In su e in sé

Mountaineering and psychology. Mountaineering is essentially about going up, psychology is mainly interested in being itself. Up means up. Following a path of verticality, reaching a peak, but it also means being up, experiencing a state of euphoria, as can also occur during an ascent. In itself it means reaching a condition of psychic balance and emotional containment, but it also means finding the path to introspection, identifying the correlation between external and internal, recognizing one's own condition and one's intrapsychic world through an experience in the surrounding world. Apparently these are two disciplines that have no reciprocity or common articulations, however both share a primary interest in the body and the mind, recognizing them in the indivisible and unrepeatable unity of the individual in relation to the world. The book proposes a psychological rereading of some crucial themes of mountaineering which can be identified in various dimensions: exploratory, playful, aesthetic, self-search. To this end, we have adopted the model of Individual Psychology, because we can recognize a profound correspondence between the spirit and culture of mountaineering and the foundations of Individual Psychology, such as the need for self-affirmation in harmony/contrast with social sentiment; the feeling of inferiority, compared with the compensatory choices and initiatives of superiority; the potential of the creative Self, as the ability to find new and more functional solutions, in the face of difficulties and obstacles; the tendency towards an end which, despite its dimension of fiction, of an unattainable term and of an unrealizable fulfillment, restores meaning to action and existence. The need to "go to the mountains" thus becomes a metaphor for knowledge of the world and the Adlerian vision of man inserted into his environment.