“I’m at a thousand” It is a phrase that we hear daily, repeatedly and insistently. It is stated as an argument for being very busy, in a hurry, without time. In certain circumstances it refers to the suffering of not having enough time. “being able to stop your head”, “having a burning head” or “not being able to stop doing” in an erratic frenzy. Excess and anxiety are common currency.
Modalities that are typical of a way of “being in today’s culture” such as boredom, apathy, “wanting”, consumption, abuses in body care, among many others. We know well from Freud that what repeats and insists deserves to be thought about.
Current events and clinical practice always challenge psychoanalysis: in its extreme version, new technologies, the dizzying excess of information, the imposition of consumption, the sovereignty of the image represent current modes of the narcissism of always. The new facades of suffering: acting out, addictions, urgency in satisfaction, apathy and others generate isolated subjects. Versions of a supposed identity of perception are formed, which is sustained by the illusion of converting an object into something unique and irreducible, avoiding the winding path of uncertainty. Discomfort in the culture that is always present.
Eric Ssadin (“The Spectral Life”, 2024) speaks of the omnipotent pretension of the so-called “alpha generation”: go beyond time and space. Abolishing the impediments that these coordinates previously limited. As well as the impudence of wanting to hold a power free of corrections, nullifying all critical spirit. Trying to overcome the resistance that the other imposes in his difference.
In this accelerated state, time and space seem to be disrupted. We find ourselves with the deceptive illusion of being “present” (not in presence) in various virtual spaces simultaneously. As well as reaching that ingenious and tortuous time without a cut, without a waiting interval, “a time without time”. Until the creation of devices that save us the memory and recollection in a kind of lethal hypermnesiaeverything is there in stored images as if that eternal present erased uncertainty. Being hyperconnected but alert and sleepless.
He Superego (as a culture of the death drive) always lurks, inciting overflow with its foot anchored in the id. It incites indiscriminate enjoyment in a manic triumph that tries to avoid the threat of castration, a threat represented in the horror of the unapproachable, of emptiness, of that which cannot be tolerated to be lost, or not known. Freud spoke of the “omnipotence and omniscience” with which man of old adorned his gods (Freud, “Discontent in Culture”, 1930).
What God are we talking about today?
Suffering summons us in these exalted and concealing ways. Excess prevails, but impotence looms. Subjects urged on in a rapid race to rid themselves of the anguish that compromises us as desiring beings. How to enable the question?
Suffering is dressed in period clothing. The challenge is to be able to translate it into a symptom that questions, to install a pause that cushions the devastating impulse that attempts to find a lying calm in the disturbing tranquility of the identical.
Perhaps, Go slowly, forget about time and its speed, slow down the pace and go slower, just as Julieta Venegas tells us in her song. In the Central Course of the Bleger Center of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association We set out to think about these topics (an activity that takes place one Thursday a month, at 8 pm, in person and online). We call it “Words from the clinic”, making a selection of those echoes that leave a mark on the discourse of today’s subject.
Psychoanalyst. Member of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association. Member of the J. Bleger Center for Psychoanalytic Studies of the APA.
Source: Ambito
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