Closer to poetry than to maths
John begins this interview by telling us about his long career in sport, both in an institutional and administrative setting and on the football pitches as a trainer.
His work is divided between his institutional activities and his involvement with Club Deportivo Export, which we have mentioned on a previous occasion. Speaking of Export, John tells us, “It has become a place where you’re not just another one of many in a large group. You’re regarded as a professional who can contribute something and, at the same time, learn from your colleagues”.
At the club, he tells us, “his team has had the opportunity to undertake a process guided by psychoanalysis applied to sport. Following this experience, he decided to take a step further and begin an individual psychoanalytical process”
From these opening words by John, we can sense something of his discontent prior to psychoanalysis and his work at Export, which may become clearer in the following paragraphs. A feeling of ‘being just another face in the crowd, as if there were nothing to set oneself apart, no difference’.
Now, referring to Jacques Alain-Miller’s text (1), this discontent has a great deal to do with our era, marked by the quantifiable, by the subject of statistics, the average, by that ‘one more’ on the list who ends up becoming something like a subject without attributes.
On this point, John tells us, “his life was plagued by depression, anxiety and distress. And when living in such conditions, one finds no way out, and the things one longs for simply do not materialise”. John continues, “fortunately, I have been able to start finding my way out of that quagmire thanks to psychoanalysis and, of course, to my own desire to get out of there”.
After some time in the process, our interviewee continues, “he feels that he is no longer just another face in the crowd, that he has something to contribute to others; to his work teams and to the children they train at the club. He has realised that, as he crosses paths with other people’s lives, he has something to offer them for their growth, whilst at the same time continuing to grow on his own journey”.
As for his improved well-being, John tells us, “it has been about committing to a new love – for his children, for his own desires – and through various steps that have opened up new paths. Now, when setbacks or blows come along that might throw me off balance, I find myself solid and stable.”
His greatest achievement, he tells us, “is that his children speak of him with pride and that he is on the verge of showing them something out there, in the world”. It has been, in Miller’s words, “the art of the one-to-one” in psychoanalysis, “not the one-to-one of enumeration, but the restoration of the unique in its singularity, in its incomparability”.
The fact is that in psychoanalysis, as José María Álvarez puts it, “whether we like it or not, we are closer to poetry than to mathematics” (2).
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References:
(1) JACQUES ALAIN-MILLER: La era del hombre sin atributos, Virtualia EOL, 2006.
(2) JOSÉ MARÍA ÁLVAREZ: Estudios de psicología patológica, Barcelona, Xoroi Edicions, 2017.
