The psychology of the other: the trick of diversity and the difficulty in talking about one's self

 

 

Gustavo Pessoa

Psychologist at Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC/SP). Master in Developmental Psychology at Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Analyst member of Brazilian Society of Analytical Psychology (SBrPA) and of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP). He maintains a private practice in São Paulo, SP. e-mail: gustavompessoa@gmail.com

 

 

---

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to problematize the ideas of the other and of difference. By exploring the use of the term diversity, a questioning begins about what psychic functioning underlies the exaltation of so-called diverse people. Taking concepts from the social sciences, especially the ideas of coloniality and heteropatriarchy, a possibility of understanding the notions of the other and of diversity in analytical psychology is articulated. The theoretical frame of cultural complexes is used for this purpose. The perspective of the materiality of the other is affirmed, thus revealing the narcissistic character of observing and listening to the other from an abstract perspective that only benefits one's own development.

Keywords: diversity, normativity, coloniality, heteropatriarchy, analytical psychology.

---

 

 

Diversity

The word diversity has been used as an effort to bring together a variety of bodies in different contexts, moving away from the uniformity of bodies observed until then in our society. Usually, when we observe the use of the term diversity in digital social networks, in the press and other vehicles of general interest, it is expected that we have contact with black people, women, LGBTI people and people with disabilities as participants and guests in this theme, be they events, publications, research or any other type of public or private initiative.

It is important to note that, as Levi-Strauss (2021) points out in The raw and the cooked, a concept often comes into existence as a double, bringing within itself what it is and also what it denies being: the idea of raw food only establishes itself after we form the image of food cooked through the technology of fire. There is no raw without cooked and, in the idea of cooked, we have already imagined what is raw. Following this same reasoning, when we talk about diversity, the question is: diverse from what?

By carrying out a historical survey on the idea of heterosexuality, Katz (2007) shows us that a hegemonic norm is established through concealment, taking the place in our thinking of what we consider normal. By imprisoning the notion of normalcy within heterosexuality, and also of the idea of what is most common, we establish what is abnormal and unusual. Thus, as Katz (2007) points out, the norm of heterosexuality was socially undertaken, while all other sexualities became abnormal, uncommon and, almost always, deviant and pathological.

As Foucault (2020) tells us, sexuality is a device of power. Through sexuality and the establishment of the norm, those who hold power are able to control bodies and hierarchize them. It is evident that, in the context in which patriarchal heterosexuality is the hegemonic regime that rules over bodies, it will be white heterosexual men of high economic classes who will hold power.

If power is exercised by those who fit the norm, it is these people who will have the means to build large-scale initiatives. Everything else will be resistance.

In the current legislature of Brazil's Chamber of Deputies, for example, about 25% of parliamentarians are black. Only 15% of MPs identify as women. This scenario is just one example of what runs through our history, in which the heteropatriarchal system reproduces itself and produces what has been named the heteropatriarchal complex (PESSOA, 2022).

Thus, large projects that focus on the mentioned minority groups will inevitably be sponsored by those who do not belong to these groups. In this sense, what is called diversity will need allies to have space and express its voice in places of greater resonance. Such approaches are welcome and allow a notion of democracy that includes those who are minorized.

On the other hand, we cannot forget that a political project of profound transformation requires the awareness of those who are involved in it. It is curious to note that Jung (2013) defines individuation as "always, to some extent, opposed to the collective norm, since it means separation and differentiation of the generic for the construction of the particular" (par. 751). The problem is that, in order to differentiate ourselves from collective norms, we need to be aware of them. In this sense, the explanation of the hegemonic hidden norm is a fundamental step if we intend to undertake a process of individuation. It is, therefore, necessary that we make it explicit when we speak of diversity that it is the diverse in relation to the collective norm that subjugates us and launches us into the enterprise of elaborating, among others, the heteropatriarchal complex.

The heteropatriarchal complex is a cultural complex founded on trauma that inferiorizes and causes psychological suffering to people based on social and structural issues related to sex and gender issues, based on an expected universal norm against which we are all unconsciously compared (PESSOA, 2022).

It is essential that the norm remains explicit, to the detriment of, if we do not, we create inappropriate universal categories and forget that those who are different from us are also subjects for whom we compose diversity. This problem is endlessly reproduced in a series of problems of minority groups.

 

The colonial view of the other

Those diverse from me become, in our culture and our time, the ones who are different from the heterosexual white male. We look at people who represent diversity like they are the other, and we reflect on the other that inhabits us. It is important to listen to what the other says because he will bring us the novelty and creativity that we often lack. In this sense, the other becomes the very representative of what is unconscious to us.

It is not just the other who enlightens us about ourselves. Through contact with the other, we can reflect on how we see them. What the other says will reveal how we listen; what others present will tell us about how we see them and the world. Anibal Quijano, a Peruvian sociologist, forged the concept of coloniality of power to characterize the way of seeing and thinking about the world that takes as central everything that is European and leaves under the aegis of the other the ways of seeing, thinking, feeling and acting that are formed from the cultures of other peoples. Quijano (2009) affirms coloniality as

one of the constitutive and specific elements of the world pattern of capitalist power. It is based on the imposition of a racial/ ethnic classification of the world's population as the cornerstone of the aforementioned pattern of power and operates in each of the plans, means and dimensions, material and subjective, of everyday social existence and of the societal scale (p. 73).

Coloniality is a system that is related to colonialism, that is, a structure of domination and exploitation of peoples and lands in a certain historical period that lasted until the 20th century. Coloniality persists in our societies, from the psychic perspective, by keeping our functioning unconsciously guided by a supposed superiority of material, cultural and subjective production in Europe and whiteness in relation to the productions of black, Asian, Latino and mixed race people. Because it was established from the trauma of a historical event and resisted in the experience of peoples and cultures, coloniality from the perspective of analytical psychology can be considered a cultural complex.

Quijano (2009) details how coloniality is established and perseveres over time, naturalizing and absolutizing what is relative, that is, making European cultural production as an absolute reference. In the ways of a cultural complex, coloniality inferiorizes and reproduces suffering in some peoples.

Since the seventeenth century, in the main hegemonic centers of this world pattern of power, [...] a way of producing knowledge was formalized that took care of the cognitive needs of capitalism: the measurement, the externalization (or objectification) of the cognosc. In relation to the knower, for the control of the relationships of individuals with nature and between those in relation to it, in particular the ownership of production resources. Within this same orientation, the experiences, identities and historical relationships of coloniality and the geocultural distribution of world capitalist power were also formally naturalized. This mode of knowledge was, by its character and origin, Eurocentric. Called rational, it was imposed and accepted in the capitalist world as a whole as the only rationality and as an emblem of modernity. The main lines of this perspective have been maintained, despite changes in their specific content, criticism and debates, throughout the duration of the world power of colonial and modern capitalism. This is the modernity/rationality that is now, finally, in crisis (p. 74).

The awareness of coloniality imposes a new fracture on the idea of the universal subject, which is certainly a subject of European origin. The whiteness of the universal human is not the Latin white of miscegenation, nor is it about Asians or Africans with lighter skin tones. We speak here of the white European colonizer as the originator of the narcissistic pact of whiteness. White people in Brazil identify with this Eurocentric whiteness and participate in the dynamics of coloniality that is expressed from the notion of elegance attributed to winter clothes in everyday conversations to the preponderance of European authors for the qualification of our professionals.

When we invoke the notion of diversity, therefore, we are also talking about all bodies that escape the subjugation promoted by coloniality. We are talking about bodies that escape the Eurocentric rationality that leads to the subject-object relationship pointed out by Quijano (2009) and criticized by Jung (2017), when the latter announces that psychology is a science that is structured by the formulation of a subject-subject relationship. In this sense, there is potential in analytical psychology to elaborate the cultural complex of coloniality, as long as it undertakes such a task.

 

Interlocutions with Analytical Psychology

The concept of the cultural complex was brought up by Thomas Singer and Samuel Kimbles. In summary, Singer (2022) points out that the theory of cultural complexes is "a mirror and an extension of the individual complex theory that Jung introduced in the early 20th century. Just as individual complexes form the content of the personal unconscious, cultural complexes form the content of the cultural unconscious" (p. 110).

Cultural complexes act psychologically in the sphere of the collectivity, according to the traumas experienced by each culture. They are powerful centers of unconscious energy that lead people or groups to think, feel and act in a certain way that can perpetuate the conflicts that inhabit the interior of these complexes, making it difficult for us to elaborate on them. For Singer (2022),

Cultural complexes structure emotional experience and operate in the individual and collective psyche in the same way as individual complexes, although their content may be quite different. Like personal complexes, cultural complexes tend to be repetitive, autonomous, resist consciousness and accumulate experiences that confirm their historical point of view (pp. 112-113).

This way of functioning of cultural complexes makes our points of view tinged by the emotional experience of trauma be seen as true. This explains to us why the reference of what is humanity comes from the European whiteness, which also includes heterosexuality, cisgenderity, and the plasticity of the body. Such a reference manufactures an excluding worldview that makes the notion of the other as the one who is exotic and inferior in relation to the supposed standard of the universal hidden norm. By questioning this way of thinking and seeing the world, we are elaborating the cultural complex of coloniality and the heteropatriarchal cultural complex.

Rita Segato, an Argentine anthropologist who spent more than thirty years teaching in Brazil, proposes a radical practice of transformation in dealing with the other. In her work, Segato (2021) introduces the idea of anthropology on demand, which inverts and remakes the relationship with the other, preventing the formation of a subject-object relation in anthropological practice.

What I propose is that our old classic "object" is one that challenges us, tells us who we are and what is expected of us, and demands that we use our "toolbox" to answer your questions and contribute to your historical project. It is because of this readiness to solicit communities and peoples that this disciplinary practice is also a litigant anthropology, in service, questioned. In this way, too, anthropology overcomes the "object crisis" that had been threatening it, as well as its counterpart, an initiatory navel, a narcissistic ego trip that consumes an excessive portion of its pages (p. 16).

What the author proposes for anthropology can be applied to clinical psychology that receives the unknown other who asks for help in front of each analyst who meets them. It is interesting to note that again we see the idea of narcissism being used by the criticism about how we view the other. In psychology, the narcissistic trait of the heteropatriarchal whiteness can express itself in our pathologizing rage as a way of confirming the asymmetry we experience in the face of those who ask for help and to demonstrate their state of suffering. Only in 2022, the Brazilian Federal Council of Psychology recognizes bisexuality and non-monossexual sexualities as subject to self-determination by people who present themselves as patients in clinical psychology offices. A similar resolution in relation to transgender people had only been published in 2018. It is also worth noting that, for the WHO, homosexuality ceases to appear as a pathology only in 1990 and transsexuality loses its pathological character only from 2019 onwards under the publication of ICD11.

We see, in this historical course, that the idea of a universal subject that is structured from heterosexuality, patriarchy and coloniality has been questioned and has its complexes in slow elaboration over the centuries. The excitement and celebration in the face of the notion of diversity must, therefore, be taken with criticism and caution, always through the affirmation of who is this one from which there is another that is diverse.

 

Body, cisgenderness and plasticity

When we discuss heterosexuality, the idea that the orientation of our desire is in relation to certain bodies and exercised in certain ways seems to be already somehow elaborated in the collective consciousness. Some declare themselves to be homosexuals, other heterosexuals, and there is still an endless categorization of the orientations of the polymorphic desire that inhabits us. There are different ways for the same desire to be expressed, as in asexuality and demisexuality. There seems to be no difficulty in thinking that all of us humans direct our desire towards some bodies and in some more or less specific ways. On the other hand, it is a challenge to explore and even admit that it is possible to desire all the possibilities offered for the exercise of our erotic drive.

This same conscience is not so clear about whiteness. As proposed by Prestes and Scandiucci (2022), white people resist recognizing themselves as racialized people, while black people do not offer such resistance. Likewise, the phenomenon of cisgenderness and the dimension of plasticity of the body seem to operate similarly. There is much contemporary discussion about transgender and transgender people, as exemplified in the September 2021 issue of the Journal of Analytical Psychology, the largest scientific publication in the Jungian community. However, we see much less literature dealing with cisgenderism, the complementary pair of transexuality. In the aforementioned edition of this journal, four articles and a replica were published about transexuality. None discussed the issue of cisgenderism. It seems more common for transgender people to recognize themselves in this way, and less common for cisgender people to name themselves in such a way. It is evident to a black person the effects they suffer from the racialization of their culture and appearance, while white people more often present themselves as people, humans, rather than whites. Again, the norm remains hidden and the subjects who have the privilege to do so are categorized as universal, albeit in a relatively unconscious way.

Monique Wittig, a French thinker, was a pioneer in elaborating the idea that there is a straight thinking responsible for dealing with the notion of difference and of the other within a power relationship. Wittig (2022) tells us that

straight society is based on the need for the different/other at all levels. It does not function economically, symbolically, linguistically or politically without this concept. This need for the different/other is ontological for the entire conglomerate of sciences and disciplines that I call straight thinking. But what is the different/other if not the dominated? For heterosexual society is the society that not only oppresses lesbians and gay men, but also oppresses many different/others, oppresses all women and many categories of men, all who are in a position to be dominated (p. 63).

The idea of the other and the different will carry, according to the author, inferiority as its greatest mark, euphemistically treated by the words of diversity and difference. When being inferiorized, this other diverse of the norm can become an object or a fetish so that there can be an attempt at integration or co-optation. The impossibility of sustaining the conflicts brought about by the other/different leads us to such a fantasy of integration. Wittig (2022) advocates for the self -determination of suffering and identities, bringing the idea that she, as a lesbian, like other lesbians, could not even be considered women. The idea of a woman, like that of a man, is created and reproduced by the system of straight thinking and, therefore, would not really be applicable to those who propose dissent to this system and resume the ability to speak for themselves.

Straight concepts are undermined. What is the woman? Panic, active defense general alarm. Frankly, this is a problem that lesbians do not have because of a change in perspective, and it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with women, as "the woman" only has meaning in heterosexual systems of thought and in heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women (p. 67).

The author's thinking leads us to the question of cisgenderness. Commonly, the idea of cisgenderness is related to the person's identity and understanding of the coincidence of their biological sex with their assigned gender at birth (EL KHOURI, 2022). With the dispute introduced by Wittig (2022), however, we reach a new questioning about what the sex-gender ideas that we use to designate people refer to, such as the word "woman". The question that emerges with the self-determination of trans people is: do the words "man" and "woman" still describe us? And, if so, how do they describe us? Wittig (2022) argues that the dissidence of the heteropatriarchy could not appropriate the heteropatriarchal lexicon because it does not describe them. The way out of the inferiorization proposed by the hetero concept of the other/different would be the development of one's own vocabulary, which is not different from the experience of social street meetings in the LGBTI community, which uses a series of expressions from the Pajub language there¹.

Artist Linn da Quebrada creatively called herself bixa travesty in a documentary of the same name (GOIFMAN, PRISCILLA, 2018). The attempt is to escape the return to norms by naming herself as a trans woman, even though this identity is a possibility. What opens up in the documentary is the idea that the processing of sexual and gender identity is something continuous, changeable and must be coordinated by the subject who experiences the process instead of biological sciences or social disciplines. The artist explores her body and the possible transformations she desires for it, without treating them as an imposition for the constitution of a certain identity. Being a woman would not, therefore, imply having a certain body with certain characteristics. Preciado (2017) strongly questions the bodily markers that lead us to a sex-gender identity in her Contrassexual Manifesto. For the author, there is great arbitrariness in the choices that lead doctors, for example, to recommend procedures for surgeries that lead intersex babies to a body more consistent with that expected for a man or a woman.

The plasticity of the body is dealt with by the social, economic and political system that reproduces the hidden norm of the universal subject. Tiburi (2018) tells us that everybody is plastic, that is, subject to transformations and capable of making adaptations to sustain such changes. Plasticity occurs from the brain, where it is possible to establish new synaptic pathways that lead us to different behaviors, passing through tragedies that force people to use prostheses to the central idea that the body encompasses a myriad of possibilities of forms and functions that can be transformed to certain degrees.

Thinking radically about plasticity opens the way for us to look at people with disabilities and people who suffer stigma, such as fatphobia, for example. From a health perspective, it would be better to stick to the question of how can this body sustain this expression? instead of walking with generic power devices that lead us to question that a fat person would not be healthy or a person in a wheelchair could not perform a given task. Evidently, the question must be addressed to the subject, at the risk of returning to a power bias in the health sciences in which the body of the other/different is determined by a group of professionals.

Conducting differently from this is risky as it takes us into potentially violent, certainly aggressive, territory. This occurs because, with more or less awareness, we would end up censoring and interdicting the desire of the other/different instead of thinking about how it can be expressed. The non-recognition of the categories of privilege (white, hetero, cisgender, thin etc.) leads us to an attitude of superiority over the other that grants us the authority to say and do about the other, what perhaps not even we would consider for ourselves. When I see myself as cisgender, I can observe a transgender person on an equal footing. We both share an identity carved within the heteropatriarchal system that oppresses almost all of us, albeit to very different degrees. From this minimal symmetry, a genuine otherness becomes possible.

 

The narcissistic pact of whiteness

Prestes and Scandiucci (2022), in the words of the author Clélia Prestes, tell us that: "The narcissistic pact of whiteness in the psi field serves to disseminate the archetypal white as a reference of humanity that, functioning as hegemonic, is taken as universal" (p. 242).

The notion of the narcissistic pact of whiteness was brought by Cida Bento (2014), so named because it relates to an idea of self-preservation and dissemination of the place of white people as a universal reference for all things. If the heterosexual white man is the universal subject, the condition of diversity is always attributed to women, blacks, LGBTIs, indigenous people and people with disabilities.

This idea can be used in a poetic, conservative discourse of the other in me, the one who prefers to talk about himself through a baseless abstraction, in another objective that can effectively tell us about something genuinely different from us. In this other-in-me functioning, the minorized groups are maintained as receptacles of projections of the hegemonic norm, without contacting people different from us who inhabit the world we share. Such a way of relating to the other reaches the limit of taking minority groups as exotic and entertaining us with their arrivals in the majority spaces, creating and reproducing stereotypes such as the fun gay or the sensual black man. Stereotypes clarify the current thinking that all those who escape the norm of the white body of the heterosexual man carry a fault. This is the very idea of the phallus as a representation of the lack in each of us. We need to ask ourselves: why does the penis become the phallus, transforming itself into an abstraction, and come to represent our fundamental lack, as if the absence of this lack consisted in being a man?

In other words, heteropatriarchal thinking unconsciously leads us to the idea that people who are not a certain type of man, white and straight, have a fundamental lack due to the absence of this phallus. This lack is characterized as a deviation from the hidden norm that consists precisely in being this type of man who holds the imaginary and powerful penis and, therefore, supposedly, lacks nothing. We formulate and maintain such images as a consequence of the heteropatriarchal system, and we need to be aware of it (PESSOA, 2022).

Having clarified this question, it is necessary to move on to another question. Why is it so hard to talk about ourselves? Who does the poetics of the other serve, and the notion that we know so clearly who the other is? Why, after all, do we not speak of the one, already appealing to speak of the other? For Prestes and Scandiucci (2022), on the racial issue, the deafness of whites in relation to listening to themselves and the voices of blacks is related to the maintenance of their privileges. If we use the image of Narcissus, it is important to realize that he does not know himself: when he sees his reflection in the stream, in Greek myth, he does not know that he is seeing himself. The narcissistic pact of the universal subject, therefore, speaks about a deep unconsciousness of those who enjoy privilege to some extent. When the unconscious knocks on our door, from the perspective of analytical psychology, it is an ethical task to listen to it. We therefore need to understand why it is so difficult for us, as a society, to speak of the supposedly universal subject, the heterosexual white man, as Katz (2007) pointed out.

 

The heterosexual white man

The idea of the existence of a hidden universal norm is worked on by several authors, from Foucault (2020) to Katz (2007). It is important to note that, although we often only use the categories male, white and heterosexual, this choice is made to represent the universal subject in a broad way, so we include all the regulation that includes LGBTI people who recognize themselves in the most varied identities, as well as people with disabilities. The reduction in the number of terms takes place from a didactic perspective, understanding that the combination of these categories is enough to evoke in our imagination the image that we are referring to. On the other hand, it will be essential to discuss the notions of cisgenderness and plasticity that also accompany this universal subject. Furthermore, the concept of universal subject refers to one who has access to material conditions to undertake his project of subjectivation.Thus, in our reality, it can only be projected onto a privileged socioeconomic class, since we know that the poorest people do not even have access to health, education, security, and quality housing.

These remarks, it is logical to think that, if humanity as universal is projected into the categories of the white person, identified as male and heterosexual, a careful look at these people can reveal something about the difficulty we have in discussing the norm hegemony based on this subject.

Tyminski (2018) presents us with a long study based on clinical cases discussing people who identify as men, mostly white and heterosexual. The author tells us that this hegemonic imagination of masculinity revolves around four main factors, namely: not considering oneself feminine, being successful, not appearing to be weak or small, being adventurous and taking risks. According to the author, such characteristics restrict gender expression in men, bringing suffering related to self-image, inhibitions and excessive expectations in relation to their own performance in intimate and social relationships. According to the author,

Traditional norm-based masculinity usually operates in a binary fashion when it comes to gender and gender roles; or whether it is male or female. Recent and public contemporary definitions of gender fluidity seem disruptive to men's sense of identity. They protest that they cannot keep up with these changes, wish back the days when their roles were more clearly defined by social institutions, and crave unquestioning support for themselves from their families and society (Tyminski, 2018).

The author's reflections are consistent with the imagery that has been revealed since the conservative political movement that took over the United States, and then Brazil, in the 2018 election. The idea of the man of the past with his unquestionable gender and his potent strength to head the family was one of the drivers of the customs agenda that helped elect the then candidate Jair Bolsonaro in that year's election. As we can see, the question of gender and the reflection on the universal subject are fundamental issues for the elaboration of complexes that affect the whole of society.

Tyminski's (2018) main hypothesis is that this stereotype and the impossibility of occupying new spaces or reinventing masculinity, leads boys and men to a psychic place of alienation, a generalized feeling of non-belonging and lack of participation in their lives time and in the places it occupies. Alienation, in turn, would generate an internal tension that, when expressed, occurs through excessive aggression, violence, and delinquency on the part of men. Such expression is the result of the impossibility of communicating, and naming the negative feelings that populate the interiority of the man who sees himself without a place in his cultural and historical context. Furthermore, it is not possible for such feelings, even when they become conscious, to be admitted and elaborated because they contrast with the collective norm of masculinity on which the identity of these men is based.

If we go back to the idea of individuation exposed by Jung (2013), what happens is the impossibility of the general, the collective norm, becoming something particular, as a singular identity in each of these men. Thus, an existential anguish of impeded individuation opens up, which returns to the collective in the form of a monstrous violence that stops any possibility of mediation. The monster inside the man informs us, with his dialogue soon impeded, that he is completely alienated from us.

As Tyminski (2018) argues, people who identify with characteristics attributed to masculine aspects of the personality feel lacking sufficient validation to express themselves and be legitimized in their anxieties and desires. When this occurs, as the author tells us, these people remain in a more primitive state of affectivity guided by collective values, little humanized and little singularized. In the context of the collective, difficulties, traumas, and sufferings easily convert into violence and oppression of the other precisely because of the lack of this mediation with individual particularities that could bring humanization and support of individual contradictions.

Tyminski (2018) brings us two exemplary aspects of the violence that is expressed as a result of alienation: homophobia and fury in men. The author brings us an important contribution in analytical psychology, suggesting that, for alienated men, the image of the anima that can inform them about psychic development may not be that of a female figure, but that of a lost and abandoned boy. Confronting the image of the heterosexual white man would imply, therefore, developing in men who identify with such an image the idea that they too are part of a deeply wounded group, of boys abandoned by their parents in an uncertain future on a planet that has no more conditions to give us resources for the industrial development of the heteropatriarchy. The promise of the super potent and resourceful phallic man has failed, and now these men too are, like all people from minority groups, abandoned and wounded, without a clear horizon ahead. This insurmountable anguish accompanies a possibility: if they can see themselves in this way, these men will no longer be alone. They will have a place to belong, along with all of us.

 

The difficulty in talking about one's self

By erasing all kinds of conflicts that arise in the interaction between people belonging to majority groups and those who resist from dissident identities, the concept of diversity subverts the creative potential that exists in sustaining these conflicts. We all learn less, advance less, elaborate less, when conflicts are relegated to the sphere of the unconscious.

There is a giant fear in talking about yourself. In Brazil, especially, I suspect that the order of magnitude of inequality makes us privileged people even more embarrassed to assume our privileges. It is widely publicized, based on a survey carried out by the National Association of Transvestites and Transsexuals that Brazil is the country that kills most transsexuals and transvestites in the world, while it is the record holder for consumption of pornography produced with transsexuals and transvestites (BENEVIDES, 2022).

Walking the path of diversity to the meaning of the other that inhabits me and exploring the other in me is, objectively said, a narcissistic undertaking. In endorsing this kind of reasoning, we are not really listening and looking at people. The one who is a dissident of the norms causes estrangement, discomfort, and conflict. If this does not happen, something is probably out of order at this meeting.

For a deeper psychology, it is necessary for whites to see themselves as white, instead of talking about the racism that subjects blacks. We need to examine our norms and our comfort with them. It is necessary that we talk about heterosexuality, not just talk about the grievances and tragedies that affect the LGBTI community.

I suspect that the enormous difficulty in talking about oneself has a serious psychological component. People who identify with sexual and gender dissidence and inhabit the margins of heteropatriarchy, also have deep anguish and, at the limit, suicide rates higher than those observed in populations adjusted to the hidden norm and identified with the universal subject (ROSA, 2021). It is evident that the systematization of exclusion, the pain of abandonment and the narrowing of possibilities and opportunities leads to no other place than suffering and mental health disorders. I think that privileged people may carry this giant phobia of taking these same risks. The achievement of a certain psychic stability is so delicate that it can even be terrifying to face the risk of losing it.

A final consideration remains for future studies: who are we when we are not white, cisgender, European men, inhabiting a normative body? I suspect that, strictly speaking, none of us is that person. But the conflict in seeing ourselves this way, disidentified with what can stabilize us, seems to be still too great for us to sustain. The dark side of this perspective is that, in order not to look at our projections on others, we spend those who really inhabit the world we share. Now, I am talking about this other: the young black man killed in a police operation, the lesbian girl who commits suicide, the trans person who is stabbed to death at dawn in the city while she was forced to prostitute herself. These are our others, and they are not in us. We are the ones who kill them.

 

References

ADLER, G. Notes regarding the dynamics of the self. In: Dynamic aspects of the psyche. New York: Analytical Psychology Club, 1956.         [ Links ]

CAPLAN, G. The theory and practice of mental health consultation. New York: Basic Books, 1970. p. 146-7.         [ Links ]

FEIFEL, H. Functions of attitudes towards death. In: Death and dying attitudes of patients and doctors. New York: Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, 1965. p. 632-4.         [ Links ]

FORDHAM, M. Reflections on training analysis. In: WHEELWRIGHT, J. B. (ed.) The analytic process: aims, analysis, training. New York: Putnam Sons, 1968.         [ Links ]

FREUD, S. Postscript to The question of lay analysis (1926). In: Std Edn 20, 1927. p. 254.         [ Links ]

GRAVES, R. (1955). The greek myths. [S. l.]: Pelican Books, 1955. v. 1.         [ Links ]

GROESBECK, C. J. The archetypal image of the wounded healer. Journal of Analytical Psychology, v. 20, n. 2, p. 122-145, 1975. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-5922.1975.00122.x        [ Links ]

GUCGENBÜHI-CRAIG, A. Power in the helping professions. New York: Spring Publications, 1971.         [ Links ]

HAERE, N. L.; OSOL, A. (ed.). Blakiston's New Gould Medical Dictionary. 2. ed. New York; Toronto; London: McGraw-Hill, 1956.         [ Links ]

HENDERSON, J. Resolution of the transference in the light of C. G. Jung's psychology. In: International Congress of Psychotherapy. Zürich: [s. n.], 1954.         [ Links ]

HENDERSON, J. Ancient myths and modern man. In: JUNG, C. G. (ed.) Man and his symbols. New York: Garden City; London: Aldus and W. H. Allen, 1964.         [ Links ]

JASPERS, K. The nature of psychotherapy. Chicago: Chicago University Press; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964.         [ Links ]

JUNG, C. G. The phenomenology of the spirit in fairy-tales. In: Coll. wks., v. 9, n. 1, 1945.         [ Links ]

JUNG, C. G. The psychology of the transference. In: Coll. wks., v. 16, 1946.         [ Links ]

JUNG, C. G. Fundamental questions of psychotherapy. In: Coll. wks., v. 16, 1951.         [ Links ]

JUNG, C. G. Memories, dreams, reflections. New York: Vintage; London: Collins and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963.         [ Links ]

JUNG, C. G. Analytical psychology, its theory and practice. New York: Vintage; London: Routledge, 1968.         [ Links ]

KERẾNYI, K. Asklepios, archetypal image of the physician's existence New York: Pantheon Books, 1959. (Bollingen series LXV, 3).         [ Links ]

MEIER, C. A. Projection, transference and the subject-object relation in psychology. In: J. analyt. Psychol., v. 4, n. 1, 1959.         [ Links ]

MEIER, C. A. Ancient incubation and modern psychotherapy. Evanston: North-Western University Press, 1967.         [ Links ]

MEIER, C. A. Psychological types and individuation, a plea for a more scientific approach in Jungian psychology. In: WHEELWRIGHT, J. B. (ed.) The analytic process: aims, analysis, training. New York: Putnam Sons, 1968.         [ Links ]

NEUMANN, E. Art and the creative unconscious. New York: Pantheon Books; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959. (Bollingen series LXI).         [ Links ]

 

Received: 07/03/2022
Revised: 12/14/2022

 

 

1 The pajubá language is a set of expressions used in the LGBT community that was first articulated by transvestites and transsexuals who frequented terreiros of Afro-Brazilian religions. With the use of these expressions, it was possible to dialogue without the themes being properly identified by other people on the street, especially police and security forces that persecuted and repressed this population at the time of the civil-military dictatorship of 1964-1988. A more in-depth description of the period is found in Green et al. (2018).