In the course of living, every human being faces unanticipated crises and tragedies. These may be contributed by one’s human condition, structural and social marginalization, historical excesses, personal life experiences, familial circumstances, inner dispositions and traumatic events. As the unbearable evokes unconscious fear and anxiety, the most common ways of grappling with psychic pain are to repress, denial or dissociate from its full impact, spilt it or project it onto others. In a bid to make life livable, when we turn our face against the’ truth of our existence’, we end up escaping; becoming exiles and strangers to ourselves. In this loss, we may lose the potential to connect to others, feel their pain and make lateral identifications. We may also end up siding with violence, oppressing and dehumanizing others, especially those who symbolize our dissociated selves. By dwelling into the author’s work as a psychoanalyst and psychosocial practitioner/researcher, this presentation will elaborate on the value of living with problems by facing, rather than avoiding, them. The psychoanalytic/psychosocial traditions are premised on a relational foundation and an ethic of mutuality between the analyst/listener and the analysand/ participant where a gradual recognition of the enigmatic conditions of life, in the presence of a witnessing other, lead to transmutation of trauma into growth. The talk will illustrate how embracing suffering in a non-defensive manner can add to the depth and richness of being human; serve as a gift opening us to our empathetic and compassionate potential and releasing blocked energy to respond to social injustice in a thoughtful manner. The presentation will focus on relational moments/ insights wherein by learning to co-exist with the “suchness of one’s condition” enabled a different form of embracing and responding to life and the world.

One of the challenges of surviving the polarizing tendency of ethno-nationalism is to recover histories of intimacies, hospitality and relationships that led to festooning of mutual imagination. While the ascendent nationalism, and the rise of islamophobia, in the Indian context work to erase the many chapters from our collective memory, in the ruins of our democracy the truth endures. To be a minor subject, implies surviving hate of the other as well as one's own hate at being hated by keeping this difficult experience apart or in abeyance. Like the Greek monster Hydra, ‘segregation’ or the need for ‘apartness’, has more than one head. Freud confronted the many-headed beast in his clinic as defensive operations, of repression, negation, disavowal and foreclosure through which ego perpetuates an internal apartheid for intolerable aspects of reality. In his paper ‘Fetishism’, Freud observes that it is possible, and in painful situations necessary, for the ego to split itself to keep two contradictory experiences incommunicado, prevented from patriation. This way, for instance, one can host a memory of one’s victimization while also being identified with the aggressor, as two separate heads. Similarly, Freud noted that the fantasy of a child being beaten while appearing masochistic could also be sadistic. Most instances of ethno-nationalisms insist on attacking and delegitimizing the existence of contradictory states in favour of pure histories of innocence. The colonizers carried the burden to civilize the colonies while killing thousands in through the logic of racial Darwinism or religion; while post-colonies, chaotically pluralistic in most cases, may be organized by the fear of minorities to establish their regimes of power. Through use of everyday encounters, in the clinic and in the polis, the paper will demonstrate the creative use of histories that are under erasure to recover stories of connection, survival and a shared belongingness.

In times of social upheavals and erasure of collective memories, learning to live with problems entails negotiations and balancing between forces of historical change and those that call for acceptance. While these oppositional pulls can be felt in many domains of one’s life, this paper focuses on their impact on the erotic subjectivity of women. The body of the woman, as the site for dominant cultural anxieties around sexuality, is rendered into an object for institutional surveillance and control. During authoritarian regimes, this surveillance is intensified, making the project of sexual subjecthood especially fraught for young women. Caught between the overbearing voice of convention that dictates how our affective experiences are to be lived and our own internal urgencies and authentic connections that are constantly in search of actualization, what does it mean to learn to live with problems? How is such a living rendered creative and hopeful instead of lapsing into a sense of passivity or despair? How do women tap into the wellspring of libidinality that Freud characterizes as free flowing sensual impulses and energy vivifying our bodies, when dominant cultural stories and myths around sexuality seem to argue for its chaotic and Dionysian potential, contending that erotic intensities must be reigned in.

The paper discusses the pedagogy of reinventing tradition through feminist retellings of old stories, which hold together the paradox of both disjunction from and continuity with the symbolism of the past. Using a psychoanalytic and psychosocial lens, it explores how cultural myths and fables play a role in enabling one to develop the capacity to hold conflict internally, making it possible to bear waiting, and surrender to transformational affective possibilities. The enigmatic messages of these stories parallel the enigmatic messages of our bodies that transmit more than we intend and receive more than we suspect.

The opening words by the poet Fernando Pessoa give ground to what the paper hopes to explore: the osmotic movement between self and life in moments of ordinary and vital encounters as it explores the self, a self as porous, caught in creative inter-play with life, as it explores the multiplicity and virtuality at the heart of an experiencing self. The paper draws from Winnicott’s ideas on playing and creative living and from Marion Milner’s turn to writing in order to build a meditative engagement with ‘the place where we live’ to explore liminal spaces between life and art, or rather, life as art as it embarks on a slow exploration of the quest-ion of creative living. The paper attempts to explore this life of moments, the life in such fleeting and yet seemingly transcendent moments to catch glimpse of a self that is ‘more than one’, a self that is flow and flowing and in the process catch the moment to moment unfolding of subjectivity in grasping it as emergent, as creative processuality. The hope is touch upon a live poetics in the act of experiencing, in learning from experience as the ‘potential space’ between a self and life, rife with both a latent musicality and the threat of chaos is opened up, as each self finds and births its singular aesthetic, an expressive voice unique to itself, always potent, always a potential in exploring an immanent poetics of being, of coming into being in the world.