The Psychoanalytic Crisis: The Place of Ego in a Contemporary World

Abstract

Psychoanalysis rose at the end of the nineteenth century as a possibility of reintegrating the mind and body. This came up as proposing a theory that empirically demonstrates that emotions create symptoms in the body. Psychoanalysis introduces a subject moved by desires, governed by the unconscious. Since then, in a dialectic perspective, search and offer to society a counterpoint view of current thought, offering new insights and reflection, bringing enlightenment of what is obscure in individuals’ internal life. The contemporary psychoanalytic crisis comes from conflict avoidance, not worrying in the integrative view, falling into a trap of “politically correct,” that is, accepting what is advocated, without questioning, not putting on the agenda the obscure side effects in human beings, the Unconscious. Therefore, in a psychoanalytic theoretical perspective, this chapter has the aim to reflect about the psychic suffering inside a body identity, without getting into sociological and anthropological meanings about the shaping of social identity. This study seeks to present the psychic suffering of the unidentified body, which not always will find resolution in an aesthetic procedure that might be belonging to a fantasy and identity recognition.