This book gives many important answers to understand our specific place in the set of living beings. Since we are born we allow ourselves to be fascinated, bewitched and hypnotized by everything around us.
The fascination and its levels
Fascination holds us together to our world, which protects and stimulates our senses until, little by little, we understand the signals from the environment and we can react to them.
Animals are also fascinated by perceiving the smells, colors and movements of their world. When they react appropriately, it is clear that they also understand the signals from their environment.
But for humans there are other levels of fascination:
- when we understand things we give them meaning,
- and with these we create our mental world.
It is not an unreal world and separate from our body.
On the contrary, thanks to him all our senses and sensations acquire meaning. Thus, our body, at first purely organic, becomes for us a body that we can understand and that participates in very subtle and complex ways in our communication with others.
When we talk with others, each one can only speak from the personal world that has been created, because they do not know the mental world of the other.
How is it possible that, despite this, we understand each other?
As Cyrulnik shows through numerous and surprising examples, we understand each other thanks to a very special fascination, the secrets of which are observed by observing everything we do to communicate in addition to speaking: we offer the other a great variety of gestures, glances and movements, Hardly or not at all conscious, reinforcing what we say and feel in such a way that the interlocutor captures, sometimes without knowing it, our state of mind and what, deep down, we mean.