Analytica: Revista de Psicanálise

Incidences of the dimension of musicality of the voice in the face of transference in the psychoanalytic clinic

2025-04-17T12:13:50-03:00

This paper proposes an approximation between the musical dimension of the voice and the psychoanalytic clinic, articulating the fields of music, voice and psychoanalysis based on the listening of psychoanalysts with a Lacanian orientation. Focusing on the musicality of the voice and its implication in transference, a qualitative and exploratory approach was adopted, based on the snowball sampling and psychoanalytic method. Interviews were conducted with four psychoanalysts, whose clinical reports revealed how the voice – in its rhythmic, sonorous and affective aspects – operates as a fundamental element in listening to the unconscious. The vignettes analyzed show that the voice can sustain desire, establish resonances between analyst and patient and constitute a support for the emergence of transference. Silences, babbling, repetitions and unconventional musicalities appear as expressive forms that favor the clinical encounter and allow the emergence of a singular speech. The voice, in this context, is not only a vehicle of meaning, but also a means of affectation and subjective inscription. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the training of the analyst also involves his or her ability to listen – a listening that is in tune with the rhythm of the other, sustained by transference and marked by a deaf point in relation to object a. Thus, more than answering the initial question – what are the implications of the musicality of the voice in relation to transference in the psychoanalytic clinic? – this study seeks to outline possible avenues of investigation between different fields of knowledge, without the intention of exhausting the subject. On the contrary, it seeks to raise new questions and indicate connections that may inspire future studies on the interfaces between voice, music and subjectivation in the psychoanalytic clinic.

Contemporary suffering and anxiety disorders: a psychoanalytic analysis of the rise of this diagnostic category and its relationship with current cultural aspects.

2025-01-23T18:45:02-03:00

The aim of this article is to explore, using a psychoanalytical reading, how some contemporary categorizations of suffering, centered around the psychodiagnosis of so-called anxiety disorders. Freud problematizes, through his concept of discomfort in civilization, how the form of becoming ill and suffering psychically is intrinsically related to the structural organizations of the culture in which the individual is inserted. In this sense, using a bibliographic review methodology, this article focuses on searching for notions of subjective and cultural character in today’s society that dialogue with the pragmatic nosology of anxiety disorders. Based on the categorization proposed by Birman, which divides the modalities of contemporary suffering into three registers (the body, the excess and the intensity), we relate and deepen, with Freud, Birman and Han, with other authors in complement, how these registers relate to panic, generalized anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders. The relationship was established mainly on the basis of a way in which anxiety manifested in contemporary times is expressed in ways that go beyond the classic models of transference neuroses, related to castration anguish.

Keywords: Anxiety disorders. Contemporary psychoanalysis. Suffering in culture.

A trace of a drive’s Object in Ariana’s Ode to Dionysus, by Hilda Hilst (1974/2018)

2025-05-26T13:56:07-03:00

The article aims to highlight the richness of the interface between psychoanalysis and literature and points out the possibility that a literary work has to clarify concepts and elucidate clinical issues, something that did not escape Freud, who used poems, novels and works of art when science did not offer him the tools to explain subjective phenomena. Following this logic, the present discussion revolves around the concept of object, drive and Self, taking as its theme the songs of Ariana for Dionysus taken from the poetic work by Hilda Hilst called Ode Discontinuous and Remote for Flute and Oboe: From Ariana for Dionysus (1974), where the presence-absence game of the beloved suggests an object investment that allows us to trace a central discussion around the relationship between Ariana’s song/cry for Dionysus and the trail of psychic work that the drive investment traces as a symptomatic longing for the presence-absence of an object of desire. In this scenario, in the face of human ordinariness and the celestial greatness of an object from the Olympus of Brazilian writers, an interpretative possibility was reached that Dionysus, Hilda Hilst’s supporting character (1974), constitutes a drive’s object.

The narcissistic pact of cisgenderity: psychoanalytic digressions of the offense of nomination

2025-05-17T11:37:12-03:00

According to Cida Bento, whiteness produces alliances in order to preserve itself by means of a narcissistic pact, and we understand that cisgenderity is immersed in the narcissism of whiteness, as Viviane Vergueiro postulates. We developed the idea of a narcissistic pact of cisgenderity. Placing ourselves in the position of analysts and affirming ourselves as “the monster that listens to you”, based on Paul B. Preciado. Preciado, we are faced with a reaction of rejection to the naming of the norm, since institutional cisgenderity uses the denial of its conceptualization as a fundamental strategy of its narcissistic pact; in other words, the norm is naturalized and thus aims to preserve itself. Our aim is to show that, through narcissistic alliances and refusal, modern/colonial normativities self-preserve and present themselves, among other spaces, in psychoanalytic knowledge. In order to follow this path, our methodology is a bibliographical review, through which we associate the Freudian notion of narcissism with the definition of narcissistic pact, by Cida Bento; with Otherness, by Grada Kilomba; with the offense of naming, by Pfeil & Pfeil. In this way, we conclude that cisgenderism, as a structure of domination, operates through narcissistic pacts and ego defense mechanisms, attributing Otherness to corporealities that do not reflect it.

The performativity of insulting language and the limits of legal recognition as a response to hate speech

2024-11-02T22:54:57-03:00

What is at stake when we take an interpellation from the context of everyday life to the legal apparatus of the State? Is it possible for the State to account for the intermediation of languages in a way that is satisfactory to its intermediaries? We resort to a conceptual analysis of hate speech to analyze the consequences, impasses, and issues involved in these processes. Let us think with Judith Butler about ways to expand an understanding of hate speech as a consequence of the norm, through the performative use of language as a means of constructing responses in the very scene in which the insult appears as an exercise of oppression. The author requests means of action in the very space where the hate speech occurs, as a bet on the subject’s capacity for agency through nonconformity to the grammar of imposition of power. In addition, she uses language as a performative mode of action and the way through which the phantasmatic structure of the insulting speech against the other can be touched, transformed, and repositioned, thereby producing a new form for universalism.

“A prostitute opens the bedroom door and finds her father”: a structural analysis of a myth of so-called high-end female prostitution

2025-05-29T13:39:04-03:00

Based on anthropological research, this article draws on psychoanalytic theory to reflect on the repression of incestuous desire in the formation of the family and modern Western civility. To do so, it analyzes a story collected during fieldwork involving participant observation on high-end female prostitution in Rio de Janeiro. This story – repeatedly told among sex workers and approached here as a myth in the Straussian sense – recounts the encounter between a prostitute and her father during a paid sexual appointment. The article seeks to explore the meanings of this narrative within the ethnographic context from which it arises, while also traversing other settings to highlight the circulation of the myth (and its variants) in the social imagination surrounding prostitution on a broader scale. The discussion is framed by the question: how does the myth in question relate the economic and moral issue of sustenance, made possible through labor, to the traditional family structure prescribed as the model for modern Western society? The findings of the analysis underscore the significance of women’s labor in the underlying dynamics of desire that shape family and sexuality. It concludes, through an examination of the mytheme that gives the article its title, that the sense of dread and anguish expressed by women and represented in the mythical encounter with the father figure within the context of prostitution is tied to the conflict of meanings emerging from that setting.

The pale magic and the speech that insists: weavings of language and remnants of the Real in psychoanalysis

2025-02-25T17:19:22-03:00

The aim of this study is to explore the power of speech through an examination of theoretical concepts in Psychoanalysis, specifically focusing on the role of language and its relationship with speech. The centrality of speech in Psychoanalysis can be traced back to Sigmund Freud’s work with hysterics, where he employed the technique of free association as a means of treatment. Additionally, this research delves into the symbolic nature of language, drawing on the method of structural linguistic analysis and the concept of symbolic efficacy outlined by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Furthermore, this study positions Jacques Lacan’s re-evaluation of Freudian theories as a foundational aspect of this examination. From this theoretical framework, the present work posits that language, in its ability to express the non-sensical, reveals a deeper reality and uncovers a truth about the subject that escapes the boundaries of the symbolic order. Thus, the power of speech can be understood as existing between the diminished magic of language and the failure that persists and leads to an understanding of the Real.

The construction of trauma in the life and production of Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

2025-04-23T17:41:19-03:00

Child sexual abuse has terrible consequences for an individual’s healthy development. Among the interventions that psychoanalysis offers to deal with this type of case, symbolization through art appears as an alternative to soften the psychic reality of the trauma. This paper aims to identify this symbolization explored in the trauma resulting from sexual abuse reported in the autobiography of the american writer, Maya Angelou, “I know why the bird sings in the cage”, in line with the analysis of the poem “Beating the child was bad enough”, also by her. Definitions of trauma for Freud, Winnicott, Ferenczi and Lacan will be addressed, emphasizing the importance of art and language, especially written production, for understanding psychic suffering. The Winnicottian reading of trauma, which especially conceives of the failure of an idealized object to perform its preconceived function, is evidently identified with the sexual abuse Maya experienced from her stepfather due to the confusions of feelings she reported. Lacan’s ideas on the importance of language and its signifiers, the primordial structure of his psychoanalysis, can be expressed from the analysis of the author’s life and work, which found in literary production an alternative to symbolize her suffering. The relevance of this area of study within psychoanalysis can therefore be observed, as well as the advantages of case studies extracted from autobiographies, considering the mode of writing (in most cases, stream of consciousness) as congruent with free association, which is the basis for psychoanalytic reading.

Elaboration and hindrance of the mourning in childhood: study of psychoanalytic textual productions between 2020 and 2024

2024-06-18T20:06:20-03:00

The mourning is an experienced process from the loss, which can occur at any stage of a lifetime including childhood. However, topics related to death can be seen even nowadays as a taboo for many people. For this cultural construction, the conception of death, on the part of adults, can become a hindrance to the elaboration of children’s mourning, once they put them in a position of refusal and privation of this moment, using fictitious elements to justify the loss. Thus, this research aimed to understand the particularities of the experience of loss during childhood, considering the lack of information provided to children as an obstacle to their work of mourning. Through a bibliographic review of articles and books that addressed the theme of mourning in childhood, especially those from a psychoanalytic perspective, it was possible to highlight the need to make possible to children the participation in rituals and discussion about the death and the mourning, face of the importance for the elaboration. The survey highlights even essential the realization of more studies related to this thematic as a way to disseminate the reality of mourning also experienced by children rather than a valid experience in all its particularities discussed.

Keywords: Childhood mourning. Mourning in childhood. Psychoanalysis.

The antiphilosophical operation of Lacan’s theory of signifier

2025-02-26T13:57:14-03:00

This paper examines the theory of the signifier as conceptualized by Lacan, along with the philosophical dimensions that his proposal raises. Our thesis is that there is an antiphilosophical operation in the way how Lacan assimilates the concept of signifier. We argue that a better understanding of the radical nature of this assimilation requires a critique of the history of philosophy, particularly within the metaphysical tradition. Thus, we first explore the notion of antiphilosophy in Lacan through the work of philosopher Alain Badiou. Our aim in this presentation is to explore the epistemological consequences of the signifier and the issues raised by Lacanian anti-philosophy. To achieve this, we will trace the historical development of the Lacanian conception of the signifier and engage in a debate with central themes such as meaning, the unconscious, metaphor, and metonymy. We argue that the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis, within the framework of anti-philosophy, does not merely reflect a critique or rejection of the philosophical tradition, rather, it signifies the potential for a form of reason or truth that acknowledges the significance of determination.

Psychic suffering or mental disorder?: Clinical-political impasses between demand and reception

2025-04-02T16:41:27-03:00

This article is derived from the post-doctoral research conducted in cooperation between educational institution and the State Secretariat of Health between 2021 and 2023, starting from the issue of “non-adherence to treatment” in mental health. With the objective of collecting elaborations from the teams of the Psychosocial Care Network (RAPS) regarding the daily clinical-political impasses at the moment of rupture of the Psychiatric Reform and the outbreak of the COVID-pandemic19, the article has as methodology to analyze issues that emerged in case discussions with professionals, under the foundations of Lacanian-oriented psychoanalysis. From the researchers’ inquiry regarding “difficult cases” (suicide attempts, self-mutilation, “self-boycott” and “non-adherence to treatment”), it is extracted, as a result, the difference between the reception/treatment of mental distress and the classification/withdrawal/medicalization of mental disorder. The impossibility of listening and interdisciplinary construction generates a “care vacuum”, replaced by actions of recollection in philanthropic institutions, among other forms of intervention that feedback demands in the field of mental suffering. The article points out, as a conclusion, the need for qualification of the teams that make up the RAPS with clinical-institutional/territorial supervision, among other implementations. It brings, as a contribution to RAPS, the main supports of the psychoanalytic clinic: the transfer, in its face of resistance and the drive of death.

Correlations between the death drive and war in light of the transition to freud’s second topography

2025-05-13T19:12:51-03:00

The general scope of our article is to provide an exposition that navigates through the notions of drive (Trieb), death drive (Todestrieb), and war (Krieg). Our starting point will be Freud’s work and his correspondence with Albert Einstein. We propose a historical-conceptual and theoretical excursus on the category of the drive, examining it in light of the transition to Freud’s second topography in order to analyze the emergence of the death drive concept and its explanatory power in understanding the historical persistence of large-scale armed conflicts. Our objective is to demonstrate how Freudian metapsychological concepts can provide critical tools for reflecting on war beyond sociopolitical determinisms, thereby underscoring the psychic dimension of human aggressiveness.

Um ato clínico e político: a escuta insurgente em tempos de supressão do sujeito

2025-10-21T12:00:19-03:00