A threefold belonging

Distinguished academic authorities, dear colleagues and friends, ladies and gentlemen. I shall address a few words to you from my threefold condition as a member of the university community, as a Spaniard and as a systemic family psychotherapist.

As a member of the academic community, I must thank the Maimónides University for the honour it is bestowing upon me. Its generosity is great in granting me this distinction without any services of any kind having been rendered on my part, and this, do not doubt it for a moment, makes me feel in debt and obliges me to respond. The future will bear witness to my gratitude.

Maimonides, Averroes and Llull

As a Spaniard and an Andalusian, I should like to dwell for a moment on the figure of my compatriot (or perhaps it would be better to say of my country) the Cordoban Maimonides, the indisputable patron of this learned house. And I should like to do so in a contextualised way, contemplating not in isolation his gigantic figure as a Jewish sage, but accompanying him with two other titans of human thought: the Muslim Averroes, his contemporary and a Cordoban like him, and the Christian Llull, a Majorcan born a century later. All three lit up the supposed medieval darkness from that privileged space of creative coexistence which for a certain time was Spain — Sepharad — Al-Andalus.

All three belonged to their age and took part in its contradictions, but they faced them with a singular characteristic that united them beyond their differences: the will to convince by reasoning and by scientifically grounded persuasion. They paid a heavy price for it. Llull was rejected and persecuted, Averroes fell into disgrace and died under house arrest, and Maimonides had to go into exile to escape the rigour of Almohad fundamentalism. None of them submitted and, in particular, Maimonides brilliantly rebuilt in exile a life that allowed him to develop his extraordinary work.

I am not the right person to gloss the immense work of Maimonides. I shall refer, very briefly, to only two of his books: a minor one, the Treatise on Sexual Intercourse, and a major one, the Guide for the Perplexed — which could just as well be called the guide for those who have gone astray. In the Treatise on Sexual Intercourse, our sage displayed a great capacity for reframing, since he turned what was no more than a commission from the lustful sultan of Hama, eager to increase his virile potency, into a rich and measured manual of sexual hygiene. As for the Guide for the Perplexed, its title would deserve to belong to Argentine literature, for Borges and Cortázar would doubtless dispute its paternity. The content, however, belongs unequivocally to Maimonides and to his time, since it is an immense effort to make faith and science compatible. The perplexed would be those who, guided by reason, felt themselves in danger of colliding with revealed truth, which medieval man could hardly do without. A further merit of Maimonides, and one that has not perished — doubly perceptible in these times when religion continues to justify attacks, massacres and invasions — is that he never used anything but learned speech in the service of his idea, and neither the stake nor the sword.

A modern perplexity: love and psychotherapy

As a systemic family psychotherapist, I want, in all modesty, to imitate Maimonides by travelling through a territory of modern perplexity: that of the compatibility of love and psychotherapy. At bottom, a crossroads of reason, emotion and practice, not so different from the one the Cordoban explored eight hundred years ago.

There are anthropological arguments that make it possible to maintain that love is the defining element of the human condition…