Freedom and Dignity: Addressing Prejudices That Shape Institutions

“Here is the memory, or rather the experience,
which is the memory, plus the wound that it has left you,
plus the change that has operated on you
and has made you different.”

Italo Calvino

Introduction

We are certain that interdisciplinary comprehension can sharpen our psychoanalytic listening to the diversity of contemporary suffering, coming from diverse cultural contexts.

It is our way of providing conceptual and technical resources to maintain the freshness of the freedom of psychoanalytic thought and its power in the creation of different sorts of care, which can contribute to public policies to ensure equity.

We want to draw attention on the importance of psychoanalysts who are immersed in their communities, taking into account their sensibility regarding human suffering. We wish that community issues are included in psychoanalysts’ training, especially those that require the presence of Psychoanalysis.

The construction of knowledge that we present here corresponds to the community work of a network of psychoanalysts, from the heuristic model of ‘dialectical spiral’, and situated in a relational theory of bonds, where subjects and institutions are thought of from a dynamic framework in context.¹

The construction of knowledge takes place in permanent interaction between the moments of emergence of the problem / production of answers to it, always going back to the origin of the question, but in increasingly comprehensive and comprehensive frames in depth, in a multicultural and interdisciplinary key for our work in the social/community clinic.

This modality allows, at the same time as the reconstruction of the knowledge circulating in the practices, the learning in the institutions, as well as the social transformation.

In one of his books about the training of reflective professionals, D. Schön said that theory is immersed in the facts and that it must be collected there. This is our challenge: to promote and sustain the freedom of the analyst as a knowledge constructor and culture creator in the new community realities.²

From this point of view, we begin by presenting three vignettes of social clinic.

Panama. Year 2022.

Scope: Native peoples.

"I go by canoe to meet a native community where a teenager, who went out to fetch drinking water in his boat, was struck by lightning and died. He was the grandson of the village musician, one of the most respected men of the place.

When I arrived, the relatives of the deceased young man were waiting for me. I felt the grief of the mother and father, but it was the musician grandfather who shocked me the most.

Never before had I experienced communal grief. He told me in his native language that his grandson was the most important legacy he would leave to the community. While they helped me with the interpretation of the language, the grandfather looked intermittently at the sky and the sea, as if he was pleading for the return of his grandson and his music and, with this, his life. Their feelings pierced me, I cried with them. There were no words, neither in their language, nor in mine, that could express of the loss.

The parents told me that, prior to the accident, they had fought with the neighboring brother town and that perhaps this death had been a divine punishment. The life of the young man and the loss of his life were lived by the whole community, and I felt that we all died a little with him". (Testimony of the psychoanalyst Natalia Mudarra).

The analyst could feel what that community feels in bereavement: a loss for everyone. It was the loss of a child of all, of a grandchild of all. What was foreign to us (Euro-centric Westerners) was experienced by them as their own. Freedom comes from openness and empathy with another culture, opening a path to integration.

Argentina.

Scope: Schools.

Argentina, 2016. A support group for a first grade teacher in a school with a population at risk for psycho-socio-emotional development. A child punches another child in the classroom. The psychoanalysts present investigate and the group tells that, before the punching, the hit boy told that his mother received money from taking care of cars at a sporting event and that this money was used to to buy clothes and materials to use at school for them. When they asked the boy who hit why he assaulted his classmate, he answered with another question: “Don’t you know why my mother gives to the other sons and daughters and not to me? Is she also going to give to the little sister who is going to be born?” He wanted to know if we could answer the questions he had about his family and his place in it.

The psychoanalysts felt shocked and unresponsive as they processed what to say about everything they could think of, which was a lot. We had to choose a modality of conversation in public, including the children who were present, who did not cease to amaze the teacher and ourselves with their production of witticisms about what they can feel in a case like this, and to decide what to talk about in private with the “aggressor” child. The teacher was surprised by the novel contents contributed by all the children who began to compare both mothers, and we contained the group, the children and ourselves, because we came up with non-transmissible ideas such as “rented womb, selling a child, the ‘disappearance of siblings’ (historical content in our Latin American societies)”. (Testimony of colleagues)

From their teacher training, teachers, in spite of having studied that it is convenient to talk about conflicts, generally tend to punish and repress, without promoting explicit communication. Possibly these are defensive attitudes in the face of the anguish promoted by events such as those reported.

The analysts were also distressed, they felt a deep pain before the moving story of the child who hit another, in a context where the representation of his mother handing over her children was so in contrast and unbearable before the representation of the other mother taking care of her children. In the face of violated human rights, the analyst cannot be neutral, he/she is involved and needs to elaborate an intervention that does not re-traumatize. Freedom unfolds in giving back to the children their voice and autonomy, generally denied by the family and educational systems, and in giving back to the analyst the dynamic connection with intersubjectivity in permanent production of affection.

We highlight Forbes’s consideration of the effect of acts of great violence, which cause shock because of the brutality associated with the unusual, such as a young man entering a school and firing a gun indiscriminately. In short, acts that show ruptures in points of the social bond that were previously considered fundamental. He stresses that we tend to apply old and familiar solutions to these points of rupture, even though they do not serve as a remedy.

The current phenomena of violence have a common element, which Psychoanalysis has detected, and that is the rupture of a point of reference for human identity, which generates a feeling of lack of stability. There is a structural distance between man and the world, which forces the subject to build new bridges between the two.

This author wonders why identities have now lost their references. He says that the world used to be organized along a vertical axis of identifications and that globalization has introduced these forms in excess, a multiplicity of models without a predetermined hierarchy. The multiple references invalidate each other and, in this way, he thinks that the organizing ideals of identities have collapsed, leading to a certain indifference towards hierarchical values. He proposes that the rupture of what he considers to be the vertical axis corresponds, in psychoanalysis, to a disorientation of the drive.³

Scope: Hospitals

In a hospital community in a South American country, during the hospitalization of a teenager for a suicide attempt a family interview was conducted as part of the treatment. During the interview, the children reproached the father for only taking care of material things, but not of the emotional bond with them. At that moment the father took the floor and said he would tell a story he never shared with anyone: when he was a boy one day his parents said they all had to leave the country, and that they would travel by plane. They packed their bags, got on the plane and just before leaving some soldiers were present. They asked the name of each passenger and when his father said his name, they told him that they had to take him. The father with his look gave them to understand that they did not have to talk, and he left with the soldiers ‘and that was the last time I saw my father…’ We, therapists, were shocked, it was difficult to say something in words in front of the magnitude of what this father confessed. Recovering from the impact, one analyst said “it must have been very difficult to grow up without a father” …the children began to ask about their grandfather…a kind of historization that continued in the following interviews…" (Testimony of a colleague in the group).

When the analyst, in the community where he works, is presented with a story about a crime against humanity, what he feels comes together with what comes from his personal and social experience: shock, helplessness, pain, immeasurable sadness, the terrorism of suffering, as Ferenczi said, in the face of evidence that refers to irreparable damage to psychosocial functioning.

Once the emotional contact of the family with the treating team was made possible, the father recovered his freedom and dignity to approach a secret where a truth kept for many years nested, the crypt of memories was opened, with this the analyst also gained degrees of freedom, in this coming and going of the construction of knowledge, in a country where some governments promote the approach to the truth of what happened during the dictatorship and others want to deny it.

From these vignettes we ask ourselves how the analyst can have affective and mental freedom, inner, deep, emotional freedom, to respect thoughts in contexts of otherness: native cultures, blacks, migrants, populations that were made vulnerable by social dynamic, in the dimension of the rights of children/adolescents, and of all human beings who suffer.

We understand respect as the consideration and concern for the impact of our actions on others, from a concave attitude to accommodate new ideas and to be inclusive, a respect from the developed being to the developing being.

Freedom in listening

A psychoanalytic position of respect from an active, polyphonic and multicultural listening is a necessary condition for the social clinic.⁴

For this, some factors need to be included:

One of these factors is the institutional disposition favorable to reflections on regional cultural differences, gender and racial diversity, on the traumatic impact produced by social invisibilization, then we can exercise the profession of psychoanalysts if we have a “freedom of listening attuned to the pain of the other”, guaranteeing the dignity of the subject who talks.

Susan Sontag, from the point of view of another discipline (photographic record) tells us that, for her, only those who can do something in the face of the pain of others should photograph the horrors of catastrophes and wars. The rest, she says, would be voyeurs.⁵

This intervention from another discipline - photography - could symbolize a way of how the psychoanalyst has to intervene in the social/community clinic, with an active and empathic listening for the understanding of community issues and getting involved in their intervention. Otherwise the psychoanalyst runs the risk of being a spectator.

Another intervening factor for the freedom of listening is the non-crystallization or freezing of concepts and techniques. It’s then when the possibility of an involved listening becomes greater, free of moral preconceptions of judging others, considering that we transit through different territories with diverse codes. This will enable greater flexibility to be present with the pain of the other and to do something for their psychic liberation, from their singularity.

In this respect, Ferenczi proposes that neurosis comes from the social order, insofar as family and school force children to bury parts of their personality in order to adapt to an adult logic.⁶

The social/cultural conditions, which can overload the subject, provoke emotional pathologies, generating for example the symptoms we have mentioned in the previous vignettes (the grandfather who feels that his life is losing meaning, the child who hits, the young person who wants to commit suicide) we understand them in the context of a relational problematic, and they are organized through linking articulations at the micro and macro levels, in such a way that what happens in the social order is not indifferent to subjectivation.

Organizations and institutions can generate pathogenic dynamics in the sense of living conditions that provoke continuous tension, discomfort, violence. Elliott Jacques, an English psychoanalyst who worked with institutions, had affirmed that institutions were containers of the psychotic parts of the personality; years later he rectified his position and explicitly stated that institutions made people crazy.

The relation of the subject to himself

Alex Honneth, sociologist, contributes to the understanding of the intertwining of the experience of social recognition in the relationship of the subject with himself.⁷

This author says that the integrity of the human being is due to subway patterns of recognition. Negative concepts do not represent only injustice; they represent wounds caused by invisibilization, which affect the positive understanding of the subject, which have been acquired intersubjectively.

The vignettes presented allow us to understand the behavior of children, adults and adolescents from the perspective of self-recognition altered by the negative adjudications that a subject receives, in a relational fabric of society.

Honneth describes different forms of recognition:

The primary relationship inscribed from the relationships of love generating self-confidence, between parents and children.

The second form of recognition would be the juridical one that promotes the application of the law for all, without differentiation of socioeconomic class, ethnicity, gender.

The third form of recognition would be solidarity: social relationships of symmetrical esteem between subjects, relationships that not only awaken acceptance of the particularity of another person, but a genuine interest in that particularity.

If these three forms of recognition are not fulfilled, what unfolds is segregation, exclusion, the destitution of the humanity of the other.

On the other hand, each form of recognition/non-recognition entails degrees of self-realization and freedom in which the individual can refer to himself as a subject.

The clinical situations reported in the vignettes mentioned above can be read from the presence of the non-recognition of the subject in his singular and historical circumstance.

The way out of distressing situations

The following is the story of a group of psychoanalysts working in the emergency.

In a time of floods, it happened in the largest shelter of a big city that a very thin woman, giving the impression of being malnourished, was going to the clothing section destined to be donated. There she asks for some socks to protect her feet, which were damaged from walking in the water. Her feet were bruised.

The clothing manager gives her two pairs of children’s socks, because he didn’t have the adult size. The socks did not come up to her heels. The woman said they would at least cover his injuries. She keeps two pairs that she would replace alternately, washing one pair per day. While we were looking for some socks for some children playing outside in flip-flops on a very cold day, this little lady comes up to us and tells us about her experience: Her husband was not at home, she was with her two children, one three years old and the other five months old. The water began to rise quickly, so she decided to tie her two children to her waist, so as not to lose them. She walked in the water in search of help and was able to reach the shelter.

Psychoanalysts say: listening to the lady who arrived at the shelter with her children, it is impossible not to wonder how that fragile and small woman was able to face the water and save her children. The story was moving. We were excited and no longer thinking about what we were coming there to do. Then the clothing manager asked what we wanted. With some embarrassment we said they were children’s socks. The clothes manager who served us, looked and found three pairs of children’s socks, there were no more. This lady when she realized that there were not enough socks for all the children, she turns around and offers the second pair of socks for the children.

In the vignettes mentioned, including this last one, the analyst can feel the strength of those who have overcome adversity and wonder if in the same situation they would have been able to act in a way that allows survival in the face of difficult events, while the subjects fight for a way out, to save their lives, and are even capable of gestures of solidarity.

The woman in the midst of the struggle can imagine what Safatle says in this regard, that in these scenarios creativity and visualization of the solution to the problem are needed, which implies the idea and the feeling of hope.

We can then think that with this subjective ‘equipment’ this woman can save her children from the danger of the water.

Other cases that have become more relevant nowadays are those related to sexual diversity.

An analyst who heard the following account: “I had only female friends, I liked some of them and that led me to be very complacent, I bought them things. I can be left with nothing, but I try to make sure that the person I like has what he/she needs. I thought of myself as a lesbian, but I have realized that it is not only a taste for women, but at 19 years old I could define that I did not like to be treated as a woman. I identified a lot with my brother… I had a rejection with being treated as a lesbian, because I don’t feel like a woman and I don’t like my body. The physical issue is very relevant for me, I don’t see myself being Maria in love with a woman. As a child I asked God to wake up the next day as a man”.

An important question we ask ourselves at this point is: how we listen to the ambivalence of the discourse without pathologizing it, enabling the understanding that leads us towards the encounter with creativity and freedom of transformation of thoughts, emotions and experiences.

Our freedom as analysts is at stake in being able, for example, to wait for the time to move from non-understanding to the outlines of an understanding, from open positions to new conceptual horizons. Our perspective includes the idea that theory must be picked up in clinical and social cases.

Likewise, rethinking the conceptual frameworks, since psychoanalysis is necessary, but it is not enough to account for such complex situations.

We rely on some ideas of Safatle who emphasizes that in the analytic act the subject is subverted, in the sense of an inversion of the famous Cartesian cogito: “I am where I do not think, I think where I am not”. The analytic act would be the expression of an existence that does not submit to the dominant format of thought. The term ‘subversion’, in this case, is precise and accurate, because it means to overthrow an established order, to reach the ruin of its foundations and to transform the meaning of its basis.⁸

On psychoanalytic work in the community

How to maintain the potency of active, polyphonic, multicultural listening in the community, in settings that embrace gender diversities, pain arising from class differences, troubling environmental issues, physical and mental health?

Forbes stresses that psychoanalysis must lead people to invent and sustain that invention in the world. This kind of invention requires an important relationship with silence, and needs to recognize that there are limits to what can be explained, and that some things can only be said through poetry. This way of seeing and inventing is liberating.³

Segato contributes to this saying that it is necessary to scrutinize the representations, ideologies, discourses coined from gender cultures and practices in order to gain access to what he calls the symbolic economy, which establishes a hierarchical regime and tends to reproduce it.⁹

Otherness is difficult to bear. Perhaps for Latin American psychoanalysts it has also been complex to tolerate within their own institutes the diversity of formations, diverse social universes, broad skin colors, as well as the thoughts derived from a hegemonic Eurocentric thinking.

As a result of the practices of domination, hidden discourses have been created that represent a resistance to the hegemonic discourse, and our work as psychoanalysts in the community requires considering not only the manifest and latent discourses, but also this complex framework of hidden discourse.

Then, using metaphors and taking into account all the vignettes presented, we analysts have gaps, holes, voids, knowledge parentheses as well as occurrences from the emotional and cognitive fields, which clash with the super-egoic imperialism of implicit and explicit theories. A genuine struggle for freedom, in scenarios where integral health is crossed by the psychic poisoning that derives from hatred, intolerance, fanaticism that circulates in the community.

The danger to which we are referring is the same that Bleger saw, to consider man from the myths of the isolated, natural and abstract man, without considering the social and cultural crossing.

Taking into account the concept of freedom, our group has initiated the exercise of an interdisciplinary knowledge, permanently open to modifications and transformations.

We think that today we need a thought that has been devalued and is regarded as intuitive for not having rational preponderance and containing cosmogonic elements of other cultures, which work from another logic.

Let’s tell something that happened in a hospital: A group of the gypsy community was waiting for the evolution of a relative who was a child. Unfortunately the relative died, and then a movement of those present from that community was observed, they began to break the windows of the hospital. The police intervened to repress. Later, the group of doctors learned that breaking the windows is a ritual of the gypsy community in the face of mourning.

Deleuze emphasized the importance of thinking in terms of multiplicities instead of fixed connections and closed categories. This influences how we relate to others and how we approach complex problems such as the one mentioned in the above example where the gypsy community in the hospital was disruptive for the Euro-centric and Judeo-Christian Western culture, how could the performance of their ritual be approached in the future for these communities, without harming the hospital as an institution?

Myth scholars say that myths simultaneously show and conceal, since their mechanism would consist in achieving that a fragment of life is inscribed in the venerable, in the exemplary and imperishable, it is the son of the horror of emptiness and the expiration of the human.

Many of the problems are solved by committed listening. Byung-Chul Han says that listening is not a passive act, that in listening one has to affirm the other in his otherness and that this is the only thing that helps the other to speak.

In the episode described above, the police, as well as the professionals, learned something they did not know before, that the breaking of glass had a special meaning for the gypsy community. It was not an expression of rage against the hospital that could not save the child, but a ritual that conjured up grief at the loss of everyone’s child.

In the exercise of freedom, dignity and creativity, hospital professionals will certainly be able to propose alternatives for similar cases where it is a matter of building intercultural practices.

How are these intercultural practices constructed?

This collective production addresses the intersection of gender, cultural, ethnic and class diversity, among others, from a perspective of the right to exercise freedom, the practice of respect for the dignity of life and human rights. All this is observed in the daily life of institutions, including psychoanalytic institutions and in the community in general, where cruelty and tenderness are the opposites that alternate, altering social bonds.

We live in a community that needs to internalize these practices and psychoanalysts can work together with groups and institutions of civil life in the creation of a containment network.

An event occurred in a capital city of Latin America: a bus driver threatens a passenger with a knife because the passenger asked for not to pay the fare, neither he nor his family, since he had had to spend everything he had on food.

This scene can function as an analyzer and can be interpreted as a “tragic enclosure”, a concept coined by Fernando Ulloa when working with social numerosity.¹⁰ This author called it a tragic enclosure because it occurs in a context of cruel impotence; it appears in a context of dehumanization. A scenario of only two places, without a third party acting as a law, where the victim, in order not to suffer and/or die, depends on the one who mistreats him, being exposed to those who reject him, in a situation of asymmetry because there is a party that cannot leave the place without the other party allowing him to do so.

In the situation described, the rest of the passengers remain silent, without interceding or mediating, instead of identifying with the family and practicing tenderness as a form of bonding, based on the feeling of Love.

Why doesn’t the bus driver ask the passengers for help, saying, for example: “Can anyone help by paying your fare?” Or tell the family: “I will insert my card this time”. What might the driver have felt when he responds by threatening with a knife?

When we speak and practice tenderness, we do not become naïve, but rather we cultivate a sensitive and reflective relationship with the other. We implement what we have called a good-mood interpretation of the cultural and social circumstances and representations that traverse the subject.

Psychoanalytic training and freedom

A contribution by Rita Segato allows us to think that it becomes imperative within the analytical training to broaden the theoretical view, clinical practice and psychoanalytic training outside the psychoanalytic consulting room, that is to say, in the territory. Paraphrasing this author, to achieve this objective we need the Latin American training of psychoanalysts to be aware of the diverse sociological and anthropological studies of each country and the context of its region, so as not to move away from an active, polyphonic and multicultural listening.⁹

We analysts are part of the community and therefore we are affected by what the author says who, situated in an interdisciplinary context, says that there can be “a generalized melancholy of class, ‘race’, religion, ethnicity and any other identification”.

This structural appreciation can be disavowed by education in the community by making an individualistic approach prevail that loses sight of the social context.

When writing about these issues, there is a risk that the use of academic concepts (so necessary to enrich the body of knowledge at hand) may fail to convey the emotional intensity of the experiential experience of psychoanalysts working in and with the community. In this work, analysts put their community vocation at stake, but nothing exempts them from losing hope.

There are structural situations in groups that have become vulnerable, as a result of years of neglect of human rights from public policies, which may lead us to be unable to dream of a future for these communities.

We have learned in the Study Group that mutual support, among psychoanalysts involved in the community, is fundamental to sustain that look to the future, and to favor the hindered development of individuals and groups, promoting the creation of new social nuclei with meaningful ties.

But this achievement is possible if there is care for the team and it is possible to think freely in order to help to rescue also the degrees of freedom of those who need to recover the possibility of living with dignity.

Care practices for teams working in the community

For years, we have elaborated a flexible methodology of at least four stages that takes care of the members of the team working in the community while taking care of the links with the community and the production of knowledge, considering the psychic processes and dynamics that develop in those scenarios:

• First stage: contact with the demand, as formulated by the consultant, and generate a horizontalized work environment between the consultant and the consulted.

• Second stage: the part of the team that worked in the territory is listened to by other professionals who do not go to work in the territory but who have experience in these processes, to elaborate the transfers of transfers, the crossed transfers, the multiple transfers and the counter-transfers.

• Third stage: to work together with the consultant on the forms of intervention that are caring and nurturing of the links, and to put them into practice in the community of reference.

• Fourth stage: to deal with the emergencies enriching the devices, with the interdisciplinary participation, in the morning of accompaniment and clarification of what is felt-thought and what the involvement and the intervention in the community make feel, following the heuristic model of progression and regression from the problem to the approach, from the approach to what follows.

We will address some reflections on the concept of freedom.

The Royal Spanish Academy defines freedom as the natural faculty that man has to act in one way or another, and not to act, so he is responsible for his actions.

Johannes Fabian in Moments of Freedom defines it as follows: “Freedom is a potential for transformation of thoughts, emotions and experiences, a discontinuous potential that appears in moments of creativity.”¹¹

The natural faculty of which the definition of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language gives account seems to correspond to the myth of the natural man.

Fabian’s definition enters into the weft and the matra (the Argentinean gaucho word for the sadle blanket, the fabric that is placed between the man and the horse he rides so as not to damage or harm himself) of the intersections between various aspects of subjectivity that are related to time and to the context of change.

Time and context: Two concepts to be linked from the point of view of the process of transmission in and of culture.

From Psychology and Psychoanalysis, around 1960 José Bleger said that the transmission of culture from generation to generation is not only the transmission of information, but also what culture transmits can be observed in the personality as well as in the organizations or in the material means.

From this perspective, culture is also transmitted in our training institutes, and this happens to integrate the personality of each psychoanalyst.

Why do we follow this path? Because in the face of the community problems that summon and challenge us, we review these concepts in an effort to break with what is taken for granted or obvious.

Bleger conceives personality as the set of degrees of freedom that a person has, conditioned by the community, family and personal experience. In this sense, the traditional classifications of personality (hysterical, obsessive, phobic, paranoid, depressive, psychopathic, etc.) would give us an account of the limits of each person’s repertoire of freedom, according to his or her defensive and adaptive mechanisms.

The treatment of the symptoms and those behaviors that surge within a group - which we have seen in each vignette- would have the goal that the subject/group recovers degrees of freedom. This occurs to the extent that the social bond/tie allows the subject/group to free itself from the feeling of being locked in impossibility, and on the contrary to find the potential of its genuine resources.

The work both in the training places and in general in the social field in the different areas in which we approach it is aimed at restoring degrees of freedom from practices that also restore human rights and thus dignity. This shows that personality is modified thanks to a dynamic development called learning.

Another story: In a South American city, a group of motorcyclists meet every night at the crossroads of the road that leads to many other cities and that has a fast and exhausting traffic because of its quantity. These motorcyclists make a lot of engine noise, interrupt the night’s rest of the neighborhood who complain to the local police station, and engage in challenges with their juggling on their motorcycles, which sometimes cost them their lives. Their motorcycles generally have no identification, they are not patented nor have they paid the corresponding taxes, because they belong to a social group of the popular sectors in which having a motorcycle is a symbol of power and that is what interests them, the identity is to be the one who has a motorcycle. They are usually on the motorcycle with their partner. When it’s time to take risks, the women get off and only the men juggle. Some have died; others have had accidents and become disabled.

The police say they can’t do anything with them, and even more, that the motorcyclists make fun of them. By talking with some psychoanalysts of the town, it was possible to create a space for exchange and consultation, and to give space and time to another reading of what is happening with these young people who until then were only perceived as annoying and transgressors. Are they acts of rebellion that perhaps build a way to seek visibility before a society that does not see them, does not feel them and cannot think about them?

The lack of community and municipal response, including the police who are frightened and powerless and feel they have no authority, could have to do with the ineffectiveness of the old approaches to these situations, the temptation to repress as the only way to deal with them, among other factors.

We introduce some thoughts from Albert Camus, which opens up understanding for the vignette we have written about the motorcyclists. He says that the only way to deal with a world without freedom is to become so absolutely free that your very existence occurs in apparently disruptive acts, which can be processes of visibilization, acts of rebellion, an idea that opens us to the understanding of the invisibilized.

Paraphrasing Judith Butler we can add that in this world lives are not valued in the same way in all social sectors, in fact, victims can even be called victimizers. The author refers that these lives are not considered worthy of mourning or grief. There are many reasons for this such as racism, xenophobia, homophobia or transphobia, misogyny and systematic disregard for the poor and dispossessed.¹²

Polyphonic listening, in community work, promotes an effort for building a symmetry, which, as described by Descola, puts social scientists and those they deal with on an equal conceptual footing.¹³

For this symmetry to be achieved, it is indispensable that psychoanalysts involved in the community carry out an ontological decentering to better understand, through listening to the latent, manifest and hidden content, how a human group can attribute determined characteristics to entities, spaces, artifacts or animals by making a world with them.¹³

Is psychic suffering the same for everyone?

Judith Butler pointed out that “there are certain conditions in which life becomes unlivable”, a brief example of which is abuse and subjugation, the inevitable contingency of being born with skin tones within a chromatic range that signifies positively or negatively, among other examples.¹²

Ganem conducted a study in which he emphasizes that children with lighter skin tones are more likely to receive adequate early care from adult caregivers, not so the offspring with darker skin tones, who are abused and subjected.¹³

It should be emphasized that these situations produce transgenerational experiences, which generate effects and symptoms that could be read within a complex plot that goes far beyond a pathological reading and that oscillates between resistance and the search for transformation.

We could then paraphrase Fassin that the disease would serve to open new horizons, contradictory as it may seem, and that this opening acts for survival.¹⁴

Forbes says that the subject loses its predicates and becomes its opposite, which would be precisely the effective realization of its deepest freedom, in which the difference between subject and symptom disappears. But this does not mean that he is trapped in the suffering caused by the symptoms, but that, through the symptoms, he has reached singularity - which appears in the risk he runs, in the suicide attempt, in the explicit violence, which function as a revolutionary desire for rupture - it is the confrontation of the subject with what is incurable in him; the anomalies that are not necessarily illnesses. According to the author, the revolutionary effect of the symptom can be apprehended when processes of subversion occur, structurally modifying the order and its determinations, so that the device of the analytic act must be linked to a force of dissolution and an operation of instauration.³

Reflections on psychoanalytic training

Psychoanalysis introduced in the Southern Cone by Angel Garma, a Spaniard, who was succeeded by others such as Pichon-Rivière, a Swiss, and the foreign analysts with whom Latin American analysts were trained, inevitably transported a European mentality derived from their specific culture, to think about the construction of subjectivity in human beings and groups, how the unconscious is discovered, how it is reached, with the Eurocentric influence of Freud’s followers.

Our societies and their psychoanalytic training institutes reproduce this model in principle without consideration for the specificities of our territories, rich in their diverse cosmo-cultures, which were lateralized by the processes of colonization that all sciences introduced with the value of a single dominant thought.

When we develop psychoanalytic practices outside the standard model, and in different territories, they invite us to operate from concepts and techniques that facilitate proposals of particular care policies, regardless of the setting or territory where they are carried out. They are practices that do not deviate from the necessary rigor that preserves psychoanalytic thought.

We believe that the study of regional culture, which includes the study of Latin American myths and the understanding of the diverse forms of colonial heritage in the continent, can help us to include new perspectives from a “territorial listening”, which allows us to avoid prejudiced and excluding practices.

The tension between various social representations of the marginalized and the legitimized generates a movement of confrontation. However, a new dynamic is being created as small points of porosity are produced from one group to the other, articulating in an intercultural and multidisciplinary key that can build a living psychoanalysis, not a crystallized one.

In this aspect, we can try to create another path of reflection on the ways to fight against a situation that blocks creativity and prevents movement in the field of individual, social and interactive freedom.

If we place ourselves conceptually in a single guiding model of knowledge, this has profound consequences for the clinic in general, whether in or out of the consulting room.

We propose a transformation of the analyst’s position; it is not a matter of going from one culture to the other by means of transculturation or by contrasting them, but by finding the logic of understanding in each of them in order to sew them together.

This is a proposal of struggle outside the logic of opposition, confrontation and subjugation: It is the work done in exchange of experiences with colleagues from around the world who participate in Freud’s spirit of freedom.

We are working to “turn a wall into a stepping stone”, as Rainer Maria Rilke says.