“I’m not suggesting that repression has lost its place as a fundamental defense mechanism. Repression remains central, coherent, and fundamental to the founding of the unconscious. It is what makes certain contents inaccessible to consciousness, and what we access as psychoanalysts through dreams, play, symptoms, and associations. That remains true. What I was observing, and I’m still observing more now, is something different. When I see children and adolescents that are more capable to work on a task while doing homework, and at the same time listening to music, and at the same time texting with somebody – I don’t think that they are real. This is my point. I don’t think they are real. This multitasking way of living is part of life today… The clinical question for us becomes this – when does this multiplicity become a symptom? When does it interfere with the capacity for depth, for intimacy, for a sustained emotional contact? I think that this is what we need to see, to study and to differentiate in our consulting room.”
Virginia Ungar, MD
Buenos Aires
Episode Description:
We consider how changes in our culture may impact the individual’s intrapsychic space and from that the nature of the psychoanalytic encounter. Virginia comments on the diminishing of the paternal symbolizing function and with that a change in the ‘rites of passage’ that adolescents traverse – now the rituals are “created by the young people themselves” as contrasted with those passed down by their elders. This, she feels, has resulted in “intimacy becoming spectacle” and for many, the analytic session is where “the construction of intimacy may begin.” She shares clinical material with us from 40 years ago and contrasts the nature of her interventions with her contemporary treatments. Now, “I appreciate the mystery in the process and that we create meaning with the patient.” Virginia closes with seeing analytic treatment as “an invitation to a process of thinking that, to remain alive, must be rethought.”
Our Guest:
Virginia Ungar M.D., training analyst at the Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Association (APdeBA). She specializes in child and adolescent analysis, was the Chair of the IPA’s Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis Committee (COCAP) and of the IPA Committee for Integrated Training. She was awarded a Konex of Platinum in 2016. She is the former President of the International Psychoanalytic Association (2017-2021).
Recommended Reading:
Etchegoyen, H. (1986) The fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique, chapters 25 and 26, Karnac, 1991.
Meltzer, D. (1968). A note on analytic receptivity. In A. Hahn (Ed.), Sincerity and other works: Collected papers of Donald Meltzer, Karnac Books, 1994.
Meltzer, D. (1988). The apprehension of Beauty, chapters 1, 2, and 4, Clunie Press, Perthshire, 1988.
Sontag, S. (1966). Against Interpretation, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York.
Ungar, V. (2017) Letter from Argentina, Vol 98, 3, IJP, 2017