Does The Culture Of Immediacy Include Psychoanalysis?
We live in a time that is absolutely fast and at the same time voracious ; It is a moment where everything is immediate, fast, without processes.
We are only the minimum distance of a “click” to know, buy or reach everything we need…. We can have everything within our reach in the blink of an eye.
We all know that just three decades ago, things were extremely different and difficult. We had to work much harder for any issue we needed, from making a medical appointment, buying a ticket for a show, obtaining information of any kind, among other things in daily life. This way of life established a very different and particular style of link between people, time and space.
The culture of immediacy within the framework of new technologies promotes a completely different type of society and, above all, subjectivities.
Psychological implications of the Culture of Immediacy
That there is a longer or shorter space and time between what is desired and what is obtained establishes, for example, a very different form of manifestations of anxiety and psychopathological symptoms.
Different times generate different ways in which subjects are linked to anxiety, therefore different ways in which it is presented.
The culture of immediacy “demands” speed and spontaneous satisfaction, which promotes social behaviors of hyperactivity, anxiety and the constant desire for gratification. The impossibility of waiting is present and everything is “now”, urgent.
In this context, psychoanalysis seems to remain in the memory of other times and societies where our great masters lived, and to make matters worse, many publications try to leave it “outside of the current era, to the point of presenting it as almost anachronistic.”
Quite the contrary, psychoanalysis is necessary and more current than ever. Their conceptualizations are becoming more current every day, given that they theorize a lot about these concepts that are now nullified (time and space), and they categorically explain how fundamental these are for the health of the psyche.
Current pathologies respond to this logic of immediacy, as do patients, who It seems that they need answers and solutions “also immediate” turning to psychotherapies that promise the satisfaction of that urgency.
There is no time for the processes of psychic work
Magical solutions are expected for symptoms that have been manifesting for many years, and that were not given enough space or time to “speak for themselves” thus indicating something of the patient’s ailment. The analytical process requires preparation time
Immediacy is a “rushed time” and at the same time nullified, there is no place for the emergence of anguish, there is no space for mourning to take place (there are people who lose loved ones, places of residence, jobs, their homeland, etc. .), and they cannot give themselves time to elaborate on this because there is no time… And this is very serious. Nor can a dream be analyzed; For example, it is known that dream work condenses many unconscious issues that guide the psychoanalyst along the path of the cure.
There is an absence of processing anxiety, an extremely important issue for our mental health, given that it is essential to give it its place and elucidate what it is trying to tell us.
The “immediate therapies” try to abolish it, anxiety is undesirable, you cannot suffer from something, it has to disappear immediately… With medication or psychotherapies “that cover it up very quickly and forever.” Utopian attempt, given that what is avoided on one side will inevitably emerge on the other, converted into a different symptom, but there it will be again, insisting, making itself seen.
The analytical work proposes time, waiting and space, a dialectical interplay between presences and absences, fundamental to founding the symbolic register of our language, essential for a well-placed psyche.
Today there is no time to be bored or to suffer from something…. This will have very serious consequences on our mental health. Objects are offered instead of words to endure emptiness and anguish The notion of “emptiness” is fundamental to the subjective constitution. If this is not promoted, there will be no possibility of subjectivity being constituted. I leave this issue raised and not explained enough because it is very complex and is not the purpose of this article.
If it is about blocking everything “that bothers” there will be no places left for certain desires to appear. The void, the unfilled space, is a place with the necessary potential for something new to come. If it were understood that this is of vital importance for the growth of a subject, I am sure that many situations would stop, leaving gaps to not be filled. This would be, for example, letting our children encounter these voids… Let them get a little anxious, let them get bored and so that their creativity can get going.
