Interview with Julieta Jerusalinsky

the childhood of our times

Abstract

The interview with Julieta Jerusalinsky situates contemporary childhood from the vantage point of the psychoanalytic clinic, considering that, since children are less structured, they are more exposed to the social symptom of their time, thus revealing the directions culture is taking. Childhood is traversed by the desire to “grow up”, where growing up is overlaid with the pursuit of ideals, while — unconsciously — intergenerational transmission carries the expectation that the next generation will succeed where the previous one failed. Hence, children’s heightened attention to the future. Yet we must question how the relation to the future is produced when such hope coexists with the threat of a civilizational project that promotes unrestrained consumption, causing environmental devastation, climate crises fueled by political denialism, and social injustices that exacerbate intolerance by suppressing sociability and respect for otherness. Children pay attention to these issues. The Covid-19 pandemic not only deprived babies, children, and adolescents of structuring experiences, it also catalyzed “electronic intoxications,” imposing an algorithmic overdetermination that fills temporal and spatial gaps from which inventive creations might otherwise emerge. Virtuality presents itself as a fourth register that has obstructed structural symptoms in their knotting of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. As an ethical and clinical way forward, the proposal is to sustain play, shared experiences in daily coexistence, and conversation as modes of elaboration and of supporting bonds, so that the sense of living is not annihilated by individualism, competitiveness, and the immediacy imposed by ready-made answers that suppress the acts of naming producible through the subversion of the subject of desire.