To defend a desire
Due to her lifelong interest in human beings, Nayive has decided to study psychology. She is currently in her sixth semester and tells us that “both her psychology programme and all the other programmes offered at the university are regarded as having a humanistic approach”.
Since the age of seven, Nayive has undergone a wide variety of therapies. Now, at the age of twenty, she says, “I didn’t understand why, even though I was doing everything I was told to do, my situation seemed to be getting worse”.
Perhaps one of the reasons, Nayive continues, “was related to having to do exactly what I was told. Like that very part, which is also mine, that had forced itself to uphold the desire of the Other and, in doing so, triggered a couple of complicated situations”.
Or as the psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller would say of such practices: “The therapist in these therapies swallows the master and then orders, commands” (1). This can reinforce what Sigmund Freud termed the psychic instance, the superego (2). Which, moreover, is “the instance that works within the subject against their own good” (3).
Her encounter with psychoanalysis “occurred in one of those situations mentioned. There a helping hand appears, a place for my singularity, which I had not counted on before”. On this last point, Nayive tells us, it is the very place he has sought since childhood, “both within the family and in academia”.
“Not even in the so-called humanist university had I found a place that prioritises the subjective and the singular. Thus, that slogan-like humanism remains open to question”.
Three years of analytical experience, according to Nayive, “allowed her to understand her own truth”. Now, “it is a matter of upholding one’s own desire and not that of the Other”. “It is no longer a matter of seeking a place, but of creating a place. Even in her training as a psychologist, where psychoanalysis has no place, it is not even a matter of defending psychoanalysis, for it defends itself.”
Nayive concludes this interview by recounting her adventures in Europe. She tells us that, particularly during her travels through certain countries, she has felt welcome and practically sees psychoanalysis wherever she goes. “Spain and France have always fascinated her. In Germany, she encountered a country that has left her surprised. She has felt welcomed.”
______________________________________________
(1). Jacques-Alain Miller, Piezas sueltas, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2013.
(2). Sigmund Freud, »Das Ich und das Es« (1923), in Sigmund Freud. Gesammelte Werke, Band XIII, London, Imago Publishing, 1940.
(3). Jacques-Alain Miller, Del síntoma al fantasma. Y retorno, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2018.
