This article is first and foremost an invitation to philosophy to establish interdisciplinary relationships with other forms of knowledge, with which it can fruitfully interact in order to exchange ideas, generate reciprocal influences and create points of contact. While contemporary analytic philosophy has shown, over recent decades, a growing interest in new media, psychology has made the image one of its most explored and fertile fields of research, including Gestalt psychology, phototherapy and visual psychology. The PdT cards arose precisely from the need to engage directly with new developments in psychological and philosophical research.

PHILOSOPHY AND ITS ALLIANCES

Interdisciplinary exchange has always encouraged the birth of new ideas far more than the rigid separation of distinct fields of knowledge. The humanities and the sciences, although for centuries they have defended their own specific identities, also through increasing specialization, in fact share a common origin. The fragmentation of knowledge is a relatively recent phenomenon and responds more to institutional, bibliographic and university requirements than to a genuine need for knowledge. It has become common practice to place Oedipus Rex on the shelf of ancient tragedies and Rilke’s poems on the shelf of poetry, while forgetting that both are works of exceptional philosophical relevance. A further problem follows from this. Knowledge that folds back upon itself, becoming self-referential and detached from concrete life, risks becoming sterile. Erasmus of Rotterdam had already grasped this danger with great clarity and wit at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In his celebrated In Praise of Folly, the Dutch essayist stages a corrosive critique of his age, targeting those “wise men” who, despite being cultured and refined, prove unable to orient themselves in everyday life. According to Erasmus, such intellectuals take refuge in “resentful” mental contrivances and become entirely useless when it is time to get to the point and confront the real problems of existence. His caricature of Socrates is emblematic in this sense: a man immersed in lofty speculation, philosophizing about ideas and clouds while measuring the jumps of fleas and admiring the voice of mosquitoes, yet ignorant of practical matters, to the point that his very wisdom—idolized by his disciples and colleagues—led him to a death sentence and to drinking hemlock. Even celebrated figures such as Plato and Cicero are ironically scaled down, not to deny their historical value, but to expose the illusion that pure theoretical knowledge automatically guarantees eloquence, balance and the capacity to govern. Erasmus’s criticism is not limited to philosophy; it also concerns every form of knowledge separated from the passions, needs and conflicts of ordinary people: grammarians, theologians and scholars are not immune from this danger. Although In Praise of Folly presents itself as a literary game entrusted to the paradoxical voice of Folly—an allegorical figure born of wealth, drunkenness and carefreeness—the core of the argument makes a serious point: knowledge that does not enter into dialogue with life, and with all the contradictions life entails, loses its vocation. From this perspective, philosophy can no longer be considered the queen of the sciences, hierarchically placed above all others. It is one facet of knowledge, one side among others, like psychology, the arts and the natural sciences. All of them, we might say, are in the same boat and rowing in one direction: trying to understand the world, the universe, society, values and ourselves. As Diego Marconi aptly observes, the philosopher should explore multiple fields, engage with different languages and visions and move beyond the boundaries of academic research, which is often incomprehensible to non-specialists. Compartmentalization and mutual incomprehension are two sides of the same coin—or, more precisely, two phenomena that feed one another. The more a field marks out its territory, the harder it becomes to find similarities and agreements with other fields that have likewise distanced themselves and pursued their own separate paths. The figure of the sage, the person who knows everything and can be consulted by everyone on any matter, is now outdated. Wittgenstein himself said that philosophers as such would cease to exist because they would be replaced by technicians: pragmatic people who know the “how” but not the “why.” What is therefore needed is a general rethinking, both of the philosopher’s role and new field of action and of the way in which the autonomies that have developed can be stitched back together. A historical example of the difficulties involved in interdisciplinary exchange is provided by the Centre for Methodological Studies in Turin, active from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. Diego Marconi himself, during a conference at the Academy of Sciences entitled “Knowledge and Methodologies in Comparison,” recounts the rise and decline of the centre. Founded to conduct targeted research into the relations between logic, science, technology and language and to promote dialogue between philosophers and scientists, the programme encountered deep ideological divergences. On one side stood the experimentalist and verificationist approach of theoretical physicists; on the other, Geymonat’s historicist philosophy of science. Added to this was the absence of a common language, since conference participants, despite their good intentions, often struggled to understand one another. When Cesare Codegone spoke about the concept of indeterminacy in physics, the philosophers generally limited themselves to requests for clarification without making significant contributions, with the possible exception of Nicola Abbagnano and a few others. Conversely, when the presentation came from the humanities, scientists often felt like fish out of water. Marconi concludes that there was clearly a widespread lack of familiarity with the practice of connecting technical-scientific knowledge and logical-philosophical knowledge. This is even more striking considering that the centre’s statutory purpose was precisely to promote a debate that could have become substantial had both groups been familiar with recent developments in logic, the epistemology of research programmes, the emergence of cognitive science, the definitive resolution of the problem of the continuum, and more. This experience shows that interdisciplinarity is not simply a wish: it requires shared competences, cultural background, open-mindedness and willingness. Every discipline that has acquired its own identity, its own hard core, has the right to speak, but that identity is strengthened only through confrontation with other identities. The mixing of forms of knowledge can produce new and fertile forms, just as hybrids do in nature. The PdT card project arises from a desire for openness and collaboration that is not only theoretical but also ethical and professional. At its core, philosophical reflections on photographic images converge with psychological study of the effects that visual elements have on the observer and of how the brain processes images according to what they contain. Starting from reflection on photography—which, despite its sociocultural diffusion, has historically received less theoretical attention than other more established arts, partly because of an inertia unable to grasp the distinctive features of the photographic medium—the project moved toward the cognitive and emotional relevance of images, which for Damasio are the principal currency of consciousness. Our bodies map internal visceral states through interoceptive images, the position of our limbs through proprioceptive images and the position of external objects through exteroceptive images. Thought itself is populated by an incalculable number of images that succeed one another at great speed. Photography can therefore be understood as a technical extension of our innate capacity to “frame” the world from a particular point of view. We might call it an exogenous image, as distinct from the endogenous images generated by and within the brain.

PHILOSOPHY OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGE

Photography has always lived in the shadow of history, for several reasons. The history of photography is in part a history of concealment, which prevented the medium from finding a critical space in which to define itself without seeking external legitimations or entering into unequal comparisons with its sister arts. What was thought to be lacking in photographs? First of all, they appeared too contaminated by chemistry and technology and, at the same time, too little capable of displaying the brilliant authorial imprint needed to compete with painting. The nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetic tradition weighed heavily against a positive appreciation of the new medium, which seemed to stand at the opposite pole from the ideals of feeling and the sublime. Art, according to this tradition, should not only arouse intense emotions but above all represent the inner states of the individual: personal experience mattered more than academic rules. Individuality therefore had to be valued. The artist was a creative genius who expressed an inner world through brushes and colours, and whose works reflected dreams and anxieties. A significant part of the early history of photography—Pictorialism is an obvious example—can be understood as an attempt to fill what was perceived as a representational void, that is, to restore to the technical image the dignity demanded by the glorious history of images. For a photograph to be considered artistic, it first had to become the intentional deposit of a mind, a concrete manifestation of creative thought and the visible expression of dense, layered symbolization. Another factor to consider is the central notion of the “aura” developed by Walter Benjamin in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Aura is what makes an artwork unique and unrepeatable, tied to a specific material and historical context. It includes the dimensions of Authenticity and Presence hic et nunc. Authenticity certifies that the work before us—such as cult statues, icons or church frescoes—is original, was actually produced by the artist, has survived through the centuries and bears the marks of tradition. In photography much of this disappears because, as a technical product, the photograph is in principle reproducible and ubiquitous. It can exist simultaneously in several places without any meaningful distinction between an original and a copy. In the age of mass production, that distinction no longer has the same reason to exist because the work is no longer bound to a single place and loses its exceptional material presence. The concepts of intentionality, the transfiguration of inner experience and the sacredness of aura therefore contributed to relegating photography to a secondary position. One merit of media philosophy has been to detach photography from these familiar epistemological categories and open the way to new understandings of the specificity of the photographic image. As Francesco Parisi suggests, photographs should be treated as photographs in order to see what happens when they are placed in relation to alternative fields of inquiry. Many intellectuals contributed to a genuine cultural battle for recognition of photography’s intrinsic dignity and of the way in which its disruptive force changed the destiny of art. Peter Galassi, for example, sees in Edgar Degas a moment when the absolute formalization of perspectival viewpoint gives way to the embodiment of that viewpoint in the eye of an observer. In many of Degas’s paintings, decentered compositions, variations in scale, the absence of a centre of gravity, the freezing of movement and the almost accidental quality of framing strongly recall snapshots—something for which critics reproached him. Photographs do not so much represent an irreparable rupture with a sound understanding of art as a change in the strategy of artistic expression. They are both symptom and cause of a new organization of the visual world, a new approach connected first of all with the birth of the modern observer, produced by the new philosophical, scientific and economic discourses that emerged between 1810 and 1840. Photography establishes a new system of vision and a new discipline of the gaze, embodied in models of representation and visual perception that break with the rules of linear perspective and the camera obscura. In other words, the question is also to understand how photography, once released from a position of inferiority, reconfigured art itself, emphasizing the unprecedented impact that the new technical image had on painting. The photographic rejects the logic of painting in order to embrace a new system of artistic norms that photography itself helped to create: this is what Claudio Marra means by “photographic Dadaism.” The interdisciplinary turn, despite dissenting voices and positions of rejection such as Roger Scruton’s denial that photographic images possess an aesthetic of their own because they are incapable of representation, allowed the technical medium to recognize an artistic and conceptual identity of its own. The next step, as we shall see, brings in the psychology of images in order to explore their emotional counterpart, which points to the very specificity for which the new medium had so long struggled. The battle to give photography an honoured place in modern theoretical thought was won when it became clear that, for the first time in human history, photography brought together the dimensions of representation and revelation. Photographs are a historically unprecedented site of interaction between these two distinct functions.

PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGE

Representation and revelation, in the past, generally acted separately. As Maynard explains, by representation we mean the capacity to re-present on a two-dimensional support a reality that was originally three-dimensional through an intentional act. Revelation is the capacity of photography, and of other prosthetic visual devices, to show phenomenal aspects of reality through the operation of physical, chemical and optical principles. More than a painting or drawing, photographic images bear witness to events that actually occurred. For this reason, photographs amplify their effects on our sensory and cognitive structures and stimulate our imagination with particular force. It is precisely because of their value as attestations of the what-has-been that Linda Berman, a pioneer of phototherapy in psychoanalysis, sees in the technical medium the possibility of reflecting life in all its infinite variety. The human condition, with its uncertainties and ambivalences, is expressed powerfully through the lens. Our lives unfold around countless contradictions that it would be important to reconcile for our psychological well-being, and photographs can help us do so. They offer tools for working through inner paradoxes by presenting those paradoxes to us. Neuroses, psychosomatic disorders and, more generally, psychological illness can be understood as outcomes of opposing forces, of demands that we often struggle to harmonize. Paradox arises when discordant, non-integrated processes take place and we are unable to translate them into words. Photographs allow us to explore opposites within ourselves of which we may not even be aware. One of the clearest paradoxes involved in looking at a photograph is the coexistence of strangeness and familiarity. Captured on film or a sensor, even the face of someone we know, fixed in a fleeting expression, can become strange to us. If we stare for long enough, the people portrayed may begin to lose their familiar identity, while particular features stand out with exaggerated evidence. Moreover, unlike short stories or novels, photographs tell in a way that is partly direct and immediate—the revelatory and presentational side—but also tortuous and unclear—the representational side. The duality between established fact and silence can be felt in every photograph we try to narrate, whether it is a personal snapshot or an image made by someone else or prepared specifically for an exercise. Extracting a story from facial expressions, gestures, the spatial arrangement of subjects, clothing and the eccentricity or normality of the situation always contains an element of arbitrariness rooted in imagination and the association of memories. A photograph can even strike us through its imagined sound, although we hear nothing. In addition, the innocent realism of snapshots fragments reality into scattered pieces that may seem to have little to do with the whole. There is the infant self in a cradle and the adult self wearing a tie beside a spouse: two frozen blocks of time. For Berman, although photographs fragment the flow, they can paradoxically contribute to reconstructing an ordered progression, a linear continuum capable of rebuilding and reintegrating painful episodes of life that have remained suspended “in the void.” Through childhood photographs, a patient can work toward rebuilding a divided self so that a more meaningful whole can re-emerge from the pieces, from the mosaic of personal images. The basic principle of perceptual organization in Gestalt psychology is captured in the well-known formulation that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. Our brain automatically organizes stimuli into meaningful configurations according to principles of proximity, similarity, closure or continuation, figure-ground relations and good form. By bringing Gestalt psychology together with the psychology of images, we can understand a photograph—or a multitude of photographs—as a meaningful structure within which the observer connects elements on the basis of previous knowledge and past experience, assigning them new value.

CONCLUSION

The PdT cards are a synthesis of philosophy and psychology. From philosophy we have drawn tools for examining the object of “writing with light” and for identifying a sufficient condition by which its individuality can be circumscribed; we found this in Maynard’s pair of representation and revelation. From psychology we have considered, though only in broad terms, the repercussions of this unusual union in psychotherapeutic art therapy. Philosophy has outlined the ontology of photography, highlighting both the aesthetic and sensory revolution of the gaze—perhaps sustained by a certain technological determinism connected with capitalism and mass society—and photography’s revelatory and phenomenological function. Psychology has addressed the semantics and semiotics of photography, showing methods and applications in clinical and supportive contexts, with particular attention to constructivist approaches in phototherapy and Gestalt psychology that treat narration as a privileged instrument of intervention. Before embodying a particular vision of photography, the PdT cards primarily embody a vision of the human being as a being of potential, capable of reinventing the self and finding resources with which to project renewed confidence into the future of life.