Abstract

In the experience of free psychoanalytic listening during the COVID-19 pandemic, we experienced a situation of urgency due to the unavoidable reality of viremia. I will only outline one of the questions that this work has raised. This question focuses on the issue of the relationship between the psychoanalyst and reality. What is reality? How does it appear to us? What relationship do we have with it? What weight does it have in urgent situations? In this work I hypothesize that the external reality for us is constituted by a dialectical reality, the reality of the other in interaction and relationship with us, and that it is a continuous construction, the result of a work of definition, differentiation, bargaining that depends on our internal functioning and on the contribution of the other interacting with us. If the psychoanalyst closes himself in front of the necessity of this dialectical construction, excluding the external reality as unknowable, clinical and institutional consequences emerge – I think – from this position, such as the opposition between the mind and the body, the opposition between the intrapsychic and intersubjective, the refusal of research that is attentive to clinical comparison and the effectiveness of interventions, and finally the refusal to use the acquisitions of empirical research such as that on developmental processes, or even the opposition between neurosciences and psychoanalysis.