The United Nations General Assembly declares April 5, 2020 as the International Day of Conscience “to periodically mobilize the efforts of the international community to promote peace, tolerance, inclusion, understanding and solidarity.” among the peoples.”
“Aware of the need to create conditions of stability, well-being, peaceful and friendly relations based on respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction based on race, sex, language or religion, declares on 5 April International Day of Consciousness.”
As a psychoanalyst, I consider that Consciousness is a function of the psychic apparatus that allows us to operate in our life in relationships with others and with ourselves. Through it we can connect with the reality that surrounds us, we can realize that there is a world that exists beyond us and with which we must interact. It also allows us to register our physical sensations, our body alarms, which can lead us to get moving to satisfy our needs and desires.
Conscience is also associated with morality, with the norms of coexistence, with the rules that allow us to live in a community. It helps us discern good from evil, it allows us to do an examination of “self-awareness”, where self-criticism and reflection on our behaviors can arise until we reach guilt and remorse.
Consciousness is individual, and depends on those values, ideals, precepts that our parents, our caregivers instilled in us and that are transmitted from generation to generation.
Consciousness is also collective, it is social. The concepts of empathy, of identification with the pain and suffering of others, can be considered in this sense.
Context: Argentina and the World
It is striking that 2020 is the year in which the “Day of Consciousness” was established: the year of the Covid 19 pandemic that left a total of 4.8 million dead globally, the year in which climate change made its appearance once again through great geological disasters (floods, earthquakes, fires in different parts of the planet) And in Argentina, it was the summer in which Fernando Báez Sosa was murdered, among many other events.
Consciousness and psychoanalysis
From our place as psychoanalysts we see ourselves challenged by this reality that inhabits us. Our conscience and commitment is to thinking and feeling, two functions that are deeply attacked today.
Our contribution has to do with providing spaces for exchange where we can reflect and question what is being instituted uncritically with the objective of continuing to build ties with others and preserving our ability to think, to discern, to discriminate fantasy from reality, among other ego functions and that contribute to our conscious thinking.
Sigmund Freud introduced us to the idea that the mind is governed by two principles. The bb goes from pure pleasure (it incorporates the pleasant and discards the unpleasant), to the reality principle; With the help of another, the relationship with something beyond me is formed, the external reality that imposes certain tasks on me, including delaying the discharge of my impulses, in order to find a more appropriate and effective solution.
But then; What happens if what is imposed at the social level is the law of Talion? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth… We observe a gradual involution of mental functioning, the psychic apparatus becomes less complex, instead of reflection, the delay of motor discharge, the exercise of violence is imposed. In this the media has a lot of participation and responsibility, from the gossip programs, from the news programs, a style of attack is promoted on those who think differently, there is not even time to listen to the other, they are not allowed to finish speaking, they He interrupts him. To then exercise a systematic and permanent disqualification seasoned with ridicule and insults.
The global movements that are increasingly turning towards the ultra-right and that leave out an enormous number of rights, generating impoverished, violated populations, denied the possibility of access to health, education, adequate nutrition, to be able to bond with their peers, thus affecting the idea of social conscience, awareness of being part of a human collective that we must preserve and care for.
That is why our function is to continue defending the possibility of thinking, of creating supportive and nourishing emotional ties with others, that promote the development of the mind, of the subject, of a loving bond that libidinizes life, that respects differences, that promotes reflection, dialogue, the construction of the word that nominates, which allows us to elaborate on traumatic experiences and in this way make us a little more human and less beastly.
Let us hope that as a society, we can emerge from such a biased, impoverished and brutalized worldview and gain access to a more complex thought that allows us to live together in peace, respecting each other in our differences. I hope we achieve it. It is our challenge, the defense of a state of collective and supportive consciousness, beyond races and religions.
Psychologist and Psychoanalyst specialist in children and adolescents – Apdeba (Psychoanalytic Association of Buenos Aires) Specialist in children and adolescents