How difficult it is to think about uncertainty and perplexity

ABSTRACT

The author has covered a range of issues to define concepts in psychoanalytic terms that are missing from psychoanalytic theory: the social, social subjectivity, the pain of the social, unpredictability, and uncertainty.

1. First, she reconsiders social pain and social suffering from the perspective proposed by Freud in 1921 in terms of three psychic spaces – intersubjective, intrasubjective and transsubjective – which she considers to be different from one another, and she proposes that pain is manifested in different modes in each of these spaces.

2. Second, she defines the concept of the social, separating it from the mass and proposing the concept of the collective as truly social. She emphasizes that the collective takes on its subjectivating potential when being together builds a “bond” (vínculo).

3. Third, she considers that belonging to a “social” collective creates the illusion of being protected from uncertainty and unpredictability. She identifies uncertainty as a vínculo-regulating psychoanalytic principle that is manifested as perplexity.

4. Finally, at the end of the paper, a section titled “A few situations” includes examples of daily clinical work with patients who have been tortured or who experience political threats or a threat to their lives due to losing their jobs and, as a result, their livelihoods. The final case, which describes an entire session, shows the dynamics of transference–countertransference in working with these situations.

Notes

1 I have developed the idea of psychic spaces quite extensively in several texts, but the topic goes beyond the scope of this paper.

2 Notes that “the concept of bond [vínculo], the bonding theory, has a long tradition in various psychoanalytic cultures, in Argentina with E. Pichon Rivière, I. Berenstein and J. Puget, in France with R. Kaës, etc.” See also Greenberg (2012) for a discussion of the term and its translation. As the Spanish term vínculo and its theoretical development are not fully captured by the English terms “bond” or “link”, the Spanish vínculo and its adjectival form vincular are used throughout this text.