aka, German expedition - part 1

Around 2005 I read "The psychopathology of everyday life" by Freud. I had already read several Freud books which made a deep impression on me. This was, unexpectedly, the one that impressed me the most. In this book Freud analyzes everyday gestures, actions, any tiny movement or misspelled word, most often from his own experience, to explain it according to his psychoanalytic framework. I was not only impressed by the sheer number of everyday psychopathological actions, but more so by the fact that Freud chose to analyze his own.
In the next few years I encountered many people telling me that Freud is "outdated", homophobic, or just wrong, and shouldn't be taught in school. I can sympathize with the sentiment that his theories might have been proven wrong and that his views on homosexuality were hardly positive. He was a man of his time, but he was also a researcher who wasn't afraid to show half-baked ideas, hunches, and to live a world built by his own theories.
In 2006 I read "Lectures on passive synthesis" by Edmund Husserl. Besides being almost incromprehensible to me at the time, the same researcher ethos came through. The same innocent gaze of the world. Both Freud and Husserl seem to ask "why is the sky blue?" over and over. In a world of self-assured pricks, I've always found this refreshing and tried to follow their example whenever possible.
In 2010 I took a second class in Cultural Anthropology. My idea was to focus on cargo cults, the professor's idea was to give me a huge anthology of world syncretic religions. I was then exposed to a number of strange practices without any apparent logic. Does religion have any logic? Why do the Nuer behave this way? Can't they see basic cause and effect? All questions that made the professor raise a couple of eyebrows and probably question my aptitude. He was probably thinking: Did this student really take Anthropology 101? Why do philosophy students ask such stupid questions? Can't they tell a social construct when they see one?
In 2022 I moved to Germany. About a month afterwards we had to move to a new apartment. I'm not new to moving, I moved quite often in Italy. This time however, I noticed something peculiar. A behavior I could not quite explain with logic and cause-effect, something that would make a philosophy student raise a couple of eyebrows.
As I was moving things around the house and packing boxes, I noticed I was taking particular care to the things I value the most. This is not a great insight, of course if you care about something you don't want it damaged. The care I was using was however different, unrelated to the actual damage prevention. I then noticed that this type of care was unrelated to the ownership of the object too, but rather to its general domain. I would, for example, move the router of the old house (not mine) so that it could not get accidentally knocked in case someone was to enter the room in a rush. I would pack the printer (not mine) by wrapping it in a thin plastic bag before putting it in the cardboard box. When lowering an object of care into a box I would do so slowly, as if any tiny shake of its chassis could damage it. My PCs and screens I've always refused to give to the moving company, and rather move them on my own afterwards.
This behavior is not unique to moving. When putting my phone on a table, I never leave it on the edge. I put it well onto table, preferibly so that it cannot be knocked off.
I think there's a part of me that instinctively thinks that objects move on their own, and that they should be put so they cannot fall off once they do. I wonder how much of my programmer's background has to do with this behavior. As a software developer, I learned fairly early that there's a special someone I need to lookout for: myself. Most of my attention and interest is usually spent in preventing myself from making mistakes. On this note, putting my phone in a very secure place makes sense, anyone could make a mistake and knock it over.
On the topic of knocking objects off a table, another possible influence would be cats. I've always had cats around the house since I was born. While cats are generally tidy and careful, they have a habit of pushing things off shelves and jumping wherever they see fit.
I also remember one example from Freud, a little story from the book I mentioned in the beginning. One day his sister walked into his studio while he was writing a paper and told him, that she would give him a new ink well when the current one was worn down. How do ink wells get damaged I cannot fathom, they're a thing of a previous era. What happened however was interesting. As soon as the sister left, Sigmung "accidentally" knocked the ink well off the table and broke it. Freud's explanation was that this was far from an accident, his unconscious craved a gift from his sister. The explanation is probably more detailed and interesting than what I can remember, my take away however is: it's oh so easy to perform actions that damage oneself, consciously or not.