« The two volumes that make
up his extraordinary biography are among the most important personal documents
in our historical memory. » Emilio Lledó, El País
All conducts are
produced according to a specific context and attitude. The attitude is the
affective and emotional factor that modulates the conduct and transforms it
into the action that each of us takes before a specific situation. This triple
axis – conducts, attitudes, and acts – brings about a fundamental feature of
the subject: his essential lack of stability, the constant process of
construction and deconstruction with which he adapts to each context.
Both this
oscillation within the versatility of human behavior
and the need to conquer an identity that is familiar allow the eminent
psychiatrist Carlos Castilla del Pino
to explore the complex lattice of acts and typified forms of conduct: for
instance, envy, jealousy, deceit, suspiciousness, irony, or extravagance, which
help us to face the world and to present ourselves as subjects in different
situations. And if psychology recognizes the mutual interaction between the
cognitive and emotional aspects that characterize us, anthropology (as studied
by Cassirer, Simmel, Weber, Dilthey,
or Jaspers) allows us to see the actor, the character that we are and that we
construct in our social interactions.
The author turns
to one of his favorite fields of study in which he
made bright and fascinating contributions: the anthropological roots of
conduct; an investigation that is always oriented at finding an idea about
mankind without turning its back on the contributions of Philosophy or Greek
tragedy, nor on the explanations of human conduct approached by great novelists
and playwrights.
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