Emotions as Biographical Material

Desire and Fullness in Romano Màdera’s Philosophy as a Way of Life

Abstract

This article examines the role of emotions in human flourishing through the framework of Biographical Analysis with a Philosophical Orientation (ABOF), developed by the philosopher and psychoanalyst Romano Màdera. It first reconstructs Màdera’s diagnosis of the capture of emotional life in late-modern consumer societies and then presents ABOF as a practice situated at the intersection of philosophy as a way of life, depth psychology, and social critique. Its specific contribution is to articulate three movements through which emotions become biographical material: attending to emotion without immediate identification, anamorphically re-reading its bodily, relational, and social layers, and discerning the orientation of desire expressed through it. Emotions thus emerge neither as disturbances to be eliminated nor as self-interpreting truths, but as privileged sites of biographical discernment. The article argues that this work connects emotional self-knowledge with solidarity and with a non confessional spiritual openness, allowing human flourishing to be understood as the capacity to value finite goods without requiring any one of them to provide total fulfilment.