La escucha del silencio

Abstract

The paper approaches helplessness from a psychoanalytic and sociocultural perspective, drawing on Freud’s concept of Hilflosigkeit as a foundational condition of subjectivity. It argues that each historical period expresses helplessness in a singular way, articulating the subjective and the social through a logic of «extimacy». Based on the analysis of media discourses and contemporary social scenes, it proposes that the repetition of certain signifiers —such as insecurity— points to an unsymbolized terror that reactivates the uncanny and the intolerable, fostering mechanisms of exclusion and projection. The paper introduces the problem of silence, both as an effect of terror that paralyzes and renders speech impossible and as a potential ethical and structuring operator. Two forms of silence are distinguished: symbolic silence, linked to the alternation of presence and absence that underlies psychic structuring, and primordial silence, associated with the constitutive nothingness of the subject. Within this framework, the voice, the cry, and their rudimentary forms are conceived as calls to the Other that, when heard, make possible the emergence of language and the social bond. Through clinical, social, and cultural examples, the paper reflects on the analyst’s position in relation to contemporary suffering, emphasizing the need not to remain silent in the face of horror. It concludes that giving voice to silence entails recognizing helplessness, enabling its elaboration, and promoting an ethics that articulates the singular and the political, thereby avoiding the dehumanization of others and opening possibilities for symbolization and ethical responsibility.