CRITICA

Inside me lies a big Silence. From the challenge of putting into words what cannot yet be thought about to the experience of having a social container that has been disrupted and not offering a landing space for new ideas, I found myself struggling to find what to say. Our social/collective containers have been imploding in the last few years – the collective spaces have been inflicted with polarization and discord, continuously maintained by many different artifacts of social discourse. As our editorial board explored the theme for our Spring 2026 issue, we found ourselves engaging with the experience of violence and aggression, and with the challenges of thinking/dialoguing in our current political and social climate. Mostly, we found ourselves wondering about how to restore human qualities like love, dignity, and grief in response to current fears and the experience of destructive chaos. I was left wondering about how to restore hope and trust in collective action at times of great despair. 

The Bread

In that quiet place, something unformed, or struggling to find a way out, lies dormant. I keep my Sourdough Starter in the fridge – there it waits for our next encounter. It always surprises me when I feed it, and it bubbles and grows, reminding me that it has always been quietly alive. At that point, we connect. Flour, water, seeds, and salt, my hands in it, messy, sticky, stretching it. For two hours, we interact – my hands feeling the formless dough, conversing, relating, being with. Eventually, it grows big, and I roll it into a ball, ready to be baked the next morning. There is something magical/powerful about the process that requires dedication and a kind of giving yourself up. It also requires remembering: the dough cannot be left unattended or unfed. I bake a new batch of Sourdough weekly, a small inheritance of my life in the Bay Area, now integrated into the most intimate spaces of my life and soul. 

Making bread reminds me of psychoanalysis – the unformed, underlying, dormant layer of our minds secretly waiting, like Winnicott beautifully describes, “It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found” (1965, p. 440). In our offices, we move toward what/who is hidden; the encounter allows the emergence of a self and new links and ideas. We need the other to become. The bread needs my encounter with the starter to exist. What happens when the collective space forbids the encountering to happen? The hidden can only remain concealed, in the back of the fridge, waiting… 

Quite often, those days, I have found myself voiceless, speechless, silenced, I dare to say? The immensity and the pace of our collective human experience feel unattainable. We are living in a changing and challenging world, one that at times is difficult to grasp and make sense of. Wordless. States. The comfort of psychoanalysis offers some respite – being with wordless experiences allows for something new to be formed, found, transformed. However, I wonder – how do we traverse chaos, uncertainty, and destruction?

We have learned about our past by engaging with humanity and history, including times of great despair and violence. We hear stories of survival—of those who conquered, those who resisted, and those who were annihilated but left their stories behind. Those are the leftovers that may give us the meaning we need or seek, and they may point us somewhere and help us develop our thinking in an environment where thinking is constantly being attacked. At times, this knowledge feels containing. It is part of the fabric of our lives and our own survival.

The philosopher Federico Campagna, in his book Otherworld, explores the origins of European civilization. One of his central theses is that humans are adaptive: to survive, they have had to move from place to place. Migration, in this sense, is both a necessity and a search for a better future—an act of choice despite uncertainty. The book addresses agency and resilience in times of catastrophe, and Campagna’s work carries a certain optimism, influenced by Marxist thought.

However, in the present moment, we often feel dehumanized, treated like robots. We struggle to speak and to think. External reality can feel oppressive, and what emerges is a wordless state. These wordless states affect our capacity to dream; they attack imagination and creativity. Paradoxically, there are still moments when we feel creative, elated, and able to think and reflect.

Music and Creativity

Those ideas remind me of a Brazilian song by Chico Buarque, “Construção” (Construction), written in 1971. The song tells the story of a construction worker exploited by his company. One day, he was slightly drunk and was killed while crossing the street. Chico Buarque—a composer, writer, visionary, and political figure—used his music in the 1970s to expose oppressive realities. This song evoked powerful images and emotions. I also thought about the experimental fiction book Pandora, in which a literature professor has an emotional breakdown during the COVID lockdown. The main character, while going through grief, has hallucinatory relationships with a Pangolin, her cat, and a bat. While they cohabit in her apartment, through their lively, weird interactions, she investigates the pandemic’s intense impact. She explores the struggle to occupy a shared space, to make sense of violence, aggression, isolation, and difference, to understand a life being lived in captivity, to traverse mourning and depression, to emerge and become. She mostly experiments with the literary form in an attempt to communicate the collective fragmentation we have been experiencing. From wordless states into a form that feels potential and transformative. Imagination and music can sometimes express more than words. Is that the basis for our resilience capacity? 

In our discussion about the theme, we talked about hope and resilience, beyond sadness, destruction, and the lack of shared truth and accountability in society. My creative endeavors involve baking, reading literature, and creative writing, activities that offer an experience of possibility, beauty, maybe even hope. Is that how we traverse?  Is that how we maintain connection and find hope amid destruction and hatred? By finding small ways to engage with meaning in a world that feels meaningless? Is that a form of resistance? 

Collective Action and Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis has often privileged words over images. In Analysis Terminable and Interminable, Freud (1937) suggests that the analyst constructs meaning through processes of guessing, conjecture, and fantasy. This conceptual tool is fundamental. Freud repeatedly invokes the idea of “guessing,” implicitly pointing toward a future psychoanalysis. This future, I believe, lies in expanding the scope of psychoanalysis—making it more elastic and more politically engaged. Change can occur through collaboration across the unconscious, the social, and the political. To create something—like making bread—is a difficult process that requires sustained, careful work. It involves connection, being with, existing in community. 

As PINC evolves into a quatripartide model for its analytic training, it recognizes the social unconscious as dynamically interacting with the psyche. Change and transformation can only be understood/achieved within our interconnected experience. Traversing means process, doing the work of sustaining the struggle, even when there is silence or the inability to find words. Psychoanalysis, in this way, can become resistance, resilience, and, most of all, collective action. 

Our contributors struggled like the professor in the book, like the Sourdough dough, my baking self, and our psychoanalytic minds, to engage with and stretch our comprehension, only to find once more what can only be approximated. In those times, relying on our community matters. 

Lastly, the editorial board would like to extend our deepest gratitude and admiration for our designer Elijah Allen, who envisioned and created a beautiful brand and design for Critica. He has been working with us since 2023, and has helped Critica to become the publication it is today. He will pursue other opportunities from now on, and we are sure whatever he lands, they will be happy to have him. He leaves us with legacy and ongoing regard and appreciation. In community, he will continue to be around for consultation as needed.

In the Fall, Courtney Stack will be joining us as our new designer and creative director. Courtney is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, artist, and creative director. They practice as a Registered Associate Marriage and Family Therapist and Registered Associate Professional Clinical Counselor, and maintain an active art and design practice while leading diverse design projects in support of social justice initiatives on a freelance basis. We are grateful to have Courtney in our Editorial Board. 

Critica, as always, would like to thank the PINC Community for their ongoing engagement and support. 

References:

Pacheco, A.P. (2025). Pandora. Transit Books: San Francisco. 
Buarque, C. (1970). Construção. On Construção. Phillips Records. 
Campagna, F. Otherworld. Bloomsbury Publishing: New York. 
Freud, S. (1937) Analysis Terminable and Interminable. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 23:209-254
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites (1963). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development 64:179-192