Does the Culture of Immediacy include Psychoanalysis?

We live in an age that is absolutely fast and at the same time voracious.; It is a moment where everything is immediate, fast, without processes.

We are only at the minimum distance of a "click" to know, buy or reach everything we need... We can have everything within our reach in the blink of an eye.

We all know that just three decades ago, things were vastly different and difficult. We had to make a lot more effort for any matter we needed, from getting a medical shift, buy a ticket for a show, obtain information of any kind among other things in life daily. This way of life established a very different and particular style of the link between people, time and space.

The culture of immediacy within the framework of new technologies promotes a type of society and, above all, completely different subjectivities.

• Related article: "What is social psychology?"

Psychological Implications of the Culture of Immediacy

That there is a space and a longer or shorter time between what is desired and what is obtained establishes, for example, a very different form of manifestations of the

distress and psychopathological symptoms.

The different times generate different ways in which the subjects are linked to anguish, therefore different ways in which it is presented.

The culture of immediacy “demands” speed and spontaneous satisfaction, which promotes social behaviors of hyperactivity, anxiety and the constant desire for gratification. The impossibility of waiting becomes present and everything is “already”, urgent.

In this context, psychoanalysis seems to remain in the memory of other times and societies where our greats lived. teachers, and to make matters worse, many publications try to leave it "out of the current era, until it is almost anachronistic".

Quite the contrary, psychoanalysis is necessary and more current than ever. Their conceptualizations are more current every day, since they theorize a lot about these concepts today. annulled (time and space), and categorically explains how fundamental they are for the health of the psychism.

Current pathologies respond to this logic of immediacy, as do patients, who it seems that they need “also immediate” answers and solutions, resorting to psychotherapies that promise the satisfaction of that urgency.

• You may be interested in: "What is impulsiveness? Its causes and effects on behavior"

There is no time for the processes of psychic work

Magical solutions are expected in the face of symptoms that have been manifesting themselves for many years, and that are not did not give enough space or time for them to "speak for themselves" thus indicating something of the ailment of the patient. The analytical process requires a preparation time.

The immediacy is a "hurried time" and at the same time annulled, there is no place for the emergence of anguish, there is no space for a duel to be elaborated (there are people who lose loved ones, places of residence, jobs, their homeland, etc.), and they cannot give themselves room to elaborate this because there is no time... And this is very Serious. Not that a dream can be analyzed; For example, it is known that the dream work condenses many unconscious issues that guide the psychoanalyst along the path of the cure.

There is an absence of anxiety processing, an extremely important issue for our mental health, since it is essential to give it its place and figure out what it is trying to tell us.

The "therapies of the immediate" try to abolish it, anguish is undesirable, you cannot suffer from something, it has to disappear immediately... With medication or with psychotherapies "that cover it up very quickly and to always". A utopian attempt, given that what is dodged on one side will inevitably come out on the other, turned into a different symptom, but it will be there again, insisting, making itself seen.

The analytical work proposes time, waiting and space, a dialectical interplay between presences and absences, fundamental to found the symbolic register of our language, essential for a well-placed psyche.

Today there is no time to get bored or to suffer from something…. This will bring very serious consequences to our mental health. Objects are offered instead of words to bear the emptiness and anguish. The notion of "empty" is fundamental to the subjective constitution. If this is not promoted, there will be no possibility for subjectivity to be constituted. I leave this issue raised and not sufficiently explicit because it is very complex and it is not the subject of this article either.

If it is a matter of plugging everything "what bothers" there will be no places left for certain desires to appear. The void, the unfilled space, is a place with the potential for something new to come. If it was understood that this is of vital importance for the growth of a subject, I am sure that many situations would stop, leaving gaps to not be filled. This would be, for example, letting our children find themselves with these gaps... Let them get a little upset, get bored and their creativity can thus get going.

Without this materializing there is no desire, for example desire to know, to do, to project...