Escenas de lo fraterno

Abstract

In this paper, the authors, members of the APU Couple and Family Laboratory, revisit the theme of the fraternal and its ramifications. In recent years, advances in information technology and the desire to think with others have enabled scientific connection with psychoanalytic colleagues and institutions, overcoming geographical, cultural, and conceptual distances. Exchanges of ideas and perspectives around praxis foster critical and collaborative thinking, which is central to the transmission of contemporary psychoanalysis. Drawing on the interest in the fraternal, the paper engages with René Kaës’s and Luis Kancyper’s conceptualizations of the «fraternal complex». The transgenerational dimension is brought into focus in the myth of Antigone according to Sophocles (441 BCE), as well as in expressions of contemporary culture. The myth of Antigone, as a metaphor for unconscious conflicts inherent to the human condition, allows for a psychoanalytic consideration of the vicissitudes of siblinghood and friendship, against the backdrop of the Oedipal configuration, as well as unconscious alliances and the history of what remains unelaborated from previous generations. This may be staged both in contemporary clinical practice and in certain institutional dynamics, potentially affecting the possibility of finding creative and libidinal solutions to discomforts and tensions.