Psychoanalysis in Times of Madness

Marcos Cancado is a psychologist and psychoanalyst living and working in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA. He is a member of the Corpo Freudiano Psychoanalytic School, the Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association, and the American Psychoanalytic Network. Marcos is also a clinical supervisor and has presented in several seminars and conferences in the USA, Belgium, Brazil, and Costa Rica. 

              I grew up in times of dictatorship. Born after the social rupture, the destruction of democracy, and the dismantling of institutions, I remember the signs and symbols of repression which surrounded my childhood. From the window of my family’s apartment, I watched a military unit that passed by, daily exercising and chanting military songs. At school, we had to line up and sing the national anthem before heading to class. Military trucks and parades were a common scene. The presence of armed soldiers on the streets became familiar, merging into the fabric of everyday life. Life did not stop. But the threat of death, the act of imposing silence on people’s civil rights, and the disappearance of hundreds of dissidents were real and resounded in the air. Madness, death, anguish, tenuously insinuated in our psyche and they echoed in our tenuous existence and social structure.

In the current moment in history, we witness the advancement and the implementation of far-right ideologies, a massive dependence on technology, an overwhelming control of governments by oligarchs, and the continuing imposition of corporations in the lives of common people. I think it is our clinical responsibility to think about the psychological effects due to the chaos and destruction of the so-called social fabric. The current situation of the world, the politics and geopolitics, the dismantlement of institutions, and attacks to the democracy and social norms have been reflected in everyday life. This has been a cause of feelings of vulnerability, uncertainty, fears, and a general sense of hopelessness and helplessness. In our consulting rooms, patients talk about and report their own personal experiences and subjective responses to the effect of the current events in the political sphere. It is as if their capacity to represent the world symbolically and maintain a sense of identity has been diminished, impoverished, and ruptured. The frequent bombardment of what they recognized as their external reality, their cultural moorings, their social fabric began to be ripped, leaving them in a state of despair.

Francis Bacon – Portrait of a man with glasses, 1963

“In our consulting rooms, patients talk about and report their own personal experiences and subjective responses to the effect of the current events in the political sphere. It is as if their capacity to represent the world symbolically and maintain a sense of identity has been diminished, impoverished, and ruptured. The frequent bombardment of what they recognized as their external reality, their cultural moorings, their social fabric began to be ripped, leaving them in a state of despair.”

As a way to understand the current situation, I propose a return to the Lacanian notion of the name of the father. The Oedipus complex, the paternal metaphor, the symbolic matrix, and the name of the father, are all concepts that point to the formation and the structuration of the subject who is born into language. But what does this mean? It means that every human being, from birth and throughout the development and maturation of his psychic apparatus, to use a Freudian term, from the moment he encounters language to the structuring of his subjective experience, will be subjected to the name of the father in the function of a symbolic agent, fundamental in one’s psychic origin. As Lacan said, “The Name-of-the-Father creates the function of the father.” We learned from Freud that one of the functions of the father is to introduce an interdict, a prohibition, a limit, to simply place a NO. This is what constitutes the father of the Oedipus Complex in psychoanalytic theory, i.e. the prohibition of incest. Another function is to intervene symbolically, that is, to “call” the infant into language. The introduction of the father in the Oedipal scene triggers desire, since the effect of symbolic castration leads the subject to confront the loss of the original object. The loss of the object creates a divided subject, i.e. the subject inhabited not only by the conscious but also by the unconscious.

The function of the father opened the way for Lacan to conceive the notion of the paternal metaphor, which refers to the symbolic substitution of the name-of-the-father for the mother’s desire, enabling a child’s entry into the symbolic order and the development of a sense of self distinct from the mother. It is not the “pater,” the biological father, what matters in this symbolic operation, but rather what is transmitted in the culture, by the laws, behaviors, ideas, knowledge, ideology, and everything else unconsciously transmitted to the human subject.  Jacques Alain Miller reminds us that “paternity is determined first and foremost by one’s culture.” In his comments about the structuring elements of subjectivity, he said that the function of the father aims at tying things together. “What things” he asks, “The signifier and the signified, law and desire, mind and body. In short, the symbolic and the imaginary.”

For Lacan three psychical spaces are needed in the structuring of subjectivity, namely, the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. The subject needs to be supported by three elements, the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. These are the three elements that sustain the structure of the subject. Each of these elements have equal weight and importance in the maintenance of the psychic structure and in the mental health of an individual. When one of them is manifested in excess, or on the contrary, if one of them is scarce or almost absent we have something of the order of pathology. The Real signifies a realm beyond the symbolic and the imaginary, representing a primal, unrepresentable reality that is both disruptive and fundamental to subjectivity. The Symbolic refers to the realm of language, social structures, and cultural norms that shape the unconscious and the subject’s experience of the world. The Imaginary refers to the realm of images, identifications, the idea of Self and Ego that serves as mediation between the subject and the world: it is the realm of appearances and meaning.

In the current situation of the world, if the Symbolic as the possibility of representing reality on a subjective level is destroyed, and the imaginary, the possibility of looking at reality and finding a reflection of the Self is shattered, what is left is irrepresentability, the impossibility manifested by the overwhelming presence of the Real. The tearing of the social fabric that somehow covers the absence of meaning, characteristic of the Real, reveals a state of madness. This is true for the constitution of the subject as well as for the structure of culture. In this scenario, the subject is reduced to the most elemental feature of his existence. He is reduced to a body, a number, imprisoned, deported, and silenced. The terror spread in the different layers of the social structure undermines the subjective structure.

Henri Michaux – Untitled, 1959

“The tearing of the social fabric that somehow covers the absence of meaning, characteristic of the Real, reveals a state of madness. This is true for the constitution of the subject as well as for the structure of culture. In this scenario, the subject is reduced to the most elemental feature of his existence. He is reduced to a body, a number, imprisoned, deported, and silenced. The terror spread in the different layers of the social structure undermines the subjective structure.”

The rupture of the social structure, which is maintained by the symbolic and the imaginary, is like what happens in psychosis, which is precipitated precisely as consequence of the failure of the symbolic in the structure of the subject. Madness is the result of this failure. As Freud reminded us, when the paternal function, the symbolic fails the psychotic subject becomes delusional. He was very clear when he insisted on saying that delusion is not the illness. Delusion is the subject’s attempt at making sense of reality. It is very common for a psychotic subject to become delusional in significant moments of life in which he is required to represent certain events. This is what happened to Daniel Paul Schreber, the German judge who gave his personal account of his own experience with schizophrenia. In one of the three periods, or episodes of his illness, him and his wife were trying to have a baby. The advent of becoming a father could only be represented with a delusion. Attempting to represent symbolically the meaning of pregnancy and fatherhood, he developed a delusion that he would be impregnated by God and would repopulate the world.

We may also witness the function and the effect of a rupture in Walter Salles’ recent film “I’m Still Here” (Ainda Estou Aqui), which follows Eunice Paiva’s lonely battle to learn the truth behind the disappearance of her husband, former Brazilian Labors Party’s congressman Rubens Paiva, while trying to keep her family together in times of dictatorship. The film is a faithful, truthful report of this family’s experience in times of dictatorship. Written by Marcelo Paiva, son of Eunice and Rubens, the film takes us to a journey to an obscure time when democracy was destroyed by the force of the military power. Their strategy consisted in silencing, torturing, and killing dissidents, threatening, and prohibiting people who organized protests, or simply got together to talk about their dissatisfaction with the government. The Habeas Corpus had been suspended. It was a time when Institutional Acts (Atos Institucionais) or Executive Orders, were issued in series, without the necessary democratic participation and decision of the congress.

This film shows the hard reality happening behind the scenes of an apparent normalcy. The parents worked, the kids went to school, played with friends, celebrated birthdays, had parties, and the family went to the beach. But all under the surveillance of government agents, who kept monitoring Rubens and his family after he was ousted from congress until the time of his arrest, and disappearance in the dungeons of dictatorship. Watching this film, I was taken by an uncontrollable state of sadness and pain. I cried profusely. Following their ordeal, the fear, the pain of this family, who tried to keep it all together, while the father vanished after been taken into custody, tortured and then disappearing, triggered my own semi-unconscious experience of that time. Despite all the unconscious manifestations, or the unfolding of unconscious ideas out to the social and cultural scene, we are still here.

By Marcos Cancado

References:

Lacan, J. (2006). Problemas Cruciais para a Psicanálise. Seminário 1964–1965. Recife: Centro de Estudos Freudianos de Recife

Lacan, J. (2013). On the Names-of-the-Father. Cambridge: Polity