A New Perspective
It began when her son sought psychoanalysis to work on a personal issue, Bibiana—whose child is a young athlete at the Attajar Academy & FC Export—tells us. “When she accompanied him to his first appointment, she realized that she, too, was part of the issue; she decided to begin her own individual analysis to uncover the root cause of what was troubling her—and not just causing her discomfort.”
She explains that she had been living with anxiety for many years and had tried various ways to combat it. As is often the case in therapeutic and psychiatric practice, she was “medicated for years—without the anxiety ever disappearing”—and without any professional ever asking about the root cause of her suffering or working with her to find it. The quiet, impersonal treatment of symptoms with medication took precedence over listening.
Bibiana has been in the analytical process for four months now. She tells us that after being listened to calmly and unhurriedly by her analyst, and guided by psychoanalytic questions, she “reached a point in the analysis where she said: ‘This is it. This is the root of my anxiety. This is what I need to work on.’” And that is exactly what she is doing—rigorously—and she has since been able to stop taking medication.
She has examined her former career as a fashion designer through a psychoanalytic lens and reached the following conclusion, among others: “Fashion is a form of expression for the unconscious. It allows you to show who you want to be. At the same time, it can be a shell imposed upon you. If you don’t dress a certain way, you don’t belong. Through your choice of fashion, you also try to gain acceptance—often as someone you may not actually be.” “Having things imposed upon her—being told who she should or should not be based on moral laws, and what is good and what is not—deeply shaped her subjectivity as she grew up in a strictly religious family.” Through psychoanalysis, “she learned to distinguish between unyielding, rigid morality and a healthy ethics.” For ethics “always guides one—based on the specific context—regarding what is correct and what is incorrect; this is a fundamentally different approach from that of immutable, universal religious morality. Ethics affords the freedom to think and to make one’s own decisions.” Thus, Bibiana now allows herself to be guided by the Lacanian ethical question: Have you acted in accordance with your desire? (1)
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Reference:
Jacques Lacan, Die Ethik der Psychoanalyse. Das Seminar Buch VII, Wien, Turia + Kant, 2021
