The Arab phoenix and the temple of the perfidious lari: dualism, mentalism and subject theory

Psychoanalysis was born as a physicalist discipline at the dawn of the crisis of classical mechanics, which has left its mark both in theory, which reveals an unforeseen dualism in the mechanistic system, and in its historical evolution, squeezed between opposing reductionist and mentalist instances which are still persisting today. It is difficult to say whether the theory of systems is sufficient antidote against any return of mentalism, which easily filters into theoretical language through rooted habits and prejudices, which, like F. Bacon's idola theatres, hinder the processes of knowledge. The A. highlights some of these prejudicial idols, leading them back to an insufficient consideration of the evolutionist perspective within psychological theory. Starting from the assumption that the brain must be considered, also in its high characteristics and in its nature as a brain-builder, as a random effect of the history of the organisms of this planet, he delimits a platform, which, relying on the role of the qualia in the actual world of natural selection, could deal with the problem of the ego, subjectivity and intersubjectivity in openly evolutionist terms able to integrate, in the former, the "second nature". This perspective, however, barely sketched out, seems to be able to avoid both the reductionist Scylla and the mentalist Charybdis.