A Wish for an Implicated Psychoanalysis: Some Notes from Chile

Discussing what we would be writing for this snapshot, a memory came to mind: when we began training to become psychoanalytic psychotherapists in Chile, two young undergraduate classmates some 20 years ago, the idea that one could maintain a psychoanalytic perspective while at the same time engaging deeply with – and recognizing the impact of – women’s, minorities, and gender issues, and being activists, was not something that appeared possible, much less desirable. Neutrality was the rule. Equidistance was key. And yet, quoting Argentinian illustrator Liniers, there are certain things that will happen to you if you’re alive.

Being alive in these times, for us, has meant there’s been an impact we cannot remain unaffected by, as women ourselves. We are all subject to, traversed, by gender – all the time. Politics is in the bodies, as poet Maria Negroni wrote. So a decade later, we found ourselves having become not only therapists, but feminist therapists at that. Both of us in our own distinct clinical paths, via different yet shared, temporally similar experiences of migration and dislocation from Chile to the US, we found our way into relational thinking: a space where our own subjectivities not only informed our work, but became thinkable as interwoven in it. It felt like a vitalizing breath of fresh air, and at the same time an unavoidable response to the turning point that the experience of migration had been. Doing clinical work with migrant and undocumented women and children, while at the same time having become minority women due to our own migrations, meant that issues of otherness, alienation, trauma, identity, home – they all became central in our lives, work, and thinking. It was in this context that we realized just how essential the possibility to explore these experiences, share them not just in the private spaces of supervision and analysis, but collectively, was. We needed to find a way to creatively use our own subjectivities in these newfound (external and internal, shared and individual) places. Inevitably, this also meant we became more sensitive to thinking and discussing the impact that gender –our gendered-ness – had in our analytic work, and recognizing that there had been a cost to sustaining the dissociation of those cries.

Since then, almost another decade has passed. In 2018, having both returned to our home country, we formed a feminist psychoanalytic collective with a focus on gender, Colectivo Trenza, with three other women, friends and colleagues. A space where we could engage in dialogues between psychoanalysis, gender/queer and feminist studies. A group which aimed to sustain a clinical, ethical and political thinking that emerged from a collective experience, which recognized our implications, privileges, and was hopefully able to hold our limitations and contradictions in mind, while doing analytic work from a feminist, gender-informed, perspective. This is part of what Colectivo Trenza has been. It has also been a place of resistance in an increasingly polarized political landscape, and a home- one that has also ignited the desire to open its doors and windows and welcome others to work with. Organizing free talks and seminars, engaging in relationships with the community, forming a network of clinicians that provide low-cost gender-informed psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a focus on feminism and diversity from a psychoanalytic frame, while at the same time writing, supervising and teaching from this vantage point – and marching – this has been the intermediate space from which we have been able to continue doing a work that feels our own, and alive, and engaged.

Feminism has taught us to critically observe power dynamics, inequalities and their impact on (all) bodies. Yet we think of Maggie Nelson (2015), when she writes, “sometimes one has to know something many times over. Sometimes one forgets, and then remembers (…) And then forgets again” (p. 32). Our tendency to forget has perhaps to do with the paradoxical dialectic of trauma: we sometimes need to forget to be able to continue living in the world, or it becomes too much. This is true even more so now. In May 2023, Chileans elected 50 representatives to write the draft of a new constitution, a process born out of the massive protests and social uprising of 2019. In a disquieting turn of events, almost half of the representatives are members of a new, extreme right-wing party, with many of them being explicit in their rejection of the idea that women’s and gender minorities’ rights should be constitutionally established. The ominous feeling that the current constitution, written mostly during the Pinochet dictatorship, might end up being less conservative than the new one is, at least, frightening for many women and gender-diverse minorities. The current political scenario works as a clear and raw reminder that we cannot take for granted any advancements in terms of gender and/or minorities’ rights, that we are always a few steps away from having those hard-won rights revoked. Thus, we need to make our voices heard, not only within the private space of our consulting rooms, but also in the public sphere. Colectivo Trenza has been a way of, a platform for, speaking.

Being an analyst today means, paraphrasing Paul Preciado, that we live and work at a historical moment without precedent. This is especially true regarding women’s, minorities, and gender rights and issues. We might also argue, as many others have in previous years, that unprecedented times call for an awareness that what is demanded from us is a deeper, more complex psychoanalytic way of thinking. An intersectional, culturally diverse and aware, gender-informed, psychoanalytic perspective, one that can hold the paradox while at the same time rigorously engaging in the examining of our theoretical frames. As clinicians, we have had privileged access to witnessing the deep impact that public policies have on shaping subjective experience, and therefore feel the duty to translate some of the pain and suffering we hear in our consulting rooms into the public realm, where they might be heard and – hopefully – recognized. It is easier to “other” someone when we remain ignorant of who they are. Creating spaces for dialogue, reflection and mutual recognition can help not only make visible the daily occurrence of gender-based violences, but also dispute the hopelessness inherent in the notion that this is the way things are and that there is not much we can do to change them. This is the trail we have been on, and the hope that sustains our work.