Clinical work in contexts of poverty and marginalization

“The silence that inhabits us. Psychoanalytic listening where the human resists”, Published by Tiempo Robado Editoras, 2024, it is a robust and delicate book at the same time, a book where the intimacy of clinical accounts is linked to the necessary critical evaluation of neoliberal social reality.

This is the compilation made by the self-baptized Women of Silencepsychologists Magdalena Correa, Claudia Curimil, Pilar Soza, Evelyn Ortega and Romina Petersen, who, through psychoanalysis, insert their clinical work in contexts of poverty and marginalization in Santiago de Chile, where the State intervenes by ignoring subjectivity and denying the very violence it exerts through its policies of confinement and exclusion.

The group Women of Silence It was born and developed by sharing the study and reflection on the clinical approach to children admitted to the residential protection system (ex-SENAME), as well as the respectful and artisanal work of therapeutic support for their parents and relatives.

This group of psychologists and psychoanalysts gather around a tree filled with experience, technical acumen, tenderness and intelligence. This imaginary “pillar” was and continues to be the Chilean psychoanalyst Pilar Soza Bulnes (1951-2020) through her texts and her memory as a clinical supervisor, teacher, colleague and friend.

The first third of this valuable book for Chilean Psychoanalysis includes 9 writings by her as author or co-author. This compilation is a fair – and posthumous – tribute and recognition of Pilar as a brave, creative and sensitive thinker of the reality of the most unprotected.

Escuchar the silence that inhabits us It was the guide for a clinical work situated and itinerant through the city in search of apprehending and giving meaning to that which is not named, that which is erased, that which is dismissed by the protagonists of the cases presented here in their own personal and family histories, and thus contributing to the living fabric where subjectivity is interrupted in the ruptures of the social bond. To listen to the silence is, in this way, to feel the density of abandonment and the raw lack of protection to which the most impoverished population of our country is subjected.

If the majority of Chileans feel that they do not have the support of the State to face old age, work, childhood and life – as was expressed during the social outbreak of 2019 – the people who star in the clinical vignettes of this book live in a present devoid of future. They are a population labeled as “vulnerable” and who, on the other hand, are a risk for the dominant society, that is, “vulnerators”, subjects of suspicion of parental incapacity, first of all, and social incapacity, in their entirety.

The book draws on authors such as Bleichmar, Aulagnier, Kaës, Davoine, Gaudillière, Salazar and S. Freud, and concludes with refreshing writings, reflections and experiences of Chilean and foreign psychoanalysts who knew Pilar Soza in her life journey. The thread that runs through the pen of these texts is the inclusion of violence in psychoanalytic listening, since “Violence has a name; it is worth naming.” (Soza, P, p. 117)