Vous êtes ici : An open letter to the internation psychoanalytic community

.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE INTERNATIONAL PSYCHOANALITIC COMMUNITY IN RESPONSE TO THE SOLIDARITY EXPRESSED REGARDING THE ARGENTINE CATASTROPHE

The Argentine economic collapse is a local phenomenon, but it is also a product of globalization and a warning of what could happen in other countries. The world would be wise to study the Argentine experience, for it well may be a mirror in whose reflection we see our collective future.

POLITICS: State terrorism (1976-1983) and the "disappeared" people provoked the emergence of the "Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo", a profoundly innovative political response, in which women became the protagonists of the confrontation with totalitarian power.

ECONOMY: The dictatorship of economic power, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has created the "piqueteros" and the "cacerolazos" movements, another completely innovative political response.  [i] Curiously, the "weapon" used in this fight is made up of pots and pans, a traditional female symbol that once represented the enslavement of women and their imprisonment in the private sphere, now transformed into a symbol of rebellion in the public sphere. Moreover, since the pots and pans are used in public protests by women, men, boys and girls of all ages, we could say they are becoming a symbol that challenges the boundaries customarily imposed by gender, class, and generational divisions.

PSYCHOANALISIS: These reactions to a totalitarian political and economic discourse -Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and "piqueteros" and "cacerolazos"-- are taking place in Argentina, a country where psychoanalysis developed a significant influence, owing to at least three factors:

1. The pioneering and original theoretical work of Argentine psychoanalysis that competed with the leadership exercised by the metropolitan centers (London, Paris, New York)

2. The split during the decade of the ‘70s (Plataforma and Documento groups) that divided the Argentine psychoanalytic community into two tendencies: (a) a psychoanalysis that remained loyal to the middle class that produced and consumed it, which has sustained its ties to the IPA and to traditional Lacanian societies, and (b) a psychoanalysis that was much more identified with social questions and revolutionary processes, which was able to transcend its class limits

3. The extraordinary dissemination of psychoanalysis throughout the culture, which created a psychoanalytic consciousness among the masses.

The political, economic and social catastrophe such as the one we are suffering today in Argentina has no precedents in our history. Indeed, it can only be compared to the collapse of the ex-Soviet Union in 1989. Furthermore, it is happening in a country whose popular culture is permeated with a psychoanalytic sensibility. So, it seems to me there are two possible outcomes of this situation: either psychoanalysis will parallel the political, social and economic decadence of Argentina with its own decadence, adding an intellectual and symbolic impoverishment to our material misery, or psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts will take up the current crisis as a challenge to be able to think about its causes and to help us to understand and work through its socially traumatic impact.

The social trauma of the 1970s and 80s' were the "disappeared," and today those whose survival is threatened because of their exclusion by the economic system tend to reproduce the traumatic experience. But the "disappeared" of the past are also reappearing in the "piqueteros" of today, as if what was repressed and denied at the time has re-emerged in the present context. The "disappeared," who were eliminated physically so that their symbolic significance was suppressed, have reappeared in the "piqueteros," who with their presence accomplish in the social realm what Freud described as the eternal return of the repressed in the individual psyche.

The "cacerolazos" invite us to interpret their significance and to construct meaning out of their deafening and polyphonic clamour. This racket that jangles our nerves also demands that we pay attention to something important. It is the psychoanalyst's job to give words to social and individual symptoms and to recognize the anti-totalitarian meaning of the carcerolazos' "crazy" slogan "All the politicians get out!" Becausesuch a demand is not realizable, it resembles the well-known one brandished by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo: "Bring them back alive!" In a spontaneous re-enactment of the ‘60s graffiti "let's be realistic, let's ask for the impossible," there seems to have been a victory: the Mothers, who demanded the "reappearance of the disappeared" (whom everyone knew had been assassinated) in the end have won, because in the presence of something new on the political scene, the "piqueteros" appear very much alive as they demand a place in this world for those previously condemned to disappear. And women have been able to take their pots and pans'and men to appropriate them as well'and transform them from being the instrument of their slavery into an instrument of struggle, just as the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo used their white kerchiefs.

I said earlier that the world would do well to look at itself through the mirror that is Argentina in order to see what awaits it in the future. Psychoanalysts throughout the world would do well to share with their Argentine colleagues their reflections on this unique historical moment. The solidarity of the international psychoanalytic community with Argentine psychoanalysts, rather than be a well-intentioned charitable expression of concern for us in our desperate times, would best be served through a determination to organize meetings and forums for discussion and exchange of ideas (in person and through the internet) that would benefit not only us who are most directly affected but all of those who are committed to the future of psychoanalysis and of humanity.

Juan Carlos Volnovich

Buenos Aires

February, 2002

 i