Each era has goals toward which it ideally tends, including that which horrifies and insistently rejects it. Thus, in the diachrony of time, significant shifts occur in culture, even contradictory to each other. For example, let’s think about the relationship with suffering, especially a counterpoint between the Victorian era and our own.
In the 19th century, after the death of her husband Albert, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom imposed a rigorous mourning period that lasted at least forty years, always dressed in black until her own death. Such a show of pain and respect for the memory of the deceased, she found its foundation in the late influences of a specific cultural movement, romanticism. According to those ideals, a true love is unique and irreplaceable, which is why it must be eternalized indifferent to earthly limits.
Philippe Ariès, a scholar of Western culture’s relationship with death, went so far as to say that at that time a mourning could be “flaunted” with pride in social circles. On the other hand, anyone who did not comply with the rites and customs of mourning was stigmatized under the weight of a lack of moral nature.
According to contemporary diagnostic manuals used in the field of mental health, a forty-year period of grief would be classified as a “Complex and Persistent Grief Disorder” (CPDD), among other related names. Although there is no consensus among the authors, the most demanding ones consider that the work of mourning should not exceed six months, others extend it to a year or even more. Of course, this reductionist perspective assumes that the death of a spouse is equivalent in each case, as if the formal kinship relationship itself explained the particularity of the bond in question.
As often happens, the obsession with dates and deadlines ends up forcing an arbitrary separation between the normal and the pathological. However, each loss is unique, limited to the place the partner occupied in the life project. Until further notice, subjectivity is not quantifiable according to numerical scales, which does not discourage health bureaucracies and their desire to normalize. Beyond opinions on the duration of mourning work, the same obstacle is always found: with what arguments can we explain to someone how much they must suffer for their loss?
Now… What changed between the Victorian era and ours? At one time a grief that spans decades is a sign of transcendental love, at another a form of mental disorder that requires pharmacological intervention. In short, what changes are the symbolic coordinates of the time, that is, an invisible network of meanings available when it comes to signifying the vicissitudes of existence.
By the way, anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer proposes the following inversion of terms: if in the Victorian era sexuality was repressed and death was part of public rituals, now sex is in the shop window and death has become taboo. Other authors understand that our time is characterized by a manic exaltation of pleasure and, consequently, a horror of discomfort and suffering.
Although social media has many uses, from the best to the worst, in general it is a compilation of images of happy moments and personal achievements. Likewise, in recent decades, the proliferation of disciplines that aim to enhance self-realization and psychophysical well-being has been notable, whether in the massive publication of self-help books or in the diversity of coaching practices. In other words, discomfort has bad press. Here is an obstacle that blocks the emergence of a fundamental question: why does discomfort break out at one moment and not another?
In tune with the state of the situation, at the beginning of a psychotherapeutic treatment it is usually demanded that the discomfort and anguish simply disappear, as if it were a physical ailment among others. It will be said that it is a sensible demand, and in essence it is, except that the fundamental thing of the matter is at stake there. Rushing to take a shortcut is not the same as consenting to a necessary detour.
If we understand that discomfort is only a disturbance of emotional balance, then treatment will focus on restoring said balance as soon as possible. On the other hand, if we admit the “message function” of discomfort, then the possibility of questioning what each one is entangled in and why opens up. As it is always said in our practice, a psychoanalysis is an invitation to build knowledge about the true cause of one’s own discomfort.
If in his time Jacques Lacan used to repeat that anguish is an affect that does not deceive, it is because there is a cause, no matter how enigmatic it may be at the moment. From now on it is a work of decipherment that goes in the opposite direction to the trends of the time and its immediacy. For this reason, it is more difficult for our culture to conceive that anxiety can have a specific function. Behind the imperative to be happy, this function remains hidden and waiting for better conditions to be heard.
Regarding the potential good uses of anxiety, two analogies are often evoked: anxiety as a compass and also as an alarm clock. If it works like a compass, it is because it allows a subject to orient himself regarding the need to specify what has stopped working in his way of dealing with existence. If it also works as an alarm clock, it is because it invites us not to fall asleep in what Sigmund Freud called “neurotic misery”, namely, getting used to living conditioned by one’s own madness.
