Escri-viendo (“writing-seeing”)
Psychoanalysis and desire
‘I have learned how much practice there is today for so-called well-being, spiritual, mental, whatever label you give it; I let myself be carried away, searching in all of them for answers to what was happening to me.’
“I have been to the so-called witch, the shaman, the so-called new age practices, the cards, the angels, coaching, and star reading. When that stopped working, I sought out psychiatrists, psychologists, you name it. Anything you can imagine. ‘
Katheryn says that’ everything in her life seemed to be going wonderfully. Her professional life, her work, was perhaps what many people desired. Yet inside me, something was screaming, unable to get out.”
What is commonly so-called depression, ‘had visited me on several occasions. It lingered, filling my days and my soul with darkness.’ Katheryn says that ‘she chose to stop her search for these other practices when she came to psychoanalysis.
‘Little by little, I began to understand some issues that had been making noise inside me, that I had not been able to hear,” she had not put into words. ‘By putting it into words, I began to make decisions that cost me goodbyes that I am still making to this day.’
From her childhood memories, ‘it was always present that every so often there was a change of location, a change of home. My father’s job demanded it, and we moved in with him.’ Despite this, she continues, ‘in my earliest memories, my father’s presence was somewhat lacking. There was always another voice in the home, different from his.’
Psychoanalysis, says Katheryn, “has helped me understand that there was abuse that I allowed. That I was putting up with things, as if it were something dictated, something I couldn’t get out of. Breaking with those standards was not part of the story I was told, and for a long time, that was my duty.”
In other words, trapped in the discourse of the Other (Lacan, 2019). Precisely based on the above, Lacan argues that the subject, before being a speaker, is spoken (Lacan, 2017). Hence, the subject and the Other do not live separate lives, since the subject is constituted from the Other as its locus (Lacan, 2016). From which it even takes what I would call its truth (Lacan, 2007).
There comes a moment in her life that she considers crucial, when she decides to get divorced. ‘At that moment, I remembered that my father was indeed present. He once asked me what I really wanted. With that question, he wanted to rescue me from what I thought I should be.’
‘That’s how I’m facing everything now, asking myself what I want. On this journey, I now respect those silent and healing answers a little more.’ The question was sent back to her, and she responded, glimpsing a possible way out through invention. Katheryn says she is emerging from the dark night of her soul, a title that currently appears in her pen’s inkwell.
If so, she would be making a choice similar to that of the father of psychoanalysis, who, as Gustavo Dessal tells us, in his discovery of the unconscious and foundation of the psychoanalytic method, ‘Freud chose poetry, (…) he devoted himself to words instead of neurons’ (Bauman & Dessal, 2014).
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Bauman, Z., & Dessal, G. (2014). El Retorno del Péndulo. Sobre el Psicoanálisis y el Futuro del Mundo Líquido. FCE.
Lacan, J. (2007). The other side of psychoanalysis. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan / Book XVII. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2016). Anxiety. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan / Book X. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Polity.
Lacan, J. (2017). Formations of the unconscious. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Polity.
Lacan, J. (2019). Desire and its interpretation. The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Polity.
