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The world was a different place when Marcelo Viñar began writing Psychoanalytic Experiences in the Sociocultural Present. Before the pandemic, the vicissitudes of the subject in the rapidly shifting contexts of the last two centuries always linked to familiar events, the emblematic social upheavals and societal catastrophes of which much had already been written. Now, mid-pandemic (we think, we hope), the world is indeed changed, but the subjectivities under the microscope of Viñar's worried gaze remain the same. Perhaps it is that some invariance of personality requires more than a catastrophic event to alter the new mix of compositions of the twenty-first century selves emerging in our consulting rooms since before the pandemic. These new and fluid compositions have been hard won through slow time and by dint of the cumulative press of change. Upon finishing this book, readers will have no doubt of Viñar's attunement to how the present moment may shape the internal lives of post-pandemic generations. In these pages, they will find an author who sees the world at a sociocultural crossroads. It is at this intersection, characterized by what he calls “civilizational vertigo,” that Viñar brings to bear his wise, often agnostic, lens.
Viñar writes at the start of his book that he wants to interrogate the subject of today's liquid modernity, a phrase coined by Zygmunt Bauman. “Liquid” refers to the inconsistency or dispersion of definitions that modifies social links, including those of life, love, work, and customs. He shows how, far from being stimulated in this new, socially mediated world, diversity is suppressed, as dialogue quickly escalates into conflict and censorship, and spaces of sameness expand at the expense of messy but personal human encounters. Viñar provides us plenty of personal information to offset the erroneous impression that we are reading the words of a disillusioned psychoanalyst who feels out of step with a changing world (though he might, now i