Psychoanalysis: Sara Cohen wonders what to do with all that hurts

The question of pain spans eras and geographies; it's a concern that has accompanied us since the beginning of our wholeness. While it has answers, each temporal and/or spatial change requires new interpretations and responses to this question. The complexity of the present (or of the time we are fortunate enough to be in) challenges us to seek and find tools for managing crises, emotions, and even the pain of our contemporary life.

What will you do with all that hurts? Psychic Pain in Our Time (Paidós) is the title of Sara Cohen 's book, which questions, examines, and also explains what pain wears today. It interprets how much it disarms us and explains how, at times, it allows us to rebuild ourselves according to what has hurt us. This way, we'll know if we're dealing with superficial wounds or those that force us to walk on a cliff edge and push us into the abyss.

The author of this book is a child and adolescent psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, but she is also a poet, essayist, and translator. These academic, artistic, and lifelong experience elements enable her to understand the pain of others, in the consulting room, on the outside, and in life in the open air. In these pages, carefully addressed by the reader, she pours an exquisite library that ranges from Freud and Lacan to the verse and prose of Barthes, Nancy, Agamben, E. Dickinson, Joyce, Saer, and Cocteau.

In her literary and philosophical explorations, she constantly pays attention to the relationship between intangible pain and bodily pain. In fact, she says at the beginning of her book that Freud considers the latter to be inherent to the psychic makeup. And, although she is a psychiatrist, she constantly warns against the temptation of medicalization to stop suffering. That common phrase in the psychological world, of Freudian origin but often repeated by Judith Miller , "When you throw the symptom out the door, it comes back through the window," explains why it is indeed necessary to confront pain and "listen to it." Cohen maintains that "How and how much each person tolerates pain and the way in which our society tends to process it often generate escapes and avoidances of any psychic work that might foster change." The specialist draws on the work of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis to explain immediate issues such as grief and the meaning of mourning in the process of overcoming pain.

One of the fundamental forms of pain is that of loss: one becomes a subject through it, Cohen defines, thus opening up a universe of meaning to understand the before and after of pain. Loss is a state that always accompanies us, but it leaves deep marks in the times of formation, in those in which fundamental beings are lost . “The avoidance of pain, which requires psychic processing, can have a correlate in a body exposed to different vicissitudes that imply extreme states.” And then he adds: “Adolescent grief for the joys of childhood, in some structures, takes the body itself hostage, due to the impossibility of tolerating absence and pain, and due to the inability to wait in the face of uncertainty. A crossroads theme, at some significant moment, is the encounter with drugs.”

In another instance, that of mourning, the author argues that it opens a question mark for the subject's future, governed by unconscious vicissitudes, even if it does not imply melancholy. Freud wrote: "We know that mourning, however painful it may be, expires spontaneously."

The poet also addresses issues related to the pain left behind by illness, of a different kind, but one that is not alien to the subjective structure, as it sometimes has a devastating effect on the psyche. She tells personal stories of pain, like those endured by Jean-Luc Nancy or Walter Benjamin.

Cohen knows the dangerous waves of these oceans where battered and crisis-ridden psyches swim and founder, both from her experience as a therapist and as a researcher, as demonstrated in her previous book , *Dying Young. Clinic with Adolescents * (Paidós). With this comprehensive and complex experience, she approaches these waters of pain, where a helping hand, a timely aid, is needed to stay afloat.

The journey through this “painful” book, set with literary touches, leads us to open conclusions and poignant and necessary interpretations. The theme of pain is not limited to grief, nor is it explicable solely in terms of one psychopathological dynamic or another. “To be alive is to be exposed to suffering.” This isn't exactly consolation; it's a warning, a necessary disclaimer for accepting life's complex and surprising journey.

Sara Cohen (Buenos Aires, 1955) is a child and adolescent psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. A full member of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytic Association, she works in the pediatric mental health service at the German Hospital. She is also a poet, essayist, and translator. She has twice received the Faculty Research Program grant from the International Council for Canadian Studies.

Her publications include the essay collections The Silence of the Poets (2002), The Border of Language (2006), Captive Childhood (2015), and Dying Young. Clinic with Adolescents (2019), and the poetry collections Doors of Paris (2000), Scene with Letters (2003), Venetian Poems (2003), The Opportunity (2012), Behind the Head (2018), and The Chance of Memory (2021). Two of her poetry collections have been translated into French and published in Quebec, Canada.