Defense Mechanisms
Siena’s Sublimation of Neighborhood Rivalries
The Palio horserace and shared symbolic play.
Posted August 22, 2016
The Palio, held last week in Siena, Italy, is a wild, bareback horse race dating back to the 13th century. Ten horses and riders, each representing a contrade – or neighborhood of the city – race three laps around the Medieval town square. The event, which attracts spectators from around the world, illustrates the sublimation of group rivalries.
Sublimation is the most interesting of psychoanalytic concepts. In this psychological process actual gratification is replaced by a symbolic one. For example, when we teach our children to “use your words,” rather than hit, words become the linguist symbol replacing a child's direct satisfaction in releasing their physical aggression on another.
In sublimation an important substitution takes place, one that redirects a base impulse into a less primitive, more civilized form of expression.
Analogously, the Palio is a way of converting neighborhood rivalries – that have divided the city for more than 700 years – into a ceremony of drama and entertainment, Italy’s most dramatic cultural spectacle.
There is a crucial difference between sublimation and repression. According to anthropologist Eli Sagan, with aggressive instincts that are not sublimated, but are instead repressed – “the desires themselves are not satisfied; they… remain in an untransformed state – they are locked in a closet” (117).
Sagan goes on to say that when primal desires are sublimated, “the individual and the culture end up with more of a full human life” (118).
Each contrade is like a closely-knit tribe or clan. The individuals among them express a fierce loyalty to their home site within the city. The love Sienese have for their contrade is testament to the human capacity for attachment to a group, and desire for belonging. Allegiance to one's historical district is a way of asserting a sense of collective identity.
Contrade pride permeates the city year-round and is a way of life learned from birth. Each baby born in Siena is baptized by the fountain of its contrade and buried in that district. Each contrade maintains its own parish church, museum, and mascot – often a mythic animal with unique colors and abstract design portrayed on their flag. These include the She-wolf, Unicorn, Porcupine, Snail, Tortoise and Wave.
The race itself is frenetic, dangerous. Yet as a form of sublimation it brings together opposite emotions such as hate for one's rivals and love for one's contrade.
Sagan describes such social rituals in this way: “the primary function of all symbolic form is the expression and satisfaction of contradictory, ambivalent human desire” (49). Accordingly, il palio synthesizes conflicting attitudes within a social context by giving satisfaction to both parts of the contradictory tension – to aggression and affection – to each side of the ambivalence thereby denying absolute fulfillment to either (Sagan, 50).
While the event provides a venue for using symbolic play to bind contradictory impulses, the psychic scale can tip off-balance away from sublimation and synthesis – devolving into destruction and chaos. Such was the case last year when neighborhood gangs clashed in street fights following a dispute over the result of the race (2015).
Before the race jockeys are frisked for weapons; they have been known to throw lead weights at another's back. It’s common, too, that the winner is an unmanned horse who has thrown its own jockey around one of the treacherous turns on the corners of the piazza, where special mattresses have been added to help prevent injury.
.jpg?itok=I49jKRmM "Roberto Vicario/used with permission")
The passionate group allegiance that we see in the contrade is a microcosm of what we know on a greater scale as intense ethnic or nationalistic affiliation. The Palio bears likeness also to the American ritual of professional sports. But what makes the Sienese race different from our soccer or rugby or the sprint relay is its explicitly religious aspect.
The race is dedicated to Mary, mother of Jesus. There is no prize money (although bribery is notorious). But the victor is awarded a silk banner of the Virgin Mary, (or "palio"), hand-painted by a different artist every year. The jockeys and horses are blessed in a ceremony of Mass the day of the event. These religious elements associated with the occasion suggest another deeper import of the race.
Mary, mother of Jesus, is often described as one who sacrificed, a "sacrificing priest" who offers her Son to God for the salvation of the world. Il Palio is also one of the many human institutions that highlight the social significance of sacrifice.
Sacrifice was a symbolic act of ancient cultures. It is a social ritual threaded throughout human history. In Totem and Taboo, Freud writes about the sacrificial rites among the Australian Aborigines as the origin of religion, one represented by the totem of each clan – usually an animal, sometimes a plant or force of nature.
Institutionalized sacrifice is characterized by internal violence. This ritual serves to purge the aggressive instincts of the community and, at the same time, defines a sense of morality. We see seemingly contradictory feelings contained in one symbolic form when we view the primary visual symbol of Christianity – the image of the crucifixion – in which a god is simultaneously killed and sacrificed (Sagan, 49). As anthropologist René Girard describes it: the aggression scattered throughout the community is “drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice" (8).
At dusk on the day of Palio, contrade jockeys and horses – adorned in appropriate colors – line up at the starting line by the pharmacy in the west side of the square, Piazza del Campo. This is the culmination of four days of pageantry where, according to the Daily Telegraph, “men in plastic suits of armour advance in neat columns, brandishing replica crossbows, sledgehammers and swords. It looks, to the visitor, like a display by the world's largest 'living history' society.”
Yet this tradition of sublimation and Medieval abandon, has psychological meaning that reverberates through many of our contemporary social practices from the Olympic games to Holy Communion. <><><>
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References
Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1977.
Sagan, Eli. Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form. Santa Fe: FishDrum Magazine Press, 1993.
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