The clinic vis-à-vis the socio-political dimension of suffering: psychoanalysis, politics and culture

Abstract

The clinic vis-à-vis the socio-political dimension of suffering: psychoanalysis, politics and culture. Presentation: The book titled The clinic vis-à-vis the socio-political dimension of suffering proposes-using psychoanalytic practices in violent social contexts as a conductive thread-a link between clinic, culture and politics. Introduction: The book titled The Clinic vis-à-vis the socio-political dimension of suffering presents the impasses, vicissitudes and directions of the psychoanalytic practice and its theoretical-clinical epistemological field of articulation among psychoanalysis, politics and culture. It presents the psychoanalytic experience carried out in violent social contexts, i.e., modes of intervention with subjects undergoing violence in its various forms: social exclusion, poverty, racism, indifference, humiliation, forced immigration. The clinical practices were performed especially with forced migrants, refugees and adolescents, in particular with those in conflict with the law, and with individuals facing poverty and exclusion.The interventions lead us to the social, political and cultural scenarios and their political strategies of exclusion, government and control. Such scenarios propose social ties that promote both the establishment of the place of the subject and its dismissal of this place. Detecting the politics, which engenders joy and desire in the scene, situates the subject and allows him to resignify his desire in its function of cause. The subject is not the individual precisely at the point where the singularity of his desire locates him in a context that seeks to determine him and exercise its power in the darkness of the relationships. At this point of the social bond, the politics of psychoanalysis emerges, that of the lack of being. In other words, the analytical work will allow the subject to face the desire that causes him, a desire inserted and signified in the field of the relational game and its historical, cultural and political determinants. Authors such as Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias, Slavoj Zizek and Zygmunt Bauman help us to address the facets of politics. Under the psychoanalytic perspective, social bonds refer to the constitutive condition of man and civilization, a condition that inaugurates man's entry into language and culture, and that inserts him simultaneously in the relational, affective, libidinal and political games. Social ties have their foundation in the language, but from that point on they are discursive ties, i.e., they materialize in the modes of relationships at a given time and place, guiding the construction of each one's history, inserted into the discursive field of one's time.Along the work we shall demonstrate that the discourses circulating at a given time indicate possible ways of belonging for each subject, ascribing to each one values, places and positions in the social bond. In specific social fields, which we understand as violent, these discourses seek to equate the symbolic field of culture with language, thereby naturalizing these assignments and avoiding giving visibility to the social and political conflicts present in their bases. The invisibility of the conflicts arising in and by the social bond, as we shall demonstrate, falls onto the subject, individualizing his impasses, pathologizing or criminalizing his solutions. The issues raised here will be discussed under various topics with a condensation of the questions they address. We present the following chapters: (1)The psychoanalytic clinic vis-à-vis the social and discursive helplessness: impasses and directions of treatment, (2) The social scene: enjoyment and experience, (3) Concepts articulating psychoanalysis and the social field, (4) Trauma and violence: the clinic of the traumatic in forced migration, and (5) Victimization, implication and accountability of the subject and of the social field. (AU)