“In the analysis, the place where you face the experience of otherness, of foreignness, of the unconscious that goes through you, it doesn't appear as knowledge. Of course, in an analysis, you get a lot of knowledge, but it's not an important aspect of an analysis. I think that in the analysis, and that's the idea of using that word ‘transmission’ instead of ‘teaching’, what you receive is something that the analyst doesn't have. When you receive some knowledge from a teacher, you receive the knowledge the teacher has. When you transmit something, or when you receive something that has been transmitted by the analyst or by the psychoanalytical setting, is something that the other doesn't have. It's a kind of void. It's a kind of fire. It's like the baton that every runner passes to others in a relay race. It is something more difficult to be grasped with words, is something elusive to words, but it does exist.”

Episode Description: We begin with describing the 'necessary foreignness' of psychoanalysis, "It is from both a foreign perspective and foreign listening that makes it possible to notice the concealed underpinnings, to discover the new, and to express the unexpressed." We consider the clinical asymmetry that allows for the patient's unbridled freedom to think and speak the unspeakable. Educationally, Mariano discusses the essential transmission of analytic experience as contrasted with the teaching of knowledge - a distinction between science and mystery. He shares his thoughts on eclectisism, hypothesis testing and risk. We close with recognizing that the "anachronistic method of psychoanalytic listening is the most authentic way of being contemporary."

 

Our Guest: Mariano Horenstein, PhD is a training and supervising analyst who belongs to the IPA, FEPAL (Latin American Psychoanalytical Federation), and the international research group "Geographies of Psychoanalysis". He is an IPA Board member and a former chief editor of Calibán, the official Journal of FEPAL. Former Training Director of APC (Argentina). His articles have been translated into Portuguese, English, Farsi, French, Russian, Italian, Portuguese and German. Author of four books :Psychoanalysis in Minor Language, The Compass and the Couch. Psychoanalysis and its Necessary Foreignness, Funambulistas. Travesía adolescente y riesgo and Artists, Writers and Philosophers on Psychoanalysis. From the Couch. He has received international awards as M. Bergwerk (about the clinic forms of Evil), Lucien Freud (about Psychoanalysis and Culture); Elise Hayman Award for the study of Holocaust and Genocide (given by the IPA); A. Garma (given by the Spanish Association of Neuropsychiatry); the FEPAL Award and Carolina Zamora Award (given by Madrid Psychoanalytical Association).

http://www.marianohorenstein.com/

 

 

Recommended Readings:

Horenstein, Mariano, The compass and the couch. Psychoanalysis and its necessary foreignness, Mimesis, Milan, 2018.

 

Horenstein, Mariano, Artists, writers and philosophers on Psychoanalysis. From the couch, Routledge, London, 2024.

 

Horenstein, Mariano, Psicoanálisis en lengua menor, Viento de Fondo, Córdoba, 2015.

 

Preta, Lorena (ed), Dislocated subject, Mimesis, Milan, 2018.

 

Preta, Lorena (ed), Geographies of Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, Milan, 2015.

 

Preta, Lorena, The brutality of things. Psychic transformations of reality, Mimesis, Milan, 2019.

 

Wohlfarth, I., Hombres del extranjero. Walter Benjamin y el Parnaso judeoalemán, Taurus, CDMX, 2014.