The PdT card project (an acronym for Parlami di Te, “Tell me about yourself”) is a creative product born from the meeting of three main fields: the philosophy of cognitive science, psychology and photography. By cognitive science we mean the major intellectual revolution—also connected with the achievements of neuroscience—that laid the foundations for a different understanding of how the mind works and of the processes underlying knowledge of the world and of human beings, reformulating questions traditionally considered philosophical: What is the mind? What is consciousness? How do we understand other people? What role do emotions play? Officially established as a field in 1977, cognitive science set itself the goal, together with other empirical disciplines such as cybernetics and artificial intelligence, of radically challenging long-established ways of thinking about ourselves. Body, brain and mind, initially treated as antagonists, were brought back together and integrated through post-classical developments that, on the one hand, situated cognition within brain architecture and, on the other, extended it beyond the brain not only to the body but also to the environment. This is where emotions and the relational dimension become central. Broadly speaking, psychotherapy is based on interpersonal communication and presupposes a model of the mind—as in dynamic psychology and its topographical distinction between conscious, preconscious and unconscious processes—as well as a model of consciousness and of the feelings at work within the therapeutic setting. From here comes the intuition of assigning photography, with its artistic and expressive codes, the role of a genuine instrument for accessing inner experience. These fields form our cultural background and provide the theoretical framework within which the project took shape and matured. The main reference guiding the work presented here, alongside Antonio Damasio’s emphasis on the crucial role of emotions in intellectual and decision-making processes, is narration—or, using the English term, storytelling.

THEORIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE SELF

The term storytelling refers to the act and art of narrating, of telling stories. Besides being indispensable to works of fiction, storytelling can be understood as one of the ways in which human beings organize and make sense of their experience. In this sense, it is closely connected with our “feeling that we exist.” Each of us possesses a sense of self, an “I” to whom things happen and who acts as a spectator. To give a simple example: when we see an object, hear a sound, smell a scent or touch a rough surface, the set of these perceptions is referred to a subject who is conscious of having them. Similarly, when we perform an action or make a goal-directed decision, two processes come into play simultaneously that, according to the Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, have a biological and cerebral basis. On the one hand, in order to plan a behavioural strategy through practical reasoning, awareness of the act being performed is required; on the other, the brain constructs a higher-order representation through which the entity that plans and acts comes into being as an “I” endowed with continuity over time. The sense of self emerges from the coordinated activity of multiple brain regions: both right and left hemispheres, the ventromedial prefrontal cortices, somatosensory areas and, in particular, structures involved in the limbic system. Damasio therefore stresses that, in addition to the images we have while reading, the black marks we distinguish on white paper, the texture of folded pages and other stimuli intercepted by nerve endings connected with lower-order sensory cortices, another presence is revealed: ourselves. As observers of imagined things and potential actors in relation to them, we can feel what happens to us when the state of our body is modified by interactions with both the external and internal environment. The neurobiological problem of consciousness therefore concerns both how the “film” in the brain is generated and how the brain generates “the sense that the film belongs to the one who is watching it.” The Self, or the I, is not discrete and immutable, as a certain rationalist philosophical tradition would have it, but dynamic and processual: it is constructed over time through narration, which gives the individual awareness of both past and future. Damasio distinguishes between core consciousness and extended consciousness. Core consciousness, as discussed in Self Comes to Mind, gives the subject a sense of self limited to the experience of the present moment, and it is easy to understand why it is not an exclusively human prerogative. Extended consciousness, articulated in different levels and degrees, allows the organism to develop a more complex and enduring self. Autobiographical consciousness belongs within this second form. Through it, we perceive ourselves first and foremost as persons: autobiographical subjects with an identity characterized by personal memories, the sum total of our life experiences and the projects we have formed for the future. The extended self draws on the entire horizon of our remembered history, both remote and recent. This history includes social situations in which we participated and that helped shape us, as well as situations in which we wished we had participated. It also includes memories that preserve, as Damasio says, the most refined emotional experiences and those that may qualify as spiritual. The autobiographical self leads a double life: it can become explicit, giving rise to the conscious mind in its highest expression, but it can also remain dormant, waiting to be activated. Core consciousness, which Damasio roots in the homogeneous and constant interoceptive representation of the internal state of the viscera—the milieu—is a universal heritage of living organisms because it does not require either conventional memory or working memory. Extended consciousness, by contrast, requires memory together with advanced cognitive mechanisms such as rational thought and language. Language, in particular, is necessary for the most sophisticated form of consciousness: self-narration. Narration is capable of symbolic representation. Our closest human ancestors, around two hundred thousand years ago, were already producing cave paintings, sculptures and rock engravings, as well as carrying out elaborate funerary rituals that required special preparation of the dead. Such behaviour would be difficult to explain if an explicit interest in life had not already emerged: an attempt to ask about one’s place in the universe and to interpret existence by assigning to it not only intellectual but also emotional value. The emotion involved may be described as wonder or astonishment, accompanied by fear—the thauma of Aristotle. The early stages of the maturation of the self can therefore already be traced through archaeology and the study of ancient populations. Any trace of meaningful and narrative devices found in history points to the presence of an extended and autobiographical self: a self that depends on the brain’s capacity to retain extensive memory records concerning not only motor skills but also personal facts and events that form the scaffolding of biography, personality and individual identity and ultimately flow into collective identity through myths, religions and structures for managing and governing social behaviour such as economic systems, legal systems and science. To further clarify Damasio’s distinction between core and extended consciousness, we can refer to a similar theory developed by Gerald Edelman. The biologist speaks, respectively, of primary consciousness and higher-order consciousness. Primary consciousness consists of phenomenal experiences such as images and, unlike higher-order consciousness, is linked to a time close to the measurable present. It also lacks a concept of self and of past and future and, above all, cannot be accessed through a direct individual report. From this perspective, storytelling assumes an adaptive function because it is an instrument through which the mind orders events from both external and internal reality, makes them intelligible according to a logic of meaning, and integrates information in order to generate a sense of unity in first-person experience. Kant, incidentally, might have described such an operation as a regulative ideal of reason.

EXAMPLES OF SELF-NARRATION

The act of narrating and self-narrating is an everyday practice that can be found in every area of human action. Emotions and memories, in particular, find in storytelling one of their privileged channels of expression. Narrative thought is a genuine workshop of meaning: it generates multidimensional meanings and values that can be interpreted from multiple points of view and makes lived experience communicable on an intersubjective level. Narration may occur individually—as when artists and writers create works of art by sublimating their impulses—or collectively. One important example is psychotherapy. A person who begins psychotherapy is called upon to share their life story with the therapist, a story made up of joys, pain, successes, failures, losses, achievements and missed opportunities. In this context, narrating oneself does not serve only to identify the roots of distress and reduce the harmful impact of symptoms; it also helps reorganize episodes that have remained misunderstood or fragmented, making it possible to face the future with greater awareness and renewed resources. Freud himself, in his conception of psychoanalytic treatment, maintained that the disappearance of symptoms was in fact secondary and accessory compared with the enrichment of personality brought about by knowledge—or, perhaps more accurately, rediscovery—of repressed contents. Regardless of orientation or school of thought, psychotherapy in general can be understood as a practice of storytelling. Starting from particularly significant images or memories, the subject begins a narrative reconstruction of the self, supported by the therapist’s attentive and interested listening. A crucial step consists in recognizing that, within the interactive setting with the therapist, the patient has the opportunity to construct new narratives, overcoming the rigidity of their own point of view and thereby updating their view of self, others and the world. Psychological disorders of nonspecific aetiology are often signs of stagnation, of a blockage in the flow of life, of the repetition of the same script through which we present ourselves to the world. Each of us plays a role, as in the theatre, and some roles fit us too tightly or fail to express our character fully. Often they are roles inherited from the family and reproduce maladaptive dynamics from our childhood or from our parents. Carl Gustav Jung famously observed that children may stage the unresolved conflicts of parental figures. These are scripts that need to be revised and updated through new “dramatic solutions.” Many techniques can support this kind of narrative restructuring, and they find parallels in fields that may appear extremely distant from one another, including magic, music, literature and Gestalt psychology.

Historically and evolutionarily, magic embodies one of the earliest forms of symbolic thought and can be understood as a kind of semiotic device capable of producing meaning and therapeutic relief. An emblematic example is abracadabra, a term of mystical origin attested in the Liber Medicinalis of Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, a Roman physician and man of letters who was also tutor to Geta and Caracalla. The word was engraved on amulets, written and repeated from top to bottom within triangular figures whose point faced downward. With each repetition one letter was removed until the word disappeared completely, symbolizing the eradication of the illness for which the amulet had been created. In clinical intervention, repetition can play an analogous role insofar as it aims to reduce the emotional impact of painful memories that disturb psychophysical well-being. The construction of the amulet, with its apotropaic function of protection from threats, can be read metaphorically as a psychotherapy session, while the progressive reduction of negative influence recalls a narrative technique: the diminuendo. In music and musicology, a diminuendo indicates a gradual decrease in the intensity of one or more sounds, while a fading or extinction of sound can represent its extreme outcome. The analogy between such dissimilar practices—one immersed in primitive animism and the other grounded in empiricism—must not lead us to conclude that they are equivalent. The comparison is useful only insofar as it illuminates their lowest common denominator: the ancestral human need to give meaning to existential condition by weaving stories and plots which, originally, led human beings to believe they could influence and dominate the forces of nature through will and occult acts. Alongside the diminuendo, other modalities can be identified, such as the crescendo, which may be related to graded exposure to stimuli in cognitive-behavioural therapies, or literary estrangement, through which an element suddenly emerges in the fabric of a story and stands out as a critical knot of memory. Theorized by the playwright Bertolt Brecht, estrangement can be understood as an artistic procedure aimed at preventing the spectator’s identification by presenting reality on the fictional stage in an unusual and disorienting way. In prose, its counterpart denotes a set of linguistic devices through which the writer reveals unfamiliar aspects of a familiar reality. In psychoanalysis, estrangement occurs when, within the flow of free associations, an apparently absurd idea re-emerges and causes embarrassment or shame. In early Freudian theorization—and also in Jungian work if we think of his word-association tests—verbalization without rationalization facilitates the return of censored unconscious contents. Infantile impulses of desire that initially appear unacceptable to the adult ego can, through maturity, become manageable rather than hostile or overwhelming. The energy of these impulses is no longer blocked but redirected toward a higher, non-sexual aim: estrangement then gives way to sublimation. Through devices such as diminuendo, crescendo and estrangement, storytelling can activate a mechanism of influence and restructuring of narrated experience, and this can apply to both short-term and long-term psychotherapies, especially those with a constructivist orientation. Although psychotherapy is, it is important to emphasize, a privileged setting for the “production of the self,” storytelling also operates as a device for attributing meaning in other intersubjective contexts that do not have a clinical or medical purpose. In educational and guidance settings, for example, people are called upon to give meaning to their “lifeworld” by selecting episodes and competences and organizing them into a coherent plot in relation to each person’s potential. The coordination of contents to which values are assigned is tied to the activity of the autobiographical self, which, for Damasio, depends on two interconnected mechanisms. The first is subordinate to the core self and ensures that each set of biographical memories is treated as a single object and made conscious—that is, made available for naming. The second will be introduced when we turn to images. For the moment, it is enough to say that every cognitive content processed by the brain is automatically evaluated and associated with a value grounded both in original dispositions—survival, preservation and adaptation of the organism—and in dispositions acquired through learning over the course of life. The assignment of value also determines the emotional colouring of a memory at the moment it is narrated. More broadly, we can say that storytelling techniques remain active, often silently and implicitly, whenever two or more people establish a relationship based on trust and reciprocity. Identity and the self, in fact, do not take shape in a vacuum but through the recognition and response of the other, as Damasio has critically shown in his confrontation with Cartesian dualism. For the Descartes of the Meditations, mind and body are two radically different substances, two res. One is indivisible and always identical to itself; the other, being composed of material parts, is divisible, changeable and mortal. The mind is the seat of thought, clear and distinct ideas and rationality, while the organism is the theatre of moods, sensations and passions. For the French philosopher, passions can obstruct correct judgement and lead it astray. For the Portuguese neurologist, by contrast, emotion and reason, mind and body, are parts of a single organic whole. Emotions are complex and largely automatic programmes of action shaped by evolution; the world of emotions is therefore a world of actions carried out in and upon the body, ranging from facial expressions and postures to changes in internal organs. Every emotion corresponds to a bodily state involving chemical and organic alterations which, in turn, have effects on the mind and on the phenomenal qualities of how we feel at a given moment. Moreover, the I—the perception of oneself as a person characterized by a particular lived experience and history—is not isolated in nature but interindividual: even the way we move, gesture and relate to others bears the imprint of those who raised and cared for us.

IMAGES AS THE CURRENCY OF THE MIND AND PHOTOGRAPHY

The second mechanism that illustrates the complexity of the autobiographical self performs a coordinating operation involving three stages, the first of which is particularly useful for highlighting the role that photography can play in our discussion. Within the extended self, some contents are recalled from memory and represented as images. These images interact in an orderly way with the proto-self or core self, and the results of the interaction are retained and stored as biographical memories. Every image is marked with a value that is added during the original perception and recorded and revived at each subsequent recollection. This means that the brain filters and marks sequences of events and large amounts of past knowledge according to value, so that present contents are coordinated on the basis of previously established values. Consider a child who, when looking at a photograph, is inexplicably attracted to the colour yellow. We can ask what is so interesting about that colour. The child answers that yellow is associated with summer because it is linked with joy and an entire constellation of positive sensations. Starting from a visual stimulus, the retina and the visual apparatus transmit signals to lower-order cortices; according to the convergence-divergence framework, these signals are then introduced into a network interconnected with somatosensory, motor and higher-order associative cortices in order to evoke memories triggered by the stimulus. The path of sensory stimulation passes first through nuclei of the brainstem, then the thalamus and finally the cerebral cortex, structures involved in the construction of the autobiographical self. By means of convergence-divergence architecture, the brain transforms encrypted knowledge contained in dispositional space—biographical memories marked by values—into explicit, decoded representations contained in image space. Given the abundance of records of our lived past and anticipated future, the autobiographical instance, even when it can emerge into consciousness, is largely unconscious or, more precisely, automatic. To avoid confusion with the Freudian unconscious, neuroscience often uses the expression cognitive unconscious. This helps us understand the enormous importance of images for emotional identity, since images are among the principal forms of currency available to the mind. Narrative practices rely heavily on images because human beings think to a great extent through them. There is no artistic or intellectual product that does not have roots in imaginative activity. Because of its immediate and preverbal nature, the image is a powerful activator of narrative and creative processes: it intercepts thought before thought is translated into language. A relevant connection between storytelling as analysed here and Damasio’s account of the self is that, in both cases, when lived experiences are reconstructed or re-experienced—through a process that may be conscious or not—their substance is re-evaluated and reorganized, undergoing changes that may be minimal or highly significant in emotional terms. During this process, entities and events acquire a new emotional weight. In the editing room, some frames of recollection are allowed to fall to the floor, others are regenerated or restored, and still others are combined, according to the caprices of will, into scenes that were never previously assembled or perhaps never actually filmed. The metaphor of editing is perfectly suited to both situations because the raw material is made of images. With each passing year, our story is imperceptibly rewritten, and past events may acquire a new weight in memory for the self. Broadly speaking, the autobiographical instance itself, supported by different anatomical sectors involved in the construction of the conscious mind, is engaged—thanks to capacities shaped by evolution—in narrating itself, and it does so by using images. Images speak a language that precedes words. Before an experience is shaped into syntactically correct sentences, it takes form at a more concrete and visual level. According to Chomsky’s linguistic theories, which contributed to the development of cognitive science, the systems that make verbal language processing possible are biologically installed in the human brain. In neuroscience, these systems are generally associated with functional regions of the left hemisphere known as Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. Broca’s area is involved in articulated language production and syntactic processing; Wernicke’s area is primarily involved in understanding spoken and written language and in attributing meaning. Although indispensable for effective verbal communication, these areas occupy relatively circumscribed portions of the cerebral cortex. Language, even though it enables the transmission of information and the logical structuring of experience and selfhood, is not always sufficient to express what a person feels, thinks or would like to say. In many circumstances, words arrive late or fail to convey the full complexity of lived experience. Images function almost like an Esperanto, a heritage shared by human beings at both phylogenetic and ontogenetic levels. Indeed, even understanding propositions—meaningful sentences capable of being true or false—or responding to requests is often facilitated by mental representations that are not purely linguistic but figurative and analogical. If, for example, we are asked how many colours are in the Italian flag, what a mountain pine looks like, or who is taller between Silvia and Roberto, what we do is visualize the relevant objects and examine them with the “mind’s eye.” Such cognitive tasks require us to think visually, reproducing experiences similar to visual perception. In other words, whether images originate within the organism through imagination or from the environment through actual perception, they are pervasive and involve the activity of the brain as a whole: memory, logic, syllogistic reasoning, visuospatial abilities, feelings and emotions.

CONCLUSION

We are convinced that images, and photographic images in particular, can facilitate the exploration of unconscious contents that are difficult to access through verbal dialogue alone, while also supporting and accompanying self-narration. The adjective “photographic” points to several properties that bring photographs close to the images synthesized by retinal cells and to those that serve as nourishment for the mind. First of all, both result from an optical phenomenon: one involving the eye, the other the lens. Both reflect a person’s situated point of view, which, depending on position, lighting conditions and the functioning of the visual apparatus, frames reality from one perspective rather than another. Finally, photographs—especially snapshots from family albums—can function like biographical memories to which people assign an emotional value proportional to the situation represented, a situation that can subsequently be reworked in an “editing room” with the support of experienced and qualified co-screenwriters.