I stumbled upon "Letter to Your Family" by Vittorino Andreoli quite by accident—in a post office display during a long queue—and found myself genuinely enchanted. Andreoli, a celebrated psychologist at 67, grandfather, husband, and father of three, has written what reads like a great modern encyclical on family life: lucid, suffused with humanity and religious spirit, even though Andreoli himself claims to lack firm faith.
Yet he argues with unmistakably religious conviction that the stable family is the natural home of the affections we need to grow and flourish. This is because the religious and the deeply human overlap considerably—not least because we believe human beings are creatures of God.
Drawing on a vast, painstaking, and loving knowledge of thousands of human and family stories, Andreoli writes with simplicity and intelligence about the problems, riches, and roles that constitute family life—that place where each person can receive vital nourishment from love and must, in turn, contribute their part. He addresses his letter to women and men, husbands and wives, children and grandparents. He reflects on the beautiful and reassuring aspects: brief passion and enduring love, hospitality and mutual trust, shared life, the wonder of children born and growing, love in old age, the sacredness of marriage. With sympathy, he guides us through family troubles and sorrows—and thus through individual suffering: an unhealthy relationship with money and needless things, joyless work, hostile silence, domination, the sense of being nothing (which is a kind of death), "the consumption of feelings reduced to objects," aging lived as a prelude to death, sudden misfortune, alcoholism, children's rebellion, the crushing of children, infidelity, depression. I see grotesque figures of elderly men and women, their hair and makeup from fifty years past, because they are ravaged by anxiety that without youth and beauty, one ceases to exist—a mental illness that television has spread like plague. And I find myself in Andreoli's fury: "I hate this society that kills whoever lacks golden proportions, whoever doesn't possess a backside to display, whoever hasn't got a sculpted and hollowed navel. I hate a society of the body and not the mind, of styled hair and never mind if the head inside is empty and useless."
He uses harsh language for two realities: violence and television.
"The family is the place of bonds—emotional bonds that allow variation, both in the specifics of relationships and in the intensity of involvement. But violence is never allowed. No human condition should ever lead to the loss of dignity. If dignity is lost, one is no longer inside marriage but outside humanity itself."
"I beg you: turn off the television. It is a curse, a disaster... a tool that sells viewers to industries hawking their wares."
To convey something of Andreoli's religious spirit—coming from a man doubtful of God—I choose this passage about goodness:
"I do not wish to dwell on the effects of evil. I wish to sing the greatness of good. Doing good is beautiful and costs little effort; in fact, it brings joy. If we truly discovered how lovely it is to do good, what pleasure we receive from it, we would find it senseless to adopt that hard stance toward others, to use domination and command, to impose things that only block all communication."
Anyone who truly cares about family—not just now and then, but genuinely—owes Vittorino Andreoli gratitude for this illuminating letter.
Sergio Sciascia, 2007