As esferas imunitárias de Peter Sloterdijk e a psicanálise de matriz ferencziana: diálogos e confrontos

Abstract

This research aims to promote a critical dialogue between Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophy – with a special regard to the ideas presented in his Spheres trilogy – and what we call the Ferenczian branch of psychoanalysis, represented here by the psychoanalysts Sándor Ferenczi, Michael Balint and Donald W. Winnicott. Despite the different semantics between the two fields, we propose the idea that both Sloterdijk and the Ferenczian branch of psychoanalysis are dealing with the same phenomenon, the good or bad arrival of a baby in the world. In Spheres, Sloterdijk presents the original thesis that the human being is an immunities’ seeker against the hostilities of the external world. These immunities are, for Sloterdijk, represented by relational spheres, where there is a protected inside, and a hostile outside. In the first volume of the trilogy, Spheres I, the author suggests that the first immunitary sphere in an individual’s history is the dyad he forms with his mother or substitute. A good subjective human constitution is derived from a good environment experienced in the arrival in the world, or from a good primary sphere, which he calls bubble. Despite his affiliation to Martin Heidegger’s thought, when Sloterdijk defends a fundamental disposition for the encounter, he is disagreeing in a strong fashion with the Heideggerian fundamental ontology, which presupposes an original or basic negativity. Psychoanalysis, since Ferenczi, a Freud contemporary, is interested in the early trauma, the good or bad environment, and its reverberations in human constitution. His disciple, Balint, proposes that some pathologies like deep boredom or apathy have as etiology a basic fault. And, at last, Winnicott investigates the origins of subjectivity from the moment the baby is still a not-I, and is fused with his environment, seeing this moment as fundamental in human life. We investigate, in the clinic and in culture, how the approximations between the two fields can help us understand human subjectivity