Situated and plural psychoanalysis: boundaries, inquiries, and conceptual innovations

Abstract

The working group “Psychoanalysts in a Plural World” was formed from the desire to share psychoanalysts’ practices beyond the boundaries of the therapist’s couch. The objective is to collectively construct a set of tools to enrich the interpretation of the particularities that occur in these different experiences. These are questions that take as their starting point some feelings and affects that emerged in the field of transference during interventions that occurred in clinical situations in the social field in Porto Alegre and Buenos Aires. To reflect in a socially and historically situated manner on both the processes of subjectivation and psychoanalytic practice means incorporating diversity and plurality into our theories and practices, as well as “making visible” the existence of a hegemonic imaginary in psychoanalytic societies. It requires denaturalizing certain power relations, putting into crisis historical perspectives maintained as “official” in order to propose alternative forms of construction of the collective.