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This sophisticated, courageous book attempts to write the impossible, to give word and representation to catastrophe in its social, political, and personal dimensions through the author's curiosity, engagement, and clinical experience. It calls to mind an ongoing dialogue with the work of psychoanalytic authors on trauma, the impossible to represent, issues of representability and figurability, and the functions of analysis, as not only discovering what has already been represented but also trying to give figure and image, word and representation, to trauma and the void (see Lacan, André Green, César and Sara Botella, among others). Carlos Moguillansky focuses on the possible passage from catastrophe to catastrophic change, using figures like outlines and silhouettes, in all their intricate and multiple meanings and functions. While these figures represent absence, they also open a potential transitional space for elaboration through playing, interpreting, and appropriating, making catastrophic experiences one's own through art, literature, creative endeavors, and the analytic situation. In an introduction and twenty-two chapters, the author interweaves references to art, literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, presenting back-and-forth movements and iterations, creating a patchwork of concepts open to questioning and elaboration. Exhibiting a sensibility almost baroque in its richness and exuberance, his writing presents and represents catastrophe and its vicissitudes in a spiral movement of playfulness and utter seriousness.
Moguillansky, a prolific writer, is a training analyst at the Buenos Aires Psychoanalytical Association (APdeBA, a component society of the IPA). He is also a professor at APdeBA-IUSAM, an institution offering psychoanalytic training within the university setting of the Instituto Universitario de Salud Mental, founded in 2005 under his presidency of APdeBA. He begins this book, Saying the Impossible, by relating catastrophe to an event that