CRITICA

The year 2020 will be remembered for the Coronavirus and the Black Lives Matter movement. These events completely changed our lives and our profession. The Coronavirus is a monster cell, an invisible enemy that has created perpetual fear, helplessness, anxiety, and a state of “collective trauma”.

At the same time we have witnessed the brutal killing of a black man by a policeman. This killing made visible the inequality, racism, violence, sadism and fragmentation of social justice in our society.

The impact of these events has affected the psychoanalytic community around the world, and many changes are taking place in psychoanalytic institutions that focus on the interplay of history, power, race and sexuality.

In this time of instability our own institute has created many avenues to mitigate our anxiety. Bruce Weitzman’s leadership and organizational skills have been extraordinary. Bruce and the leadership group have kept us informed of all the changes taking place at PINC, and created an e-mail system which facilitates constant communication between us.

This is a difficult time and I noticed my own difficulties in setting out to write. I wrote many drafts of this editorial, but I felt that I was unable to express my ideas/feelings and thoughts clearly. The editorial seemed fragmented, unclear, and unfocused. My mind was paralyzed. Our editorial team as a whole felt this paralysis. What takes place when the ink cannot flow, and your head is too clouded to think? Carolina Bacchi, helped describe some different forms of paralysis that were being activated.

My not being able to write forced me to think about what was going on both in my mind and in the world. I began to read, and encountered the works of many critical thinkers, including Maurice Blanchot and Walter Benjamin.

The French philosopher Maurice Blanchot helped clarify our dilemma in a book he wrote in 1987 entitled “Writing after the Catastrophe”. The essence of this complex book was the idea that we must not forget; we must write to not forget. We must write to keep the past alive. He was writing about the Holocaust.

I found Benjamin’s work to be a source of inspiration. In one of his late papers on “On the Philosophy of History” he used the word “Jetztzeit”, translated as “now is the time”. The word implies, both an historical moment of change, and an opportunity for action.

Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot were both exceptional men, political, innovative and not afraid to write or speak against injustice. Inspired by their example, we felt that the publication of a Newsletter could serve as a vital and historic response to such a call for action. The newsletter, as a form of transmission, would prevent our paralysis of writing and speaking.