Rome and the Self: a Psychological Excavation｜Italy

Begin your journey by meeting your guide and setting off on a walking tour of Rome. Walk to Michelangelo’s Moses with Freud (and Freud with Lacan) to debate the law, its weight, and desire as a motor of existence. Register your interpretations of the statue and sit in front of the Colosseum to discuss the many meanings of (Freud's) Michelangelo's Moses.

Continue to the Imperial Forum and confront Caesar's panel to challenge perceptions of time, especially the one that sees history as a linear progression or regression to a stable state. Explore the view into Caesar's forum, thinking of the simultaneity of time, how many "pasts" are present, and how this can inform your own personal views of life.

Then, examine Caesar's statue to discuss our personal Rubicons, sovereignty, and how new worlds can emerge from a reality in crisis. Have you ever crossed your Rubicon?

Next, walk up Via di San Pietro in Carcere and analyze symbols appropriated by fascism, relying on Lacan's "Big Other" to meditate on political orders that crush our personalities. Keep going up, until reading Freud's passage on Rome and its ruins as a metaphor of the psychic life - Rome as an "unconscious", where everything that happened doesn't cease to exist.

Conclude our tour by sitting at the Terrazza, where the view of Rome's skyline, its sounds, domes, forms, birds, opens as a vast life's field, the city becoming a living image of life in its many dimensions: historical, political, personal, private, natural, and more.