The voice of agony

echoes of the (un)speakable on psychoanalytic clinics

Abstract

In psychoanalytic clinics, sensitive listening to the uneasiness that escapes symbolization makes it necessary to address the unsaid. In this paper, we explore the frequent naming of agony on the part of the analyzed, referring to a threat that makes everyday life more difficult. In order to further explore the theme of agony, we begin with Freud’s 1930 text Civilization and Its Discontents, in which he suggests that the production of suffering comes from three directions: from the body itself, from the outside world, and from relationships with other human beings. Emphasizing the last of the three, we understand culture as something built in relation to the other, significantly influencing the constitution of subjectivity. It is therefore unavoidable to consider the first of all relationships. Agony, as explored by several authors throughout this paper, reveals itself as an affective thread that denounces an early, basic failure produced in the relationship with the other, a state of extreme helplessness. Agony, understood as a feeling beyond anguish, can also express psychic collapse, a primal experience, that which escapes symbolization, a limit-experience of the subject, and annihilation anxiety. The voice of agony haunts contemporaneity: past events that return, populating psychic life with intensities for which no meaning has yet been found and that, by continuing to haunt, generate terrifying pain. This article explores the proposition that the psychoanalytic space makes possible the return of this state as unsymbolized psychic and bodily memories of something experienced under such conditions. The sensitive work of the analyst in transference allows new meanings to emerge and opens up new perspectives of existence for the analyzed, other than the imprisonment of agony.