The time for understanding has arrived. The CIEC (Center for Research and Clinical Studies), associated with the Freudian Field since 1998, has come out with its offer to the social. We know that a practitioner of psychoanalysis cannot function if he is not in contact with the social. Jacques-Alain Miller says at PIPOL 4: “…the effects of psychoanalysis do not depend on the frame but on the discourse, they depend on the analyst, on the experience he has committed himself to.”
One reads that this irruption of COVID-19 is a war. We know that psychoanalysis is not occupied with the war itself, since war is a confrontation of the politics that identifications promote. Politics is the way, says Miller, of making the real work in a discourse, while the real in the clinic emerges as that which doesn’t work.
It is the irruption of the social in emergency and the response of the Lacanian Action in the virtual that has allowed the practitioner of psychoanalysis to offer the link that the transference maintains, trying to locate “the deadlock” of each situation that the analysand poses This point becomes the driving force each time, in the day-to-day encounters, in which the analyst offers his listening and his body, either with the voice and the gaze, or simply the invocation, so that anxiety, fears, anguish can be dealt with in a singular way, thus “endowing desire with resources, given that this situation implies loss – although not total loss, because it brings with it invention” in the treatment of the drive, being advised on the side of the practitioner that the silent path of the drive does not take a self-absorbed direction.
In virtual consultations I hear where anguish seizes the bodies of different analysands: “I am falling apart… I do not know how to protect myself…”; “This is suffering for a fixed period…”; “I am uncomfortable”,” I feel a trapped energy… “;”I am between breaking up or gathering… “;”I feel terrible anguish when I wake up… what are we going to do this morning? Is there tomorrow?”; “Fear for the loss of loved ones…”; “It is not easy to live with oneself…”; “The uncertainty of the next day…”; “this makes me reflect on how to remove isolation from myself”; “I feel strangely healthy.”
These are some of the sayings of patients who are losing all symbolic capture, feeling unprotected, caught up in a sea of enjoyment that is drowning them, leaving them unable to find anything to hold on to as an anchor, as a quilting point, feeling that he most intimate of their life is being compromised.
Faced with trauma, one is never prepared. The real falls on us, it does not speak. Hence our desire as analysts, the one that makes us responsible for being up to the challenges of the times, for begin accessible, malleable to the other who calls, situating ourselves as an instrument, given that one’s own object has already emerged and been put to work as a cause. The real will persist as long as we have a body and as long as we speak …
Humanity has collectivized for the first time around a common real. Psychoanalysis and whoever embodies it, the analyst-object, has the plasticity to offer the analysand (and also to anyone who has been caught up in contingency without being in an ongoing treatment) the good use of virtual networks. Jacques-Alain Miller once said to us: “Alea jacta est”, (the die is cast). I add: knowing how to do with one’s own solitude, one’s own being, sustaining the solitude of the other.
Bibliographic references
Miller, Jacques-Alain. Presentation of PIPOL 4, “Psychoanalysis in closed touch with the social”. Available online.
Palomera, Vicente. “In defense of democracy” [Spanish] Available online.
Brousse, Marie-Hélène. “The Times of the Virus”, The Lacanian Review Online, 27/03/20. Available online.
Lacan, Jacques. British Psychiatry and the War. Psychoanalytical Notebooks, Issue 33, July 2019.
Brousse, Marie-Hélène. “Finding in the Very Impasse of a Situation the Vital Force of Desire”, The Lacanian Review Online, 19/03/20. Available online.
Miller, Jacques-Alain. The Lacanian Orientation. Course of 12/12/2007. Unpublished.