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Chair: Ricardo Readi
Presenters: Mónica Cardenal, Jeanne Magagna, Alicia Monserrat
All participants of the panel are members of the International Psychoanalytic Association’s committee Psychoanalytic Assistance in Crises and Emergencies (PACE), Mónica Cardenal being its chair, Ricardo Readi the co-chair for Latin America, and Jeanne Magagna and Alicia Monserrat link members in their respective institutions. PACE is a recently created committee whose importance for the IPA was demonstrated by the assignment of the main auditorium for this event, with simultaneous translation; although there were only about 30 people in the audience, the hybrid modality allowed for an additional 70 people to attend remotely. PACE provides assistance and psychoanalytic interventions around the globe to populations facing crises, establishing links between our field, other professions, governmental agencies and humanitarian organisations.
The first talk, by Alicia Monserrat, was titled “Communication in PACE: ‘Subjectivity Threatened: Context of Social Distress. Tackling by Way of Collective Devices.’” The speaker recalled that the central project of PACE consists of organising work discussion groups with professionals such as teachers, nurses or medical doctors, who attend victims of traumatic situations caused by natural disasters or mankind. Such groups use and transmit psychoanalytic methods to help vulnerable populations, enabling the acknowledgement of unconscious processes which are involved in any task. In this context, the Madrid Psychoanalytic Association offers devices of contention based on the concept of après-coup or Nachträglichkeit, according to which the effect of a traumatic experience can only be thought of through representations in a retroactive way. One of the achievements of these group dynamics is to bring closer to each other what is experienced and what is narrated. The idea is not only to contain anxieties, but also to reflect upon the effects, a project that imp