Anxiety, temporality and the challenges of contemporary psychoanalysis

Interview with Mário Eduardo Costa Pereira

Abstract

: In this interview, Mario Eduardo Costa Pereira discusses the relationship between anxiety and temporality in the contemporary world, taking as a starting point the idea of a “collapse of temporality,” in which the future tends to be experienced less as an opening toward possibility and more as a horizon of threat, closure, and catastrophe. The discussion addresses the social, economic, technological, and environmental transformations that shape contemporary forms of suffering and examines the challenges they pose to psychoanalysis. By considering the historical conditions in which psychoanalytic practice itself emerged, the interview discusses the need for a mode of listening capable of sustaining the singularity of the subject without separating it from the historical, political, and cultural conditions that participate in its constitution. In this context, the analytic experience is conceived as a possible space for working through suffering and reconstructing a temporality open to desire and the future.