Uta Santos-König on Massimo Mangialavori

In 1995 the name Massimo Mangiolavori entered the pages of LINKS for the first time. Marguerite Pelt wrote a seminar report inspired by his 1993 and 1994 seminars in Wageningen on snakes and spiders. Although his English at that time was not so easy to follow and despite the fact that the spoiled Dutch audience had to do without a video presentation, Massimo made a deep impression. Marguerite finished her report by writing: “Dr. Mangialavori has a lot of experience, and not only with animal remedies. He has ideas about plants and showed cases of Nuphar, Phellandrium and Eryngium maritinum. But then his name predestined him to be a workaholic (Lavori: work, Mangio: eat and Massimo: to the maximum).” We clearly hadn't heard the last of Massimo. Cees Baas, who had learned Italian by just visiting Massimo in Italy, had translated his spider and snake cases into English, and several of the cases he had presented in Wageningen featured in subsequent issues of LINKS. In 1996 Uta Santos-König and Peter König interviewed Massimo for LINKS. Uta has been following Massimo ever since so I have asked her to share with us what it is in Massimo and his work that keeps inspiring her.

Since when have you been following Massimo's work?

I first heard him in Augsburg in autumn 1995, after Jürgen Faust had told me that there was someone worth listening to, a rising star from Italy, profound and modest.

What is it in the approach of Massimo that is so appealing to you?

What impressed me deeply from the very beginning was his case-taking and the way he documented every expression used by the patient which at that time was not at all common. He respected the patient in the sense that he worked only with what the patient was willing to say, without pushing, at the same time registering details in breathing or other physical changes that accompanied the flow or non-flow of the words, so that even what the patient avoided mentioning became a source of information. In other words: the high level of observation.

The search for the remedy then was conducted from a very wide perspective, which was only possible because he had decided and dared to step over some old rules that the homeopathic community had held dear for more than 200 years, just because they were rules, disregarding the historic context that had engendered them.

Which rules do you refer to and how did Massimo step over them?

A better word than “rules” might be “opinions” - opinions that by virtue of being constantly repeated over decades and generations of homeopaths ended up as part of the “knowledge” we all had been offered in our studies, like the idea that there are polychrests that are big and very useful on many occasions and small remedies that only serve for minor complaints and never as a constitutional remedy. Or that the grades in the repertory reflect the capacity of a remedy to cure a certain symptom. The delusion “the higher the grade the better the curative potential” is a distortion resulting from the habit of dividing remedies into polychrests and small remedies - an opinion that leads to observations that petrify the opinion etc …

By questioning traditions and using rational intelligence as well as creativity Massimo seems to me very Hahnemannian.

What else impressed you?

I was also impressed by Massimo's deep-going investigation of substances. He included all possible sources to elaborate a full picture of a remedy like toxicology, myths, traditions, the system in which a substance “lives” and “survives”, which seems to be a very satisfying source of analogies.

Important to mention also is the reliability of Massimo's presented cases. It is very true that “the best sources of information are cured cases” and Massimo's seminars are exclusively based on cases where he prescribed one single remedy for many years.

These were my first impressions; then, with all those years of intensive studying of many, many cases and many, many remedies I became more and more aware of the depth of analysis and the fine and precise differentiations between remedies within a certain family or between remedies of very different families that cover a certain theme like “forsaken feeling” in slightly different ways.

Is the way in which Massimo analyses cases a method one can learn, and if so, what are the ingredients?

It is definitely a method you can learn, although there is no way to do it superficially. Either you go deeply into it or you will fail. I think this is one of the reasons why several colleagues just heard him once or twice and considered the method too confusing or too miraculous. Massimo's insight into human behaviour and strategies is astonishingly deep for someone who is not a psychologist.

So, if you ask me for the ingredients of the method of analysing cases, there are several important points worth stressing:

First, if you have a good case of X, go back to your notes and study the case, then if you have another good case of the same remedy compare the two cases so that you will recognize the third one more easily. If you have failed to prescribe the correct remedy, go back to your notes and decide whether you have completely misunderstood the patient or if you still have the same impression. If the latter it could be advisable to search for a similar remedy, a remedy within the same family. In this way you make your own experience the source of your knowledge; this is what Massimo did, and experience, cured cases, not theory, became the basis of his model. (To all those colleagues who are at the beginning of their career: enjoy the time gaps between patients; it is precious time for case analysis!) The second ingredient is refining one's level of observation. This can best be done in a group. It is great to reflect upon the variety of observations on one and the same patient. You can learn to polish your mirror and your glasses! It is not necessary that we always all observe the same things; what is also important is that we are aware of our own individual, specific way of observing. The third step, after having a clear idea about the patient, is to relate this idea to a remedy. This part is chiefly about techniques (easier to learn than the first two, a sigh of relief for that part within us that needs solid tools): a good computer program and a reliable materia medica.

So a deep understanding of human survival strategies and a refined ability to observe these and compare them with those of possible sources in nature seems to lie at the basis of his work. Can you say more about how Massimo observes survival strategies?

It sounds a little strange to talk about the “survival strategy” of a stone or of a plant. The intention is to give a name to a concept and I will try to explain what I understood from Massimo.

Let's take Calcarea carbonica: our well-known oyster is living and surviving in the sea. What is the sea? It is the womb of nature, where all life began. So, if you have decided to become an oyster, you have chosen an environment similar to a womb, where your basic needs are largely met. There is no great challenge to evolve. No necessity to develop special adaptation mechanisms - very simple in comparison to life on earth. The temperature in the sea is always more or less the same, reproduction is not bound to the upbringing and protection of offspring, etc.

Fig. 1 Massimo Mangialavori - Bologna 2004 (photo: Harry van der Zee).

Of course, none of us has ever heard an oyster talk about her perspective on life, unless maybe some shaman who has learned to listen to the spirit of plants and animals.

It is always our human perspective that perceives “strategies” and similarities.

But this is also true for a remedy proving where the proven substance resonates through a human CORPUS, (Massimo has introduced into homeopathy the distinction between body, meaning the material structures that we all share, and corpus, meaning our individual, specific way to sense our body. We HAVE a body, but we ARE a corpus) and it is equally true for all our reflections about the sea and the oyster. It is not objective and it is not subjective; we could call it collective. This means that our experiences with and thoughts about the sea since the beginning of mankind have a collective aspect on which we can all agree. You might say this is all too metaphorical. In Massimo's book “Praxis” Alberto Panza writes about metaphors and I want to share this with you, because it seems to me necessary to appreciate its value for recognition.

“… (that) the metaphor is not just an ornament of the mind, but should be regarded as an essential instrument of the mind, through which aspects of reality that are hard to grasp come within the range of understanding.”

Let's come back to Massimo's method. The next step is to see an “Oyster-like-existence” in a patient - oyster-like strategies. Remember that Massimo's teachings result from cases. So, what I say now is not theory imposed upon praxis but successful praxis that has led to theory, that has improved praxis.

Calcarea carbonica patients want and need security in life; their main strategy is to assure that their basic needs are met. Food, shelter, a safe income, someone stronger to lean on. No big changes, no great challenges. This is very common and even adequate for childhood whereas in adults it might seem “childish”. So, in case-taking, I might realize that for a certain child a safe environment is very important, he might get very stressed by any kind of change, he might be a little fat because food is important (even if he doesn't love soft-boiled eggs); if he then happens to mention - like a ten-year-old boy I remember - that he would love to sleep within a box because it would be so cosy and his physiognomy is crouching by crossing his arms as if cuddling his chest, this is not a superficial “signature” of an oyster but something very essential to the understanding of the inner world of this little boy.

What led to the successful prescription of Calcarea carbonica are certain themes that constitute the similarity between the oyster and the little boy. Essential themes and not some superficial symptoms however well-known they might have become in the tradition of describing a remedy-picture. Themes are “life in progress”, themes manifest themselves in a process, they are dynamic, like a film, as opposed to the static nature of a photo-like symptom. So, themes, showing the story, correspond much more to the reality of life than symptoms, which instead represent a selection of snapshots.

Sunday morning, October 21, Massimo Mangialavori will give a lecture on Animals: the Final Synthesis of Evolution. Although Massimo has worked on all kingdoms, it was especially his work on animal remedies that impressed the fraternity when many years ago his star rose as an international teacher. Animals are probably the only creatures on earth that are able to observe themselves. The animal kingdom is a complex and sophisticated kingdom and only very partially investigated in homeopathic medicine. In his presentation Massimo will discuss the 'vertical relationships' between members of the animal kingdom with substances from other kingdoms.