The gap between politics and reality
Betty Milan
Conference in Après Coup Association – 20 October 2023
I’m very glad to be back
with you in Après Coup Psychoanalytical Association. Were it not for Paola Mieli, Adieu, Lacan, the film directed by Richard Ledes and the book Analyzed by Lacan which has just been published by Bloomsbury, would not exist. So, I thank you all and I specially thank Paola.
When I first came to this Association in 2018, I talked about the analyst’s discourse and literature. I then said that psychoanalysis also draws from literature and can, in turn, have a significant influence over it. In literature, the subject is not conventionally the subject of the unconscious, but it is possible to give life to it in different ways. One of these ways is the inside monologue that has much to do with the inner speech which is fundamental for analysis.
In 2018, I spoke about my novel – Lacan’s Parrot – and my play – Goodbye Doctor – that were adapted for the movies. Only after the novel, the play and the film have been done I could write the testimony Analyzed by Lacan: A personal account.
I wrote it because Lacan’s theory has been spread in the world through the publication and the translation of his seminars, but his clinical practice is not well known. My testimony sheds light on his practice. I wanted to show what his scope was, and to dispel damaging rumors, such as the one that he had shortened the analytic session to earn more money.
Lacan made an extensive use of the so-called short session. In fact, the time of the session was variable. He was not guided by Kronos, the time that passes, but by Kairos, the moment of opportunity that we can seize. For him what counted was the discourse of the analysand, not the clock. As soon as the essential had been said, the session was over, and the analyst had already fulfilled his role. In his own way, Lacan taught us not to waste time.
Lacan did not interpret the analysand’s discourse by attributing a meaning to it. He interrupted the session and allowed the analysand to interpret the reason for the cut. The analysis continued after the session. This new way of working was due to a clinical discovery : Lacan realized that the traditional manner of interpreting could provoke resistance. He therefore changed his practice. From his point of view, psychoanalysis needed to be reinvented.
Why Lacan was written to illustrate this reinvention and to render Lacan’s approach intelligible to the uninitiated. Fortunately, the book, that was first written in Portuguese in 2020, has already been translated into three languages, and it is now available in English: Analyzed by Lacan : A personal account published by Bloomsbury.
In this book there is Why Lacan and also the play inspired by my analysis, Good bye Doctor. The play is structured around the sessions of the heroin, Seriema, with the Doctor. Seriema lives the drama of a Western descendant of people from the Middle East. Motherhood seems impossible for her. Is it because she cannot identify with the women in her family or is there some other reason? Through the analysis, she discovers why she cannot give birth, namely, an unconscious desire to satisfy the will of her father who didn’t authorize her to conceive. She ceases to be the victim of her unconscious, grasps the possibility of choosing a father for her child and thus becoming a mother. Good bye Doctor has been adapted for film by Richard Ledes. His film is called Adieu Lacan and can be seen in https://vimeo.com/ondemand/adieulacan.
I won’t talk any more about Analyzed by Lacan, but I want you to know that there will be a zoom launching of the book in November. Hope you all can attend.
Paola has asked me to speak about psychoanalysis and politics and I have accepted it, because I am writing a novel that has to do with this subject.
I will focus on the denial of politicians and religious leaders during the recent pandemic. How can we explain it? What is the relation between people’s belief in these saviors and disbelief in one’s own death? To address these questions, I will talk about Brazil under Bolsonaro’s government – Bolsonaro’s Trump-inspired government.
First of all let me tell you briefly who Bolsonaro is. He began serving in the Brazilian Army in 1973 and graduated from the Military Academy in 1977. He rose to publicity in 1986 after he wrote an article for a great magazine criticizing low wages for military officers. He was arrested and detained for fifteen days.
He left the army and was elected to the Chamber of Rio de Janeiro two years later. In 1990, Bolsonaro was elected to the Chamber of Deputies as a representative for the state of Rio de Janeiro. He was a congressman for 27 years and he became known for his national conservatism.
In 2018 he entered the Brazilian presidential election, during which he started to advocate economically liberal and pro-market policies. He won. In his first months as president he focused on domestic affairs, dealing primarily with the Brazilian economic crisis. He rolled back protections for Indigenous groups in the Amazon rainforest and facilitated its deforestation. Bolsonaro’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil was criticized across the political spectrum after he sought to downplay the pandemic and its effects, opposed quarantine measures, and dismissed two health ministers, while the death toll increased rapidly.
In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare says that “ignorance is as tenebrous as hell”. During the pandemic, due to ignorance – to politicians and religious leaders’ ignorance –, in my country we lived in hell.
In 2020, Japan’s government decided to close the academies and in China even the coins were decontaminated. The president of Brazil said that people should continue to live as they were living before, because Covid was nothing but “a simple flu”, and that the International Health Organization only made a cause out of fighting Coronavirus because it was ignorant.
Bolsonaro appeared everywhere with no mask and made selfies with the people in the streets. He once said that in order to prove his loyalty towards the people he was going to cross the city in a crowded subway. As to the bishop of São Paulo, he declared that the concern about Coronavirus was Satan’s tactic, the enemy of God in the heart of men, and that he would not close his church, because God is stronger than the Devil. For him, scientists were the enemies of faith.
Brazilians where incited by the president to overcome fear through denial and by the bishop to fight it through belief. Consequently, we have had over 700,000 notified deaths. Two times more than we should have had, if it weren’t for denial and belief, because the country has a good vaccination tradition. Contrarily to the French people, Brazilians were willing to be vaccinated. France experienced the lowest levels of trust in vaccines in the world. One out of three French citizens doubted the safety of vaccines.
During the pandemia, the president of Brazil denied the threat and the bishop denied the importance of science. Both were against prevention and the president even wanted to interdict the word lockdown in the whole country. He was not only against lockdown, but he also said that as we are all going to die someday, there was no reason to make such a fuss about Covid – particularly because the most vulnerable ones were old people.
After denying the threat, he joined the position of the bishop and said that he did not believe in scientists, because they are not impartial, and that he would give himself the medal of scientific merit. Using Trump as his reference, he wanted chloroquine to be largely distributed, independently of its serious collateral effects. He believed in chloroquine as the bishop believed in God.
Denial of reality and faith have to do with the fact that we don’t believe in our own death. In one of his articles, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915), Freud says that we all have the inconscient conviction that we are immortal. Lacan agreed, and Derrida said in his last interview that it was impossible to accept death.
As we are more and more threatened by it because of climate changes, I’m afraid scientific knowledge will be more and more substituted by faith and democratic leaders by dictators.
To think the future of politics, we must consider both denial and death pulsion. In Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915), Freud says that we are the product of generations and generations of assassins, and therefore we must adapt ourselves to war. He does not explain why we surrender to death pulsion and accept war. I think it can be explained by the fact that we do not believe we are mortals. If it were not for this disbelief, there would be more deserters, more people refusing to risk their lives in war. At least nowadays
During the pandemic, denial and fake news prevailed. Bolsonaro ordered that only the number of lives that had been saved should be notified, and not the number of deaths. It was only thanks to a very efficient press consortium that we were informed of the real situation.
I’ve asked myself more than once why such a president had been elected in 2018, and almost reelected in 2022. I think it is because he said and did whatever he wanted to do and to say. In other words, his pleasure was the only law of his desire, what makes him a pervert. Bolsonaro spoke and acted as most non-educated persons speak and act and, therefore, he gained voters. In poor emergent countries, pervert leaders tend to be elected, because their behavior is seen as an expression of liberty.
What happened in Brazil concerning the disqualification of science also happened in other countries. In China, Li Wenliang, a particularly courageous doctor warned that in the institution he worked there had been seven people with a severe acute respiratory syndrome, and that these people had been selling exotic animals – mainly bats – for consumption. Public security agents went to Wenliang’s house and told him that he was disturbing social order, and he should sign a retraction letter. He did, but continued insisting in the prevention, until his death due to Covid.
As in China, in the United States the government considered that clinical experience was not an argument, and Doctor Fauci was accused of having invented the virus and was seriously threatened – both Doctor Fauci and his family.
Because of the opposition to scientific knowledge the acquisition of the vaccine in Brazil was seriously delayed. The virus that causes COVID-19, was isolated in 2019. Its genetic sequence was published on January 2020, triggering the international response to prepare for an outbreak and fasten development of a preventive vaccine. By June 2020, tens of billions of dollars were invested by corporations, governments, international health organizations, and university research groups to develop dozens of vaccine candidates, and to prepare for global vaccination programs
In November 2020, the Pfizer-BioNTech submitted an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its vaccine. In December 2020, many countries and the European Union had authorized or approved Pfizer’s Covid vaccine.
The Brazilian government made negotiations with Pfizer particularly difficult and only bought the vaccine four months after it had been authorized. The indifference to life was evident.
By then, I asked myself the relation between Bolsonaro and the Nazis. Bolsonaro interdicted lockdown and insisted in chloroquine. He minimized the importance of death and said that the strongest were going to survive.
He did not make crematoriums to exterminate Jews, but he exposed the weakest to contamination. It was a form of extermination. The weakest were the poor and mainly black people. Slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888, but its spirit is still there.
Bolsonaro did not say like the Nazis that there is a superior race, but he let natural selection take care of the people. He wanted to preserve “those that can both fight the virus as a man does and be capable of giving birth to descendants who are more resistant… as we don’t need pussies in this country.”
History does not stop repeating itself because of denial, death pulsion and narcissism that exude throughout the world the virus of indifference. As you know, the myth of Narcissus has to do with his indifference to other people. He not only refused the love of the nymph Eco, but also of all those who tried to approach him. Nemesis, the God of revenge, punished Narcissus by making him see himself and falling in love with his own image.
In conclusion, I will say that to explain the gap between politics and reality, denial and war, the psychoanalytical theory must consider three elements: denial, death pulsion and narcissism. As long as we cannot find a vaccin against the virus of indifference we are seriously threatened.
Thank you.