Just these days a book is in the bookstore that revisits the Covid experience, unfortunately recurring even if not in the original pandemic forms, from a point of view we say "new?", "different?". This is the book of Colette Soler, Written under the Covid. What to do with mass hypnosis, Guerini e associati, 2022 (€15,67), with goWare for the digital edition (€9,99).
By now everything has been said and written about Covid and there is a certain media and information saturation. And also a great desire to talk about something else. But the space for some further reflection remains and it is important that it be explored.
That of Colette Soler, psychoanalyst of the Lacanian school and professor of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, is an observation point and a reflection that deserve to be considered carefully. First of all for the caliber of the French scholar and secondly because, as the title of the book says, it was written on the spot during the pandemic period. In fact, the volume collects the texts of a dozen video conferences and speeches held from April 1920 to March 1921.
This immanence to the events makes the book even more suggestive, because there wasn't even time to let them settle down and analyze them to obtain the necessary detachment; we are really in corpore vivo, as in an analysis session.
E the psychoanalytic point of view, as has happened in many other cases in contemporary history thanks above all to the Frankfurt School, can contribute to explaining phenomena that are difficult to deal with and entirely explainable by the disciplines and methodologies of the traditional human sciences.
Soler's thesis of having seen a sort of mass hypnosis unfold during the pandemic in which the individual way coincided with the collective way is, even if it may leave some hesitant, a suggestive hypothesis and, also, with a certain foundation.
In this framework, the role that Soler attributes to his own discipline and to his professionals is also decisive in reserving for himself a role capable of understanding where their time is taking them. The book also initiates a discourse within psychoanalysis.
Of Soler's book we publish below the preface by Mario Binasco, professor of Psychology and Psychopathology of family ties at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute at the Pontifical Lateran University and analyst-member of the School of Psychoanalysis of the Forums of the Lacanian Field.
Condition altered
«Under Covid»: this is how Colette Soler says she wrote this text, and adds «as they say: written under LSD». Written therefore in a state of alteration, in which, I might add, certain appearances of reality lose their usual consistency and familiarity, and other types of sensibility sharpen.
But this altered condition is the same one that has been imposed on everyone by something that has happened: and that it is not the brute fact of an invisible though real virus, but the story that the social authorities have made of it and the consequences they have drawn from it . Who could deny that 'under Covid' is the condition in which everyone has lived and is still living every aspect of their life in the last two years?
Work, profession, school, family relationships, politics, social relationships, life prospects: all of this, even if it hasn't been interrupted or forbidden, has nevertheless entered a sort of suspended time, suspended to a decreed emergency.
Something shocking
But it is the way this happened that justifies the book's subtitle. Something unheard of and unimaginable until then could happen without major objections: that an entire nation shut itself up at home on the orders of the authorities, silencing and eliminating the reasons for living in the face of the new dominant criterion, the absolute imperative of avoid contagion, identified tout court with death.
Where are these conditions met? Namely: a definition of the state of reality totally determined by the word of an authority, the command of behaviors congruent with that story, the compliance of the recipient of the command who renounces criticism, initiative of thought, wanting to know, for not disturb one's relationship with that authority? In hypnosis. What had happened and continued to happen therefore had all the characteristics of a case of mass hypnosis.
Mass hypnosis
This time, however, it was not the daily and inadvertent hypnosis to which television has accustomed us for decades, suggesting various ways of consumption, including political and cultural ones: what was suggested did not simply take its place among the other vital possibilities.
This time the suggestion introduced, with the unconditional imperative to avoid contagion, a logic of war, in which every citizen was enlisted: and as we know, the army in war is one of the social places in which any action that is not obligatory is forbidden; in which any assumption of risk is proscribed for the single subject – which instead normally characterizes the life of the subject, his acts, which make that life his life.
We also know that in war it is not allowed to wonder about the more or less convincing reasons for that maneuver or that imposed behavior. In the war situation, the subject is not asked to share the action and its reasons, but only to carry out the prescribed behaviors: the community asks him for unconditional dedication, where the slightest questioning about the reasons for the commands means questioning the authority to which the subject supports his being and contradicts his own desire to be part of the collective.
I work for psychoanalysis
The uncovering of the hypnotic nature of social ties cannot fail to pose a question to psychoanalysts (but not only to them): Freud invented the psychoanalytic device by abandoning hypnosis and going in the opposite direction, and in the field of the psychoanalytic bond, which Lacan calls the Analyst's Discourse, it is up to the latter, the analyst, who has to keep operating what radically differentiates this bond from any other, even if therapeutic.
But certainly the analyst cannot ignore or neglect how discourses work, i.e. the bonds outside the analytic one: because the analyst is the one who knows much more than any other that the subject to whom his act binds him is the same subject who finds himself implicated, differently, in the other social ties and in their vicissitudes.
The immense work of Freud and Lacan in conceptually accounting for the structure of the subject and the impossibility of suturing its existence gives him knowledge and a task.
Where are we going
Colette Soler notes that :
«The trauma from Covid-19 has produced in psychoanalysts, after a moment of amazement, as a kind of awakening, a feeling of urgency. An urgency to rethink their place and their function in the new external conditions».
From the book: Colette Soler, Written under the Covid. What to do with mass hypnosis
Then ask yourself:
«What opportunities does the government of the collective of society leave for this discourse of psychoanalysis? Whose characteristic, unlike the others, is that one engages in it only by choice; for him [the analyst] it is therefore impossible to ignore the state of mentalities shaped by politics, and he therefore needs an updated diagnosis to know 'where his time is taking him' ».
From the book: Colette Soler, Written under the Covid. What to do with mass hypnosis
All the more, we might add, when this "awakening" occurs in parallel with an aggravation of the "hypnotic sleep" in other functionings of social bonding. But the practice of analysis, the analytic experience, shouldn't already be itself an awakening practice?
Certainly: and "for this to be the case, it is evidently necessary for analysts to continue to believe in the radical nature of what they do and to desire this radical nature", Colette affirms.
But this is not enough.
The end of Soler's book
On the one hand, this extraordinary booklet by Colette urges analysts to face up, to fully believe in what they do and which distinguishes them, to recognize and orient themselves on the essential facts of the structure of subjects and social ties, to which these they take part, in fulfilling the task or duty that «it falls to them in this world» (Lacan).
And on the other hand, it is offered to those who seek to act responsibly in these fields of social life and who want to answer for what they seek and do: to all those who work and commit themselves in various capacities and in various positions in these other social ties - from politics to education, to care services, to the economy and business, to justice in its immense crisis - and finally, or perhaps first and foremost, in the media and information, a crucial area of all propaganda and every hypnotic acquiescence; in all the devices in which they find themselves dealing with the subjects in their lives, and deciding the fate of the human.
He would like to entice them to take an interest in and take into account what psychoanalysis reveals about the unavoidable reality of the human subject, in order to be able to think and experience a different alliance from the one which, in modernity, technoscience has established with political and social power.
Science and technology have seduced the powerful by promising to make it possible to progressively overcome human impotence, but by exchanging impossibility for the impotence from which technoscience promises to free us, they ended up imposing the concentration camp model on society. and to fuel the gigantic flight from reality of which the ideology of enhancement and the post-human is a symptom: escape from reality because escape from the impossible ("the real is the impossible", Lacan).
I would like Colette Soler's myriad of intelligent observations to help us allow ourselves to be seduced this time not by the rampant denial of the subject's dependence on reality, but instead by taking into account the impossibility as a fact of the structure of the speaking being, which psychoanalysis proves to be condition and inescapable factor for human livability.
Who is Colette Soler
Colette Soler was professor of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and at the Universities of Paris VIII and Paris VII. Her encounter with the teaching and person of Jacques Lacan then led her to choose psychoanalysis. She was a member of the Freudian School of Paris, later director of the École de la Cause freudienne and initiator of the International of the Forums of the Lacanian Field (IFCL) and of her School of Psychoanalysis (EPFCL). You teach in the Lacanian field in France and abroad, holding periodic seminars and covering managerial responsibilities from the very beginning. Among his books, translated into several languages, we remember The era of traumas (2004), What Lacan said about women (2005), Lacan, the reinvented unconscious (2010), The open-air unconscious of psychosis (2014 ), Lacanian affections (2016) and Advents of the real. From anguish to symptom (2018).
