Helplessness: «Event» and repetition. Après coup in transference

Abstract

The paper suggests discriminating what is always traumatic in helplessness, essential for the constitution of the subject, from helplessness which fragments (desestructura) and makes psychic assembly processes difficult, where the commerce between the ego, the superego and the unconscious does not promote the mobility of the different transcriptions in the psychic
structure. The author indicates that the structural traumatic, unavoidable primal violence, with its two possible paths: the fellow other does not «exist» (no «es»), «is» not (no «está») everything that the omnipotence and the helplessness
of the baby «would need», which forces the toleration of limits, mourning what is lost forever, but which also allows for the search of new forms of transcription. In this encounter there is also the erotization of the body of the infans by the adult. Necessary erogeneity, but only if it includes the recognition that the infans is another. But we also find the fragmenting helplessness and the intrusion of the adult. The frequency of excess, manifest in an erotization – possession and / or absence – lack of libidinization, which severely mark the structure. These traumatisms need to be put into words and this is only possible
in the transference, committing to the pain of the other and accepting that the word will never manage to account for psychic suffering.