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This article was published in Volume 13, Number 3 “Argentine Economic Meltdown: Trauma and Social Resistance” of Mind and Human Interaction. The full reference is: Psychoanalysis and Hope in the Epicenter of Despair: Juan Carlos Volnovich, Ph.D. Dr. Volnovich is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Buenos Aires . During the years of the military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983), he lived with his family in Cuba , where he practiced and taught psychoanalysis. Volnovich has spent decades addressing the convergence between social and psychic reality in his theoretical concerns as well as in his activism. He has been a member of teams of health professionals who support human rights organizations, especially the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. He is currently researching the relationship between psychoanalytic and feminist theories. His published works include El niño del “siglo del niño” and Claves de Infancia. Argentina ’s complete economic collapse has to be understood in the context of the triumph of neoliberalism1 . Indeed, it should serve as a warning of what could happen in other countries. You can call it historical calamity, social tragedy, slaughter, crisis, or catastrophe. The current Argentine situation is the product of both U.S. policy for all of Latin America and the country’s inability to defend its own sovereignty and manage its own development. And it is the context for my own experience as a psychoanalyst. I begin my exploration of the fate of hope and psychoanalysis in present-day Argentina by inviting you to read a clinical vignette: My patient in analysis is a Jewish industrialist in his late forties. In response to the economic crisis, he has had to fire a significant number of workers in order to prevent his firm from going bankrupt. He suffers for having to take such a measure. It hurts him because he identifies with those who will be notified of their dismissal. In the current situation, being laid off means that they and their families are being thrown out into the street and perhaps out of the labor market forever. Our dialogue proceeded as follows: · Do you know what I am thinking now? About Schindler’s List… · What do you associate with Schindler’s List? · I remember now the pain I felt when I saw that movie. It wasn’t only sadness in the face of the horror; it was the indignation at the Nazis’ military abuse. · Are you afraid of being identified with the Nazis; for having to take those measures, for having to fire your workers? · No. My fear is that now I am Schindler. It seems to me that I’m identified with Schindler when he wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to sell his gold ring to save two or three more Jews. Maybe I should sell my car to save one or two workers. While this vignette has many different meanings deserving of interpretation, I share it in this context to show how the traumatic effects of the Argentine crisis are not only suffered by the poor, the needy, and the helpless. They are also experienced by those who still enjoy advantages and privileges. Thus, it is not only hunger that produces psychic as well as physical pain. In fact, it is not only self-conservation that determines the system of representations that produce suffering or pleasure but its representational impact—in the sphere of ideas—that is responsible for the way experience is inscribed. A small digression will enable me to elaborate this idea by examining the nature of the tension between two forces that operate within us, “self-conservation” and “self-preservation.”
BETWEEN SELF-CONSERVATION AND SELF-PRESERVATION By self-conservation I mean all those functions assumed by the ego that guarantee biological survival, which is based on the original caregiving of the other. But the conservation of life cannot be reduced to the merely biological. On the contrary, it includes psychological needs that go beyond mere physical survival. Because of this, human beings can die trying to obtain an objective that does not necessarily contribute to their biological self-conservation. There is indeed another ego function that represents the preservation of aspects of behavior that are linked to our characteristics as human beings. Thus, I understand as self-preservation all those features that give the ego its identity. For example, to be rich, poor, decent, Argentine, North American, male, female; in other words, who and what a person is, which is different from the ego ideal in that the latter is related to what a person aspires to be. Self-preservation essentially refers to the representation that each person has of him/herself as related to self-esteem and to the register of the other, especially when it is not subjected to excessive moral demands or related to the guilt of a harsh superego. A simple example of the contradictory aspects of these two ego functions comes to mind when I think about the desperate poverty plaguing Argentina now. The preservation of our identity as human beings presumes that we maintain our dignity in the simple activity of eating. When we sit down at the table and use knives and forks and chew our food with our mouths closed, we are not only responding to super-ego mandates (our mothers taught us appropriate table manners), but we are carrying out an aspect of our ego identity that is culturally syntonic. So, when in order to survive and to deal with extreme hunger, we have no choice but to desperately search through the city’s garbage, eating rotting discarded food with our hands and behaving like animals, in this process of self-conservation we have lost the possibility of self-preservation (that is, the preservation of the self). On the other hand, if in order to avoid lowering ourselves to the level of sub-humans and to preserve our human identity, we die of hunger, we are choosing self-preservation over self-conservation. With reference to the challenge posed by the current crisis in my country, a question underlies these reflections: under what circumstances does external reality, that is to say, the transformation of a certain routine—the daily rituals of shared life—affect the functioning of the psyche to the point that it permits us to speak of a traumatic event? How does this traumatic event, this potentially traumatic experience, impact on the subject? For me, external reality refers to the stimuli that are beyond the psychic apparatus, whose impact generates a disequilibrium that obliges it to do the work of metabolization, processing, and digestion, ultimately leading to psychic growth. I am arguing that the appearance of thought and of more complex forms of mental functioning are directly related to external reality and that external reality itself is twofold: an aspect that is signified and signifiable and another that is not signified but rather external to subjectivity and thus impossible for both the psyche and social discourse to capture. In other words, a traumatogenic reality. If we accept the notion that the ego is responsible for the functions of self-conservation and self-preservation of the subject, we may argue that these two aspects make up a relationship with reality and articulate all domains of one’s social relationship to the world—including libidinal attachments and those that make up the larger social and political realm. In times of peace and prosperity, intense contradictions between the self-conservative and self-preservative functions of the ego generally do not exist. In periods of economic affluence, for example, an industrialist can keep his business afloat and can at the same time be a decent person. One can be successful in the work world and be simultaneously honest and decent. But in times of war and other social catastrophes, conditions challenge our ability to sustain this balance. And that is the reason why we sometimes have to choose between the conservation of the ego or its preservation. An example that comes to mind of this sort of conflict is the experience had by some Jews in the concentration camps of the Holocaust in which in order to be able to live as a Jew, one had to help the Nazis exterminate other Jews. Similarly, during the Argentine dictatorship when the revolutionaries were captured by the military, in order to survive they were forced to betray their comrades and to participate in their assassination. No one illustrates this dilemma more clearly than William Styron, who shows in Sophie’s Choice how a mother, in order to save one child, is forced to send her other child to her death. In today’s Argentina, as I pointed out earlier, an enormous number of people, in order to be able to eat, are obliged to abandon their human condition and search through the garbage like animals in order to subsist at mere survival level. Indeed, my country has known many periods during which hatred and terror have provoked a fissure, the crumbling of the psyche that we see in those who are forced to rummage for food. Uncontained violence, social disintegration, the loss of a way to make a living—all these disasters represent a risk to self-conservation; that is, the danger of dying due to starvation or the absence of appropriate societal interventions. But they also signify another threat of death that is due to the collapse of self-preservation. This kind of death is expressed in the shipwreck of an identity that has been constructed over generations and is now robbed of any sense of a future, of a belief in a prosperity yet to come; a psyche suffering from the destruction of solidarity and loving connection with others like oneself; a psyche that has disappeared amidst the savage competition that pits all against one another in the struggle for survival. It is not the economic reality in and of itself that generates a sense of disintegration, but rather the fact that this economic reality is experienced as an assault on the psyche, which is faced with the failure of both an individual and a collective project that once held the possibility of creating a different life. Hunger provokes malnutrition and produces illnesses. This is a biological problem. But the humiliation suffered by thousands and thousands of human beings searching for food in garbage cans and at the doors of well-stocked supermarkets generates despair, desperation, pain, and homicidal fury. This is a psychological, political, and social problem. The reality of the economic plundering perpetrated by international financial corporations in league with local politicians has left my country deprived of national resources. This is a problem of material misery. The absence of a political response capable of articulating a strategy of national recovery leaves citizens defenseless, depressed, and desperate. This is a problem of symbolic misery. The reality of our patients is that of a profound material indigence. The reality that we psychoanalysts are forced to grapple with is how to help them recover the ability to construct systems of representations that reconstitute the right to think and to structure projects that do not reduce marginalized human beings to their pure biological essence. We cannot limit our own interventions to compassionate and charitable empathic understanding. To do so would further undermine what remains of their dignity and reinforce the concept that they are doomed to remain without subjectivity in an unchangeable economic reality. We can think about this dilemma in regard to the superego. The reality that constitutes it is originally external to the subject, discursive but congealed, frozen in time. It is comprised of imperatives that come from outside, but which are perceived by the subject as its own, originating from within. To a great extent the debate regarding the possibility of challenging hegemonic ideology revolves around the right of the subject to transgress superego mandates and reformulate the social contract according to specific historical circumstances. For example, the superego mandate and Christian commandment to respect one’s father and mother tends to extend itself to all authority. What are the limits when it comes to respect for and subjugation to a despotic authority? What are the limits of “Thou shalt not kill” when the other, the tyrant, is overseeing the death of our loved ones and ourselves? What are the limits of “Thou shalt not steal” when the means by which wealth is created is based on plundering, legalized in such a way that appropriation itself becomes legitimate? A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OFARGENTINA As I have indicated, psychoanalysts in my country have been forced to struggle with the paradoxes of ego and superego phenomena within the context of a history of extreme situations, including economic crisis and political repression. A brief overview of this history will permit us to understand how psychoanalysts who are interested in the relationship between psychic and external reality are thinking about the collapse of our economy, its traumatic impact, and the rise of new forms of social struggle that represent a challenge to the basic social, political, and economic structures responsible for the crisis. At the beginning of the 20th century, Argentina was one of the most prosperous nations in the world, due mainly to its fertile pampas that produced large exports of cattle and wheat products. Economic prosperity was accompanied by artistic, cultural, and scientific production that helped Argentina rise above its status as part of the Latin American ‘back yard’ of the United States to win two Nobel Peace prizes and three Nobel Medical prizes. By the middle of the 20th century, Argentina ’s European-identified intelligentsia and its educated middle and working classes contributed to its evolution as a prominent center of psychoanalytic practice with a popular culture that was permeated by psychoanalytic ideas. Between the successful Argentina of the first half of the 20th century and the current one, between economic prosperity and the contemporary level of deprivation, there is an abyss. In the contemporary period, the destruction of the state and the imposition of an economic system that has condemned large numbers of Argentines to misery and poverty have occurred with the complicit silence of much of the population. The Argentine people are still suffering from the fear imposed by the reign of terror of the dictatorial military government of 1976-1983 and by the devastation of the hyperinflationary period of 1989. In this context, psychoanalysts are now frequently confronted with fear: our patients’ fear and our own. Paralyzed by the sequelae of the culture of terror that was created during the years of the military government and hypnotized by the ideas of prosperity and a consumers’ paradise as promised by the globalization campaign during succeeding years, many citizens were deceived. The discourse of globalization convinced the middle classes of my country that they could actually achieve the same incomes and standards of living as their counterparts in the developed world. But globalization had the opposite effect. During the 1990s, the powers of the state, which had traditionally guaranteed the country’s sovereignty, were dismantled one by one: the national currency, the national army, national political life, the national judicial system. All down. All destroyed. Of the sovereign nation only the hymn and the national flag are left. They are still intact because nobody has wanted to buy them yet. During the 1990s, President Carlos Menem, strategic ally of George Bush Sr., committed himself to make Argentina the leader of the globalization project. Menem sold (and sometimes even gave away) the country’s natural resources, delivering to multinational corporations our public services, along with the captive consumers who had no choice but to pay for their use. Menem’s legacy for our next president, De La Rua, was a dysfunctional state and a collapsed economy. The crisis deepened when the IMF demanded payment of the interest due on a staggering foreign debt also accumulated by Menem and impossible to cancel. De La Rua stubbornly persisted in the same policies as his predecessor by raising taxes and reducing the salaries of public employees, thus pushing the middle class to the brink. He sabotaged his progressive vice president’s campaign that was to uncover the bribes given to Argentine congressmen for supporting pro-globalization policies, and he appointed Menem’s Minister of the Economy to plan what became a continued decline into economic ruin. On December 10th, 2001 , two years after De La Rua took office, the IMF decided to cut its so-called “aid” to Argentina . As the opposition to the President’s policies increased within the country, demanding the resignation of the Minister of the Economy, De La Rua imposed his Minister’s plan to confiscate all bank deposits and freeze all salaries. Most of the money was ultimately transferred to banks outside the country. This measure affected employed and unemployed people, businessmen and those with savings accounts, retirees and students with scholarships. Since Argentines had been for some time legally obliged to open bank accounts in order to collect their salaries, all of the nation’s purchasing power cycled through the banks. Once the new law confiscated all bank deposits, the nation’s financial exchanges terminated. This collapse, nicknamed the corralito, constituted the theft of the century. Never before had an entire country been robbed in such a flagrant way. And in response, it was as if the society at large was in a stupor. People were stunned and wandered around the streets like automatons with no destination; they gathered at the banks’ ATMs, desperately hoping to take out get any cash that might still be there; an army of beggars, especially children, seemed to invade Buenos Aires . The urban landscape was crowded by the impoverished searching through garbage cans looking for something to eat. This situation endured until some sectors of society, people who were generally indifferent to politics, began to emerge from their state of confusion to demonstrate their rage. The desperation of the poorest sectors of society was encouraged by opposition political groups, resulting in the pillaging that began in the provinces and made its way to the outskirts of Buenos Aires . The government, now totally ineffective, no longer controlled the police and the military, both of which took advantage of this chaotic situation to brutally repress the growing number of peaceful mass demonstrations. Their brutality fanned the flames of citizens’ anger and generated even more chaos and anarchy. By this time, Argentina ’s railroads and airline services were in complete disarray, leaving only the highways to connect different regions to one another. Former workers or unemployed people who had lost access to the job market—the piqueteros—along with their families, occupied and blocked the roads as a sign of protest. They were trying to let people know that they were starving and had no other recourse. Their strategy wound up blocking the movement of all kinds of vehicles, including trucks containing food, buses filled with passengers, and ambulances transporting sick people, and it generated a kind of social convulsion, much like what the human body might experience if the arteries and veins were simultaneously obstructed at core strategic points. THE PSYCHOANALYST AS CITIZEN During that time, I felt like I was living in an enormous concentration camp, in which everyone shared the same fate. I now repeatedly thought about Bruno Bettelheim, Primo Levi, and Hannah Arendt. Very frequently the concentration camp has been the paradigm of the extreme or borderline situation, and this crisis was no different. Moreover, the state of exception in which we lived threatened to become a habitual way of life. “If we go on in this way,” I said to myself, “we will all run the risk of becoming a ‘Muslim’ population.” In the jargon of the Nazi camps, “Muslim” was the term given to the prisoner who, though not yet dead, was no longer a person in that he/she had lost all hope, had been abandoned by fellow prisoners, and could no longer distinguish between good or evil. The Muslim was a wandering corpse still alive physically (though just barely), but suffering in agony and dead as a psychic subject. The most probable explanation of the origin of the appellative “Muslim” is its literal meaning of one who unconditionally and with resignation subjects him/herself to God’s will. I thought of life’s paradoxes: if the Jews died in Nazi concentration camps as Muslims, we Argentines were condemned to die as Jews. But all this changed on December 20th, 2001 . As I mentioned earlier, the destruction of the Argentine state and society was aided by a silenced population that was still suffering from the traumatic effects of military rule from 1976 to 1983. But the fear that had begun on March 24th, 1976, when the military took over the government and gave birth to state terror, died a quarter of a century later on December 19th and 20th, 2001, when the people spontaneously poured into the streets in defiance of a democratically elected government’s imposition of martial law. When the veil that hindered us from really seeing what we had always known, that foreign banks were just that—foreign banks—and that global capitalism has always pursued its own interests and not ours— when that veil lifted something profound began to change. I had spent Wednesday, December 19th, treating patients, all of whom were reacting to the alarming social and economic situation. Some of them were in a state of stupefaction, stunned and on the brink of a breakdown. Dispirited and certain of a tragic fate, they had no strength to keep on fighting. Others seemed like walking electrical charges, in anguish and devastated by uncertainty, agitated and terrified of not being able to survive. They cried because they had lost all their savings; they cried because the unemployment insurance that had once assured them of surviving the lack of job possibilities had faded away; children cried because they saw their parents crying and didn’t understand anything. They literally trembled on the couch as they contemplated the possibility of a repressive political assault like the one we had suffered with the military coup in 1976. When I finished with my last patient, I returned home and turned on the TV. The images on the screen of the massive pillaging were disturbing. Later that night my wife and colleague, Silvia, and I were in our bedroom, and at 11 p.m. President De La Rua delivered a message to the nation. We were paralyzed in front of the TV set. Without blinking and hardly turning my head, I poured myself a drink. De La Rua spoke against violence. I remember it well. He said, “I know how to distinguish between needy people, violent people, and criminals.” I felt enraged as I heard him announce that he was declaring Martial Law. Suddenly there was a loud noise coming through the open window. I stared at Silvia’s astonished expression and we said nothing. “The air conditioning,” I desperately thought, and kept on listening to the President’s speech. But then the noises became more intense. Silvia and I looked at each other again without saying a word. I held her hand as we stood stunned, flooded by unwanted memories of the misadventures and tragedies we had lived through together during the era of state terror. I went to the window and opened the shutters. We live in an apartment whose balcony faces onto an interior space surrounded by other apartment buildings. The noise was deafening. All the other balconies were crowded with people, and at that moment I realized that the noise I had heard before was the sound of pots and pans being banged together2 . Like sleepwalkers, without saying a word, Silvia and I went to the kitchen. Each of us took a pot, the first we found. She took a spatula and I took a big spoon. We went back to the balcony and joined in the noise. Then it occurred to us to get dressed and go down into the street. People flooded in from everywhere armed with pots and pans, hundreds came down from the buildings and converged in an endless human stream. Cars’ horns were blowing, competing with the racket of thepots and pans. The din was so loud that car alarms were spontaneously going off, making a clamor that was deafening. The human wave took us (or perhaps we led it, who could tell for certain?) to the corner, where we converged with another multitude of women, children, adolescents, and the elderly. All looked as if they had rushed to get dressed like we had in order to get down to the street to beat their pots and pans. Suddenly, the massive crowd started to move in the direction of downtown toward the Plaza de Mayo, for well over a century the locale of major Argentine political protests. Not anyone or any group was leading us; it felt like pure instinct, an uncontrollable need, something we could not stop. In my country we are accustomed to seeing demonstrations of 400,000 or 500,000 people protesting injustices. But this was something different. I later found out that when the crowd started to move towards Plaza de Mayo, the corner where we had started had remained deserted for a while. A few minutes later, a new group of neighbors gathered there to build another huge mass that began to move down the same street, leaving the corner deserted again. And then, endlessly, the same thing was repeated. That night Plaza de Mayo was full of people as never before in the history of Argentina —thousands and thousands of neighbors who beat their pots and pans in silent indignation. There was not one political flag in the entire crowd, only the thundering noise of the pots and pans. Suddenly somebody screamed, “Get out!” The slogan caught on. Everyone began to shout, “Get out, go away!” It was directed at the Minister of the Economy, at President De La Rua, and at everyone else in the government. I asked a woman standing beside me who was screaming the new slogan at whom it was directed. “They should all get out!” she responded. And then I heard everyone shouting what I can still hear in my head today—the most enigmatic, polemical, and multifaceted slogan in Argentine history: “Everyone get out, go away!” And by that they meant all the politicians, all the political parties, all the corporate leaders, the IMF, the World Bank, all those responsible for ruining the country. It was the lower middle class—the inflamed new poor—that filled the Plaza de Mayo that night of December 19th, all outraged at the government. That night the pots and pans were heard not only in the Plaza de Mayo. The deafening noise overtook the entire city. In that hot summer night, the elderly called from their balconies out to the young men who were beating their pots and pans, naked to the waste. Young people in jeans spontaneously formed percussion bands, their smiling faces filled simultaneously with triumph and hate. On some street corners in neighborhoods around the city, bonfires were lit and people gathered around them. Others marched in massive crowds to the homes of known politicians to publicly repudiate them. That night was destined to go down in history as a myth, a legend, and those who were there knew it. “We all brought down the government because we banged our pots and pans.” Everyone was saying this. It was an amazing experience of spontaneous collective power. It was a demonstration of unity that had not been organized by any one. It was an unplanned eruption, as if each of us knew without being told what we had to do. Thus was born a mobilization of masses of people whose political force and power resided in a new kind of weapon: the tools of traditional women’s work—the banging of pots and pans known as the carcerolazos. The Plaza de Mayo remained filled with people the entire night. When some left, others took their place. At about 10 a.m. December 20th, with no major incidents having occurred during the entire night, a wave of policemen suddenly began to throw tear gas and beat people in order to clear out the Plaza. No one has yet taken responsibility for having given the orders to repress the crowd. Nobody was in charge, but somebody gave the order. To justify their behavior, the police chiefs would later say that they had received some disturbing information that the demonstrators would try to enter the President’s residence, the Casa Rosada, as had occurred in the distant past and in a faraway country at the Russian Winter Palace . However, there were no political militants or martyrs in the Plaza. There were families—men, women, and children—from the city’s many neighborhoods who ran desperately when the police went after them on horseback. When the police drew back, the people returned to the Plaza again. This confrontation repeated itself endlessly. The people suffered more repression than the Mothers of the Disappeared remember ever having experienced during their weekly protest demonstrations under the military dictatorship. Then, as the repression swept the Plaza, some demonstrators fled to the plaza in front of the national congress, only to find a worse situation. As a dreadful symbol of the end of an era, a man lay on the ground dead, bleeding from one of his testicles where he’d been shot by a policeman on the main steps leading up to the Congress, the same steps where a red carpet is always laid out for the President’s arrival. That December 20th at 7 p.m. , De La Rua resigned as president of the nation. It was not the customary way Argentine presidents had been overthrown. We have many examples of traditional coups in our country. This one was different. It was the first time a constitutional president was unseated by a mass of angry citizens. Thirty people died as a result of the repression. Significantly, the angry citizens who took the Plaza, who abandoned political neutrality and indifference, did not install a new government. The people were there simply to demand that “Everybody get out!” Everything that happened that day had no relationship to political parties or political struggles. That December 20th the masses did not obtain a new political leader, but they actualized themselves as a political force. They took power without delegating it to anyone. That day representative democracy died and direct democracy was born. PSYCHOANALYSIS INTERPRETS THE THREE DISCOURSES OF SUFFERING, RESISTANCE, AND STRUGGLE How have psychoanalysts responded? I argued earlier that as psychoanalysts, we need to help our patients recover a reality based on an ability to construct systems of representations that reconstitute the right to think and to structure projects that do not reduce marginalized human beings to their pure biological essence. In this regard, among those psychoanalysts who have lived through and reflected upon the meanings of this radically disruptive economic and political historical experience, three discourses have emerged: the discourse of suffering, the discourse of resistance, and the discourse of struggle. The discourse of suffering is concerned with the endless economic and cultural anguish imposed by contemporary global capitalism. This discourse defines the parameters that measure subjective pain, internal schism, and the daily devastation suffered by the majority of Argentines in the present period. This discourse provides a lens through which to view how men, women, adolescents, and children are damaged by social exclusion (unemployment, homelessness, hunger, and so forth) and how the inequitable distribution of material goods is reflected symbolically in the culture’s representations of power, privilege, status, and identity. This discourse reveals the growing conviction that there is no future release from this current nightmare. Whereas the discourse of suffering addresses the experience of pain and trauma, the discourse of resistance highlights the innovative strategies that people have developed to deal with the devastating policies imposed by corporate capitalism. In this discourse one finds passionate apologias of the cacerolazos movement and an admiration for the remarkable popular assemblies, mass meetings that spontaneously take place in the major downtown plazas and in many neighborhoods and communities throughout Buenos Aires in which people make a space to reflect on the sources of the crisis and what can be done. The discourse of resistance invokes respect for the neighborhood flea markets that were organized to respond to the absence of a means of exchange so that people can barter goods for services; it lauds the innovative strategies carried out by the unemployed, the piqueteros, who, without support from political and labor leaders, continue to protest their wretched state of impoverishment. The discourse of resistance highlights the creation and reconstruction of social links and emphasizes the meritorious effects of the solidarity that builds the network of urban organizations. It acknowledges the originality and creativity of men and women who accept the challenge of surviving, despite those in power who view them as superfluous and no longer relevant to the system. This discourse is focused on the creative ways people manage their misery, the alternative methods used by them to administer the decay of their society. Finally, it vindicates people’s legitimate right to keep on working just as they always had before the crisis, and it demands that we be something more than the custodians of a social order in ruins. Now, in spite of the fact that it is ubiquitous, I prefer not to speak of suffering, nor to discuss the discourse of resistance. I prefer to talk about struggle. And in order to do that I want to discuss the struggles being waged by women and men today, although we have to try not to idealize them and to remember the power that the system has to neutralize whatever the forces are that threaten it. I would say that just as women in the feminist movement learned that the struggle against the most damaging effects of patriarchy cannot be waged without addressing the most harmful effects of capitalism, in Argentina since the corallito and triumphant globalization, we are becoming conscious of the many converging factors responsible for our oppressive situation. It is this kind of consciousness that is fueling the efforts to replace the existing system with a non-capitalist social order. I believe that contemporary political practice in my country has actualized many of the principles of the radical feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It is not only because women are playing a primary role in the various struggles in Argentina or because they represent a huge percentage of the workers who have to date occupied hundreds of factories. Today, the methodology adopted by the piquetero movement, the popular assemblies organized from below, the workers’ cooperatives that take over and run the bankrupt factories, and the organizations of the unemployed bears the trademark of feminism and the women’s movement. Indeed, some of the essential ideas of that movement are clearly manifested in the anti-capitalist political activism in today’s Argentina . For example: 1. The insistence on a non-hierarchical organization and elaboration of economic and political project. 2. The embrace of heterogeneity among the activists in the workers’ and popular assembly movements. 3. A critical position regarding the principle of representation. 4. The commitment to autonomy and self-determination, which refers to the authority of each group to define its own problems, the right to assess available resources in order to build autonomous entities with the participation of all the protagonists; and the refusal to delegate to the state the initiative in adopting polices aimed at taking care of peoples’ basic needs. A concrete example will illustrate these points. The members of a collective called The New Hope (La Nueva Esperanza) are workers, the majority of whom are women, who took over the Grissinópoli factory, one among the many factories that were owned and operated by unscrupulous businessmen who had exploited and stolen from their workers for years. These workers had labored for decades and were victims of mistreatment and humiliation. Then, in response to the debacle, their incomes were reduced because their bosses forced them to work overtime without compensation. Then their salaries were devalued to unprecedented low levels. And finally, they were fired without any indemnification. Moreover, throughout the many years prior to the economic crisis, these same businessmen had stopped making contributions to the state’s retirement plan from the money that they had been withholding from their workers’ wages. These workers had been robbed in every sense of the word. The members of the New Hope participate in the new kinds of workers’ organizations sprouting up all over the country. In the midst of catastrophic conditions, these workers and others like them are responsible for one aspect of the productive system to begin functioning again. The impact of this experience is highlighted in the following excerpts from interviews with the workers at Grissinópoli: “To take over a factory is a political act and, without knowing it, we are engaging in a political act. From now on we can only move forward.” “If we have to get the piqueteros to make a barricade at the door of the factory to keep the bosses out, we’ll do it. Now it’s the workers who are in charge.” “When the owners left, the basic elements remained. The workers are still here, and we’re the most important part of the factory. And if we have to ally ourselves with someone, the only possible alliance is with other workers who have taken over and are operating their factories or the popular assemblies and the employees who have taken charge of the companies.” “You don’t have to stop being a worker and become a boss. It’s a question of assuming responsibility for your future and that depends on the work that you yourself undertake.” “I can only speak from a personal point of view. This experience changed my whole way of thinking. I mean, from now on I don’t loan myself out, I don’t give myself away, and I don’t sell myself. I know that as a worker, I offer a service, and I have to be paid for that. And it’s this way because the job is part of my dignity and the respect I owe myself. I would never go back to the kinds of experiences we had before under any conditions. Those were ill-fated times. We’re adults; we’re all forty years old and older. We can’t go back to that. We don’t have enough time left to do that again.” I said earlier that the struggle of women against the worst effects of patriarchy cannot be carried out without the struggle against the most harmful effects of capitalism. This is what Deborah King has called “multiple jeopardy.” She is referring to the multiple ways by which women are subordinated and the burden they thus bear: for living in the slums, for being dominated by male privilege, for being poor, for being lesbians, for being from Bolivia, Paraguay, or Haiti, for being prostitutes, for being workers. So they have to be involved in many social movements simultaneously, and that involves a kaleidoscope of loyalties and a betrayal of loyalties to their gender, their social class, and their political affiliation. This one example of the New Hope demonstrates that when women take over a factory there are multiple consequences: 1. They break with the assumption that only capitalist bosses and their technical experts know how to administer a business and make it productive, and at the same time they overcome the social expectation that they should passively wait for men to take the initiative. 2. They destroy the system of class relations that assumes that some (the capitalists) are the owners of work who offer work to others (the female and male workers), who do not have work but who search and ask for it. 3. They achieve a reconciliation between the self-conservative aspects of the ego (to mitigate hunger) with the self-preservative aspects of the ego (to gain self-respect and create solidarity). In other words, these actions permit them to eat without having to betray their identity as workers. On the contrary, they can feel proud of doing what they are doing. 4. They rebel against superego mandates to consider the bosses as the only legitimate owners of the factories, mandates that serve to shore up the laws that defend private property and a repressive system, thereby enslaving them. 5. They collectively elaborate a social and personal trauma when they act together and strengthen solidarity among them. They reinforce alliances with other workers and family links as well, through the cause of defending their factories. 6. They defy being depicted as needy and incapable people who, if they just behave themselves, will be in a position to receive aid from the state, the Church, or other charitable organizations. 7. They eliminate the sensation of being helpless and without protection when they join a health network composed of doctors and social workers who have organized themselves in a similar fashion in response to their own work places being shut down. In this way they obtain the care and medicines they need. 8. They expand their capacities when they take stock of available resources and decide how to best utilize them. The New Hope workers for example have cultivated an orchard on the factory’s grounds, not only for their own subsistence but also to produce flowers, vegetables, and fruits that can be bartered or sold in the market. This allows them to train themselves and agricultural technicians as well. They constitute themselves as a cooperative that is legally recognized by the state. 9. They contribute to the creation of a political formation based on workers’ labor that then can be linked to the struggles of other social sectors: the neighborhood assemblies, the other factory takeovers, the movement of the unemployed, and the student associations. They also join together with other sectors of the population, including the middle class, intellectuals, and artists; the latter often use the factory building to make a cultural center. For example, internationally renowned plastic artists will come to the factory and, in spite of the risk that the owners might try to recover the building and have everyone thrown out, they paint murals on the walls so that the premises can be declared of special cultural interest by the government, making it impossible for the building to be privatized, closed, or demolished. Psychoanalysts also go to the factories to help the workers deal with individual or family conflicts and to teach them about group and institutional dynamics. PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE “OTHER” INSIDE THE STRUGGLE How can these experiences help psychoanalysis? What might they inspire in us so that we can hope to be relevant and to survive as a profession in such tumultuous times? I would say that the hope of psychoanalysis—that is, the possibility that psychoanalysis can take up and elaborate the complexities of the world we live in and the likelihood that psychoanalysis will endure and contribute to the construction of a better future—all depend on the clinical flexibility and sensitivity we bring to each individual case, but depend even more on our theoretical development. In order to be able to think about hope, to speak of the future, to create a future for psychoanalysis, we can begin by recalling Freud’s words in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921). He argues that, “In the individual’s life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so, in its origins, individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the word, is at the same time social psychology as well.” So it is there, in the “other” that we find that which unites the individual and the social. It is that “other” that holds the key to understanding the subject’s relationship to politics. The “other” is always present in individual psychic life, and when Freud includes the determinants of the social structure within the subject, he begins with “the individual in his relationship to his parents and brothers and sisters, to the person he is in love with, and to his physician. That is, all those individuals who until now have been the object of psychoanalytic investigation can be thought of as social phenomena.” Moreover, it is the case that the “other” who is originally present in the individual is inevitably the result of the social Other, the system of production and the culture in which each one of us is inscribed. So while the “other” is indeed father, mother, sister, teacher, physician, it is also the Other, and both are always present in individual psychic life. And, unfortunately, too often that omnipresent Other is a ferocious and despotic Power. How might we understand the subjective bases of Power; that is, the processes by which Power captures the conscious and unconscious complicity of the subject, which is then sustained through consensus? What are the kinds of traps from within us that hinder our capacity to disobey, to rebel against a ferocious and lethal Other? From birth on, and perhaps even earlier, the formation of our subjectivity bears the mark of the Other. Our subjectivity is constructed on the basis of the open wound of our original state of helplessness and the attempt to weld our absolute vulnerability to an omnipotent power. Later on, the relationship of the subject to political discourse will bear the marks left in the unconscious in relation to the Other. For example, the situation of extreme social helplessness, the experience of defenselessness that characterizes our youth today can only result in their inability to identify with anything beyond a kind of death wish. In a society where social exclusion is the rule, in a culture in which the ruling class desires the disappearance of the poor and others who are considered superfluous, a death wish is inscribed on the unconscious minds of adolescents as the speech of the Other, and it is expressed through destructive acts against themselves and the others. Enacting violence and suffering violence are more or less equivalent because in these adolescents the border between victim and perpetrator virtually disappears. The Other functions as the destructive foundation of the self-destructiveness that exists within. I suggested that our original helplessness predisposes us to remain subordinate in relationship to Power. And Power demands sacrifices: human sacrifices. Power demands sacrifices, but also seeks consensus. Let us not forget that in Argentina the present system of misery and exclusion of the vast majority of the population and simultaneous enrichment of a tiny elite was accomplished with a remarkable consensus in the society. It is sad to realize it, but entrapped by the discourse of Power, the subject collaborates in sustaining it. Complacent and complicit, many individuals wind up reinforcing omnipotent Power. And Power promotes consensus by encouraging us to identify our desire with the representations it offers. Lethal representations: destroy yourself, exterminate the others, kill off the insignificant ones who don’t matter. If the military dictatorship in Argentina caused massive social trauma, subsequent democratic regimes have not dealt with its sequelae nor challenged its political and economic discourse, all of which have contributed to massive depoliticization and disinterest in the face of profound social violence. Thus, citizens continued to be under the spell of the powerful Other. During the post-dictatorship years, active identification with Power or indifference toward the discourse of Power condemned us to worship the executioners and made of us stupefied subjects. We became masks without faces, echoes with no voices. But Power is not as absolute as it appears, nor its scars so implacable. A surplus of innovative energy is generated by the system’s own contradictions. That energy resists the tenacious hold Power has by creating an opening for new possibilities. The psychoanalytic situation entails both possibilities: by means of the transference, it can reinforce submission to the Other. But it can also help to deconstruct myths. One of these myths in the larger social sphere—and not the most insignificant, to be sure—is that there are no alternatives to the existing economic system (for example, the myth that there have always been poor people and there will always be), so that we must resign ourselves to the widespread misery that itcreates. Psychoanalysis can help to create new meaning, to resignify such myths so as to dismantle the subject’s relationship to Power. Psychoanalysis can help to construct an alternative system of representations that recovers the right to think more critically and to feel more authentically. Psychoanalysis can help in the reconciliation of the subject with his/her passions. Now if we return to the question of what is happening today in my country, how might we think about it in terms of subjectivity and the challenge to the Other? We can conceptualize the Argentine disaster as a fundamentally productive development, which presupposes that what is happening on the margins—the popular movements I have described—will not stop. On the contrary, we should think of them as a challenge to Power and its dominant values. The movements will not exhaust themselves either. They demonstrate that what we have understood as a mere crisis is in reality a society undergoing fundamental change at an ever-accelerating pace. To accept the idea that these events represent the unleashing of productive forces rather than a disastrous disintegration underscores our discussion of the potential reconciliation between self-conservation and self-preservation within the psychic subject. Current conditions are such that many people are exposed to experiences that are potentially traumatizing; that is, experiences in which survival is obtained only at the cost of the renunciation of the most important values associated with one’s identity or the reverse, those experiences in which the consequence of upholding the core principles of one’s identity is the inevitable loss of one’s life. But the protagonists of the struggles we have discussed are engaged in activities that signify the current conditions as the foundation for something new, and this resignification foments the rebirth of hope. It permits new ways of recuperating the capacity to create and to transform subjectivity. From a theoretical perspective, we are speaking of the fundamental importance of the effort made to open a breach between the subject and his/her deadly identification with Power so that something akin to desire can circulate within that space. Psychoanalysis has an important role to play in this process: if there is an “other” who can listen and also desire, if there is an “other” who invites the subject to speak, then something of the violence that destroys us, something of the destructive compulsion can give way to an elaboration that, in the social domain, can become transformative action. This is my own experience in working over the past 40 years with children and adolescents in many public clinics and hospitals, both in Argentina and in Cuba . It has been my experience through my work in the slums and squatter settlements that surround Buenos Aires , and through my work at Grissinópoli, the factory taken over by the New Hope workers. In the final analysis, then, as I argued earlier, Power is not so absolute nor its scars so implacable. There are many ways to confront the mandate to be silent. There are multiple voices demanding to be heard; voices of desire suppressed for so long by the overwhelming discourse of an omnipotent Power. To be sure, there are a lot of ways of suffering, but also many ways of resisting and struggling. The mere fact that resistance and struggle exist opensa space for the human screams that, when they are listened to, become language. A language composed of words that demand only this: to be heard. Words that are inscribed in the culture for every little girl and boy who might claim a place in relation to a non-absolutized Other. Words that provide for children a social network that promises the possibility of subjectivity and solidarity. For as Freud put it in Civilization and Its Discontents, “A culture that does not satisfy a significant number of its citizens and pushes them to revolt, not only does not have what it takes to sustain itself indefinitely, it does not deserve to” (1930). Notes 1This term is used throughout Latin American as the name given the phenomenon of corporate globalization. Neoliberalism refers to the unfettered free market economic policies embraced by the United States government, transnational corporations, and international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. Free trade and privatization principles have facilitated the access to Latin American economies of the transnational corporations, resulting in the bankruptcies of domestic businesses that are unable to compete with their size and capital resources. International loans have increased the indebtedness of governments and have strengthened the ability of international financial institutions to demand of them the implementation of “structural readjustment” programs. The latter include the downsizing of government bureaucracies, which entails the firing of thousands of public employees and the exacerbation of the already existing crisis of unemployment and underemployment throughout the subcontinent; the elimination of government social programs, which dramatically reduces middle and working class families’ access to health care, education, housing, and employment; the freezing of wages while prices are market-driven, which results in a rise in corporate profits and a reduction in purchasing power and thus the standard of living for millions of Latin Americans. 2 The banging of pots and pans had for years been used by citizens in Argentina , Uruguay , Chile, and elsewhere as a method of protest of unpopular governmental policies. |
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