Does Giving Something a Name Really Change What We Experience?

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By

Loredana Filippi

Published

7 October 2026

Reading time

2 min

Format

Column

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Editorial Introduction

With Behind the Words, Emozioni starts from familiar words and images to explore what they carry with them. In the first two instalments, with Loredana Filippi, conflict appeared first as a threshold, then as an encounter with the antagonist. In this third instalment, Loredana Filippi turns her attention to an apparently simple gesture: giving something a name. What changes when something that was previously indistinct is recognized and named??

I cannot help but recall the famous episode in Genesis, in which Adam is called upon to give a name to all the creatures created by the Lord (Genesis 2:19-20).

God brings the animals before him and waits. He does not name them himself. He waits for man.

So what does it mean to «give a Name» to things?

As long as things have no name, they remain confused, indistinct, and «not seeing» generates fear.

To name something is not to label it. It is to recognize its essence.

For example: «Lion» is not just a sound. It is strength, king, danger, respect. When you give something a name, you establish what kind of relationship you will have with it.

It is the power to create order out of chaos.

Before Adam there was only «creation». After Adam there is «the world»: many things placed in relation to one another.

The same thing happens within us.

As long as emotions, thoughts and problems have no name, they are «chaos».

When you name things, you place them in front of you, you observe them, you measure them. You realize that you are not those things (or «only» those things).

Above all, you put them in order: your «inner world» comes into being. Something you can inhabit.

And so, from «things», a world is born. A whole made up of names, boundaries and relationships.

And when chaos becomes a world, you can breathe within it.

This is why a crisis or a conflict is not a mistake to be erased. It is a Meaning asking to be read.

When you read it, discover it, recognize it, the conflict stops being «noise», a disturbance, and becomes a «message». A message that points you in a direction.

The Name, the hidden one asking to be born, but also at times the one that accompanies us through life and in our «identity», therefore carries Meaning. Which is Signum: an imprint, an indication of the way.

It is not destiny: it is a compass.

This is why I say: Meaning gives birth to Sense, or to a new direction for the journey.

Often conflict does not ask to be resolved. It asks to be crossed.

And when you cross it, something within you takes on a name it did not have before.

Text adapted from the unpublished essay «Conflict as a Threshold» by Loredana Filippi.

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Does Giving Something a Name Really Change What We Experience?

Editorial Introduction

A letter, when an issue comes out.