-group solutions, they will have no solution as long as the proletariat remains subjugated to the chariot of the bourgeoisie: therefore we, the Marxist Communist Party, while pointing out its solution in the resumption of the class struggle that will inevitably and necessarily lead to revolutionary armed confrontation, continue tirelessly to denounce all the mystifications of bourgeois culture and defend the radiant integrity of Marxist revolutionary doctrine, the last refuge of scientific knowledge itself.