Maria Homem: “People are increasingly lonely”

The divan is a sober and fundamental piece in the beautiful house with a backyard, in the Siciliano neighborhood, in São Paulo. The dim light offers complicity and the large wooden door closes to ensure that the secrets told there will be deciphered and well kept by the São Paulo psychoanalyst Maria Homem. In her cozy office, she describes herself like this: “I live by listening to people and talking to them – and also with their creations, their dreams, books, films, poems, symptoms”. The material revealed by the analysand and the associations he makes based on it allow him to access his own unconscious, his fantasies and understand himself better.

In Maria’s hands, the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, cinema and literature become a working tool. she wrote the book On the Threshold of Silence and the Letter – Traces of Authorship in Clarice Lispector and points out as inspiration, in addition to this Brazilian writer, the 6-year-old son and the students with whom he exchanges experiences. Professor at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (Faap) and researcher at Núcleo Diversitas, at the University of São Paulo, she became a favorite after posting videos on YouTube and teaching, at Casa do Saber, topics such as love, abandoning the collective to be single, the end of genres and the price of the frantic pursuit of happiness. Our conversation with Maria:

CLAUDIA: One of your themes is the pain of love. Because it hurts?

Maria Man: Mainly because we idealize one thing and live another. There is a mismatch in the way we take affective relationships. We demand a lot from each other. And, nowadays, this is aggravated by the transformations of the social, psychic and economic places occupied by men and women. There is also the displacement of ideas of gender and sexuality. That is, in addition to the old Platonic clash between the ideal and the real, we now have multiple situations that interfere with the engineering of affections. Finally, let us not forget, we are immersed in a profoundly consumerist logic: Narcissus is bored with the object of love and already wants the next one.

Why do you say that we abandoned the collective to be single🇧🇷

We came out of a collectivized base, in which authority was clear, linked to tradition, to God, to the figure of paternal power. We ask: “Why do you know? Why is he in charge? I also think, I want to negotiate”. This was the modern turn to found individuality. Today, subjectivity is extended to groups that were previously excluded. Women, gays, people with disabilities became subjects. There are many having children without a husband, couples living in separate homes and elderly people living alone. The nuclear family will almost implode to establish the mosaic family: a father here, a mother there; a father dating a young man, then the romance ends, he comes back… They are singularities that build webs. Architecturally, spaces are reduced, with beautiful, tiny and expensive apartments. Where do you group? In the ballroom, at the bar, at the gym. People find themselves more and more lonely, they have become single🇧🇷 Maybe in 50 years this won’t be a complaint; just a human condition. What we notice as a trend is the cohousing🇧🇷 The movement will grow because the person says: “Oops, it’s boring to arrive and not have anyone to talk to”. The “big family home” model will give way to homes shared by friends or couples with children. Smaller houses are starting to appear on land for common use, with a single kitchen, a backyard and bicycles for everyone. They are even cheaper.

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Society psychoanalyzes itself and, as you can see, comes into the office saying, “My ego is inflated” or “I have been castrated in the past. Freud explains”. Does it make self-knowledge difficult?

Freud entered mass culture. Everyone uses the ideas of the Oedipus complex, the drive, repression. And they blame the father, the mother. It’s interesting? Yes, because you arrive at the office. Before, people didn’t stop to listen to each other and to open up too. Speaking transforms. But they come with various rationalized diagrams that block access to the unconscious. An analysand takes time to reach something elaborate. The process of self-knowledge requires alchemy and it hurts. To understand oneself, a person goes around, opens a door, closes it. Slowly, in the sessions, there are holes in that ready-made speech.

As a Lacanian, you see better the power of the word. What do we mean by so much verbiage on social media? What contours did speaking take on?

Invited to give an opinion on everything, we are making a lot of mistakes with so much verbiage. I distrust this fallacy. For elections and political crises, 2016 was a key year. However, there were no advances. So far the discourses have been regressive; a contemporary symptom of the most terrible. Talk is empty, inconsequential, primary and its basic function is to let affection flow. It is almost relieving, it rides on emotion, but it goes downhill. The content has been narcissistic. No one listens to the other, only himself. The person says: “You coxinha”, or “You piece of shit”. Life is more complex and tougher than that. I think we have to shut up. The fundamental question of politics is: “How can we live together?” And it is not being answered.

In a reflection on the woman, he wrote: “The body is mine and I offer it to your gaze, but you cannot touch it. You look. That’s the limit.” Are men already beginning to understand this?

The value of virility is linked to strength and courage. It’s there in the classics, in Homer, Ulysses, in the heroes. Our tradition asks, “Are you strong or weak?” My son starts to understand these categories and wants to know: “Who can do more? My father or so and so?” The masculine is imprisoned in potency. So, how is the man going to keep himself in the place of desire without using force on the woman, the object of his desire? But she also became desiring and thinks: “How can I maintain a common life when I, today, am a subject and so is he?” To enter the culture of rape and the logic of domestic violence: the man desires the woman and she makes herself desirable. She plays with her own body, and that integrates the feminine. He stands erect; however, he depends on something outside to reach that state. She does not. She is genuinely powerful. This is an advantage that the man cannot stand – so much so that he suffocates the woman. And he uses violence especially when he sees himself banished from the post of manhood. When she says “No, you can’t” or goes with someone else, the affront to potency is done. He assumed she was his and feels betrayed – trigger number 1 for femicide. Rape culture is capitalist, it is in the usufruct matrix. The guy states, “I want this merchandise. And she, in that delicious packaging [sic], why are you going to refuse?”. It is an obedience to the capitalist culture, which “fetishizes” the merchandise. In a feminist paradigm, she reacts: “I may not accept it”. And it can. So it’s been really complicated.

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Where are we going with all this?

I dream of the day when women exercise their sensuality, corporeality and eroticism as they wish. I don’t know if there’s a key to turn: “Now I’m a woman, you can look at me, at my dress, desire me”. We are skating a little there. We don’t know how to stop machismo – and we stop it with some violence. Here I criticize a feminist discourse that, a priori, complains: “The guy is sexist, he looked at my chest”. How are we going to maintain the link between two desiring subjects? We cannot lose the relationship between the bodies.

Why does man, in general, not support rejection?

He was born in a splendid cradle. Mother and son form one of the most pregnant fantasies in history. A man has to go through a great deal of mourning to leave his mother’s love and bond with another. Many do not take this route, they are “married” to their mother until they die. They become a dom-juan or choose novels doomed to failure so that, unconsciously, they continue in the imaginary mother-baby partnership.

In this melting pot of genres in which we live, what are the achievements and limits?

Soon gender will be indifferent. One will listen to the other as a partner in walking the Earth. I was born on XX chromosomes, I reproduce, I carry life. I’m happy like this, but it could not be and it wouldn’t make me any less subject for it. At the moment, we are experiencing a delirium of disconnection from nature, flirting with the ability to obtain anything through the flesh. With robotic technology, we create another sex, another heart. It is biopower, the cyborg tendency, artificial intelligence, being and not being human at the same time. We have men in female bodies, women in male bodies, people who transform themselves, take hormones, undergo surgery. The human has a lot of ambition, he is trying to break the limit of the real. I don’t know how much is madness and how much is daring. In 100, 200 years, we’ll just see this as a crossroads crossed. We will be whatever we want.

You say: “Happiness is sought and depression is found”. Because?

The search should be based on: “How can we, together, create richer and simpler ways of living?” Why are we avoiding the question: “What is interesting for me and for the collective?” We remain in the simplistic, infantilized and manic-depressive binomial. He alternates euphoria – a lot of artificiality in a pumped, festive, entertainment joy – and depression. This happiness is hollow. The clinic reveals that it is not working and therefore the person falls into the opposite. Depression does not mean creative melancholy. She is nothing. And also a disease that can paralyze.

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Marriage is once again celebrated and glamourised. An ideal of perfection to be pursued. Because?

Perfection is almost an obsession. One of her names today is success. What is glamorized is the spectacle. You buy the wedding-show: the preparation, the arrival at the church, the bouquet, the dinner, the toasting slippers, the inn on the island. There is a video and photo of the before, during, and honeymoon. We believe in the image. Later comes life. And she doesn’t match the spectacularization of things. It’s arid, a hard beat.

Is it possible for a person to live without hate?

Not. Because hate is a structuring feeling. It’s there, in the baby, it will destroy inside or out. Displeased, he will react aggressively. And you will find containment from those outside. At that moment, he discovers the obstacle, which is the other. So hate helps to work out the contours of the self. We need the action of forces in opposite directions: that of connection and connection that are opposed to that of separation and destruction. You can’t just paste; you need to break, tear down, undo ties to build other links. The problem is not the hate, but the performance of it. An adult must understand that the other is autonomous and independent, has his own way of exercising sexuality, beliefs and ideologies. Disagreeing with him, instead of reacting with fury, he should take the opportunity to elaborate intolerance. And he has an obligation to curb his aggressive impulses.

Today, what are the main…