ABSTRACT
According to the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus, conflict is the source of everything. Conflict was immortalized by the sculptor Phidias in the metopes of the Parthenon at the dawn of western civilization: he portrayed conflict between humans and beasts, and the barbarians and the civilized Greeks, or what finally comes down to conflict between the body and the mind. Freud placed conflict at the root of his notion of depth psychology. In our practice today we are facing new horizons of such a kind that the repressed unconscious is considered together with the unrepressed unconscious and its more pervasive role (Bion, 1970; Matte Blanco, 1975; Lombardi, 2015), with the result that conflict reveals deeper implications, regarding, first of all, the body-mind relationship.
