“The Broken Mechanical Wind-up Bird”: A Philosophical Memoir

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SECOND THOUGHTS

Recently, the purpose and meaning of obituaries has been on my mind, both with a death in the family and with fellow Psychiatric Times columnist H. Steven Moffic, MD’s frequent obituaries to our colleagues. Furthermore, Moffic responded to my Speak Up Manifesto and my column on Socrates’ Choice about euthanasia, suicide, and assisted suicide with a manifesto of his own. Identifying with Socrates as a gadfly, Moffic announced his Gadfly Manifesto! This chain of call and response started with his reflections on Deciding How to Die.

My maternal uncle, Antonio (Tony) Cipriani (1934-2025) recently passed away. Born in the province of L’Aquila in central Italy, he came to Canada as a young man and worked hard to establish himself and to bring his maternal family to Canada, first his mother and younger sister, later his older sister, my mother Nena, and me. We owe our presence here and the opportunities that this country has given to us to my enterprising Uncle Tony.

I remember my Uncle Tony during my youth as a vigorous man, physically fit and powerful, with an infectious conviviality and a boisterous laugh that belied a mind like a steel trap with the political passion of a pundit. Although we believe he had a good death, surrounded by my maternal family, this family memoir continues to resonate inside me. Recall that Freud used the term in German for “insight” only once, informally, calling the labor of the patient “working through.” Dating from a family encounter in 2017, this memoir concerns those things that, as we say in therapy, will not lie still.

While I have written my share of obituaries, most recently a valediction for my friend and mentor in social psychiatry, Eliot Sorel, MD, DLFAPA, FACPsych, I am not yet ready to say goodbye to my Uncle Tony. Not quite ready to grieve him on his way, as Dylan Thomas sang in his most famous poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”

The Broken Mechanical Wind-up Bird

It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in torment.

—Yevgeny Zamyatin¹

My uncle’s house is a kind of museum, preserving a past when his 4 young children lived there. Each child’s room has some or all the furniture and the surviving objects of their childhood—clothes, dolls, story books. Recovered objects from their lost childhood, and a lost father.

I took my wife there. We walk through the rooms with a kind of curiosity, but we leave with a sense of shame for having invaded a private space and a deep, abiding sadness. As we leave, my uncle points to a toy bird and winds it up. Its mechanical wings spread out and flap as its head bobs along with the whirring sound of its clockwork mechanism. It is fantastical, a toy from another era. Nothing like the plastic toys “Made in China” or even the wooden toys the hippies made for their kids. More like the mechanical robots of the industrial age showcasing a kind of mechanical intelligence.

Where did you get it? we wondered.

He had spied a broken mechanical bird in a neighbor’s trash and offered to repair it. The neighbor’s children having moved on, she told him to keep it. He took the broken bird home and brought it back to life. My uncle is a man in his 80s, expressing the kind of joy fathers know in assembling baby furniture and tricycles or mending toys for their children. And the wind-up bird told a story like nothing else in this children’s museum.

That broken mechanical wind-up bird is a form of life for my uncle. Not dead, yet not quite alive. It is what Zamyatin called “dead-alive.” It captured the essence of life: potenza from Italian, meaning potentiality. Life potential. To make it come alive, all you had to do was wind it up! But it was prone to breaking down if you wound it up too tightly. Just like life. That whirring sound of the mechanical bird coming alive and the wistful glint in my uncle’s eyes will stay with me.

Once we had left my uncle’s museum of memories and were safely alone in the car, my mother let out a torrent of words about her brother. I collected my thoughts about my uncle. His children had cut him dead, but he was still alive. Not dead-alive like the mechanical bird but Zamyatin’s “alive-alive … in search, in torment.”

As we were driving away my wife, who is economical in her expressions and respectful of my family of origin, let out a sigh combining empathy and relief. She said it best who said the least: my uncle was repairing himself.

Potentiality and Form-of-Life: A Philosophical Memoir

I have written philosophical fiction² as well as philosophical poetry.³ This philosophical memoir is an extract from a work in progress, memoirs and meditations about my life and work as a social psychiatrist called Intimate Strangers.⁴ Just as philosophical fiction devotes a significant portion of its narrative to philosophical matters,⁵ I propose this philosophical memoir as a lived narrative framed by philosophical questions.⁶

The key ideas at work in this family memoir were inspired by my work with Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who was the muse for my doctoral investigations in philosophy while I was his teaching assistant at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.^7,8 It is a personally meaningful connection since Agamben’s family was also from the province of L’Aquila in the Abruzzo.

The 2 key terms are form-of-life and potentiality.^9-11 Besides imbuing my uncle’s mechanical bird with life, I have made the argument in Agamben’s seminar for texts as a form-of-life. A text—a poem or a prayer, say—comes alive like the mechanical bird when we read it. The Ancient Greeks distinguished 2 terms for life: zoe and bios. Zoe refers to the “simple fact of living” as documented in the zoology of living things and representing the bare necessities of life. Bios refers to our shared socio-political constructions of life that Agamben, following French philosopher Michel Foucault, calls biopolitics.¹¹ Bios and biopolitics are what human society does with zoe, creating the socio-political context of life.

Form-of-life is a compound philosophical construction (hence the hyphens as 1 word), that means life that is not reducible to bare life, to mere means and necessity. For example, the natural necessity of ensuring the survival of human infants who cannot fend for themselves is zoe, while the social evolution of family culture with children thriving as its goal is bios. For him, my uncle’s family was reduced to zoe, bare life stripped of a humanizing social context. This triggered his search for bios, imbuing nonliving things as stand-ins for forms of life in the vain hope of turning them into forms-of-life that could not be denied and reduced to bare life. He referred to the dolls his daughters had left there as his children. It was not a metaphor, but a reality to him.

My text also gives a nod to the dual nature of potenza/impotenza in Italian, translated as potentiality/impotentiality. Every “potentiality to” contains within it or is accompanied by its shadow, “potentiality not to.” This distinction is fundamental for a philosophy of life, starting with Aristotle in Ancient Greece. If things just existed as brute facts, actuality, we would not need theories of change, development, and growth, transcendence and transformation. We would live in a world of things that are and things that are not, but we would not even be able to imagine things that are not. Since Aristotle, philosophy calls them “counterfactuals”—alternatives to reality.

In such a world, without counterfactuals, we would have neither utopias nor dystopias; neither potentialities nor impotentialities. In the psy disciplines, this was the world of American psychologist BF Skinner’s radical behaviorism.¹² As American linguist Noam Chomsky pointed out, not only would we lose a vocabulary for describing the world of thoughts and feelings in the transition to Skinner’s social engineering, but eventually we would lose the capacity to experience the nuances of lived experience.¹³ (More on that critique that has been characterized as “the most influential document in the history of psychology” when I return to my overview of manifestos in the psy disciplines in a later column).

Potentiality/impotentiality are philosophical categories elaborated by Giorgio Agamben based on the work of Aristotle. But make no mistake, they describe the way life is lived. My uncle’s museum was the place where potentiality—the life he had created—confronted impotentiality—its absence and negation. His family was absent so he treated children’s toys, household objects, photos, and furniture, the artefacts of life, as forms of life. When the categories potentiality and its double impotentiality manifested themselves and he could no longer distinguish between them, the moment arrived when, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, his life no longer affords philosophy but psychiatry.¹⁴

Our work as psychiatrists is always at that border between the 2. Perhaps our work could be captured as the labor of working through potentiality against the rage and resistance of confronting impotentiality. This is mine.

Resources

1. The usual suspects cited in philosophical fiction include Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann in German; Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir in French; Alberto Moravia and Italo Calvino in Italian; and Jorge Luis Borges and Ernesto Sabato in Spanish.
2. Philosophical memoirs are a more specialized form and I would include Augustine’s Confessions and Montaigne’s Essays.
3. Giorgio Agamben’s work is well translated into English and requires a capacity for nuanced discernment. My other mentor in philosophy, Alain Badiou, described him as a “Franciscan of ontology” documenting “the delicate, almost secret persistence of life.”¹⁵ There are many works about Agamben but since he is a master craftsman of language and thought, I would send you to his own texts. Start with his slim autobiographical volume, a “travelogue that chronicles Giorgio Agamben’s profound interior journey.”¹⁶

Dr Di Nicola is a child psychiatrist, family psychotherapist, and philosopher in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he is professor of psychiatry & addiction medicine at the University of Montreal. He is also clinical professor of psychiatry & behavioral health at The George Washington University and president of the World Association of Social Psychiatry (WASP). Dr Di Nicola has received numerous national and international awards, honorary professorships, and fellowships. Of note, Dr Di Nicola was elected a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (FCAHS), given the Distinguished Service Award of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and is a Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists (FACPsych). His work straddles psychiatry and psychotherapy on one side and philosophy and poetry on the other. Dr Di Nicola’s publications include: A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families and Therapy (WW Norton, 1997), Letters to a Young Therapist (Atropos Press, 2011, winner of a prize from the Quebec Psychiatric Association), and Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Sciences, the Humanities, and Neuroscience (with D. Stoyanov; Springer Nature, 2021).

Acknowledgements

• Dedicated to the memory of my maternal uncle, Antonio (Tony) Cipriani (1934-2025).
• Many of my ideas about the nature of philosophy, thought, and trauma were developed in my seminars with Giorgio Agamben, my doctoral muse at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, and are deeply integrated into my doctoral dissertation and other texts.^7,8
• My family memoir was written several years before I read Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s masterpiece, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997).
• Finally, many thanks to John Farnsworth, PhD, for his valuable suggestions to improve this column.

References

1. Zamyatin Y. On literature, revolution, entropy, and other matters. In: Ginsburg M, ed & trans. A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin. The University of Chicago Press; 1970:107-112.

2. Di Nicola V. Strangers in a cemetery: a letter from prison, a voice from the grave. Capital Psychiatry (The E-Magazine of the Washington Psychiatric Society). 2021;2(4):32-35.

3. Di Nicola V (text), A Donoyan (photography). Two Kinds of People: Poems from Mile End. Delere Press; 2023.

4. Di Nicola V. Intimate Strangers: The Making of a Social Psychiatrist. Unpublished work in progress.

5. Philosophical fiction. Wikipedia. Accessed April 30, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_fiction

6. Di Nicola V. States of exception, states of dissociation: cyranoids, zombies and liminal people. Letters to a Young Therapist. Atropos Press; 2011:149-162.

7. Di Nicola V. Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community. Atropos Press; 2011.

8. Agamben G. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Heller-Roazen D, ed & trans. Stanford University Press; 2000.

9. Agamben G. The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life. Kotsko A, trans. Stanford University Press; 2013.

10. Murray A, Whyte J, eds. The Agamben Dictionary. Edinburgh University Press; 2011.

11. Agamben G. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Heller-Roazen D, trans. Stanford University Press; 1998.

12. Skinner BF. About Behaviorism. Alfred A. Knopf; 1974.

13. Chomsky N. The case against B.F. Skinner. New York Review of Books. December 30, 1971.

14. Foucault M. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Vintage; 1973.

15. Badiou A. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. Toscano A, trans. Continuum; 2009.

16. Agamben G. What I saw, heard, learned … Price AL, trans. Seagull Books; 2023.