The “shooting” mirror

A few days after what happened in the city of Lewiston in the state of Maine where a man murdered 18 people and injured dozens in a new mass shooting in the United States, it is important for us to point out the coordinates in which this event occurs and at the same time time to situate the cultural, social and subjective components that are at stake.

This attack is already the 643rd mass shooting so far in 2023 in the United States, according to Mass Shooting Tracker. It is a collective database on mass shootings in the United States that defines a mass shooting as “a single outbreak of violence in which four or more people are shot.”

These events are becoming a complex and painful repetition. In addition, it is estimated that since the beginning of the year there have already been more than 30 attacks with weapons in primary schools. Not counting the attacks in schools, universities and massive places such as supermarkets, shows and nightclubs. Obviously, denying this reality is a passion for ignorance that becomes unsustainable. Repetitions of this type of aberrant events show without a doubt that something is happening and that we must address it.

Let’s try to give an explanation to these off-stage and out-of-discourse behaviors given that we need to make so much real symbolic. Let’s start with the repetition of these events which shows that it is a problem without resolution, that seeks to be elaborated and that will be repeated over and over again, until it can be processed, generally through words. So, what is it that we are not listening to? key question to try to understand what is happening in North American society and in the world. It would be a temptation to say that massive arms sales with ridiculous restrictions are exclusively the problem. But is not. This is an issue that goes far beyond the power to freely access the instrument with which the possibility of destruction of the other would be deliberate. It is necessary to locate the hatred, the fear, the rejection of what is different, the impossibility of knowing how to do with the other when it is presented to us as enigmatic, strange or unknown while we try to symbolize these issues as what is most typical of oneself.

Let’s start with the ideal of a brave new world, or a brave new world syndrome where everything is believed to be fine and where any psychological discomfort is prohibited. In this world, anguish is a bad word and should not be named. It is a society where the cultural pressure to uphold this ideal of happiness is clearly unbearable. What is not processed by words runs the risk of becoming an act not mediated by reason. Let’s remember that we live in a society that brutally demands that you be a winner.

Furthermore, let us not forget that those who are considered different and those who do not adhere to the social ideal are not treated very well in educational and work environments. The examples of school abuse demonstrate this. But this form of aesthetics of life wants to resolve what is not processed and what does not work, through the abuse of behavioral, adaptive therapies (which hide the phobia of the clinic, of listening), which have incorporated the capacity for their effectiveness. or the medicalization of daily life with the abuse of psychotropic drugs that actually end up worsening the situation.

Let us not forget that universally, educational institutions in the United States and in the world respond to biopolitical disciplinary models with the intention of control and standardization of a culture of winner and loser. Current teaching methods do not allow themselves to be questioned by this disciplinary society, which is none other than the one that transforms happiness into a demand, into a superego issue. However, this ideal of happiness has its obverse in the anguish that occurs in the face of the impossibility of sustaining the imperative of the time to be happy, to be able to do everything, not to stop, not to complain; this ideal that pushes us to move forward without further ado. This anguish that touches the body with all kinds of symptoms but at the same time silences it, a demand for happiness that leaves the subject increasingly alone in the face of a world that evicts him and rejects him when he does not meet the expected requirements. So, it is a marked ideological perspective, where subjectivity is not admitted as such, which attempts a return to an impossible ideal, that of a society, a culture without discomfort.. This reminds us of the novel A happy world by Aldous Huxley published in 1932 and considered a classic of universal literature. Huxley ironically shows us this ideal of a world without unrest. Sigmund Freud, in his text Discontent in Culture, tells us that the greater the cultural imposition there is, the greater the discomfort. Consequently, there is no culture without discomfort, discomfort that our society fiercely tries to deny.

Finally, let us distort this reality to do not repeat it. It is not only about the indiscriminate and unregulated sale of weapons, but about a sum of factors where the word and the subject have no place, where the aesthetics of life are framed in the demand to be happy and be a winner. This mirror crudely shows us that there is an ideal of efficiency and supposed freedom that fails, even though we are inundated with the opposite. They want us to believe that a world without regulation and where everything can be sold or bought is possible. How does colleague Ana B. Ordoñez place it? In our established culture, there is no possibility of transgressing or simply playing without minimum established rules.

There is no possible mental health if for those who disaffiliate from these ideals only the abuse of adaptive therapies, medicalization or mistreatment through stigmatization and segregation can await.

Psychoanalyst. Bachelor of Psychological Sciences (UBA). Specialist in Clinical Psychology (MSAL). Former president and founding member of the Argentine Mental Health Association (AASM). Life member of the Word Federation for Mental Health (WFMH).