CLIMBING AND DESCENDING: MOUNTAINEERING AND INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY

Abstract

Looking upon mountain as an absolute, archetypal symbol, as an image of the world and the trascendence, as a link between heaven and earth, our mind recalls the mountain which frightens and enchants, the mountain which has to be beheld, which as to be climbed. The ensueing images are joint whith the attraction and the tendency up-wards: climbing can be regarded as the
coming of the myth of the hero and the compensation for inferiority feelings, as the course of the statement and of the fictitious dissolution of the limit, but also as the knowledge of the finite, as the achievement and consciousness of the feeling of imperfection and of vulnerability; likewise the expe-dition and being on the rope may become the image of the social interest and the sense of belonging to humankind. Mountaineering is thus the metaphor of the knowledge of the world and of the individual man research and strain towards life, practice revaling the unknown, deep experience about the fiction, about the impassable boundary wich everybody finds within himself