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Psychoanalysis and Tango: Complex Arts of Grief Therapy Psychoanalysis and Tango Dancing During This Pandemic

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Psychoanalysis and Tango: Complex Arts of Grief Therapy Psychoanalysis and Tango Dancing During This Pandemic **DO NOT CIRCULATE OR PUBLISH: FOR 11/09/2020 SFCP SCIENTIFIC MEETING ONLY** No part of this paper may be used or reproduced in any form without the prior written permission from Dr. Dawn Farber. `Psychoanalysis and Tango: Complex Arts of Grief Therapy Psychoanalysis and tango dancing during this pandemic Psychoanalysis: “What the patient brings into the field of therapy is a body haunted by an absent other, a body whose gestures find no witness, no reciprocal, for their appeal. And to the therapist, these gestures hold in presence an absence which yearns for some lost other…an absence which galvanizes a field between patient and therapist, establishing a magnetic tension…a field in which each infects the other with desire and longing…” (Romanyshyn, 1998, p.52). Psychoanalysis: “The purest form of listening is to listen without memory or desire. Every session must have no history and no future…Out of darkness and formlessness something emerges.” Bion, (1967). Both: “Argentine tango and the teaching of tango present optimal processes that are systematic and subsymbolic, that occur within awareness and underlie the internal organization and interpersonal communication…In the analytic interchange as in the complex interactions of the tango, subsymbolic communication provides the guide to bodily and emotional exploration and integration.” (Bucci, p.45). I started to write this essay pre-pandemic, taking a kaleidoscopic view of the myriad connections (geographical, historical) and affinities in sensibility between psychoanalysis and tango. As we started to shelter in place, distance socially and abstain from all but essential social contact, my inevitable central thesis for this paper emerged. The magnitude of our losses – personal, political, national, global; loss of faith in the very survival of our planet and all life forms - constitutes an overwhelming source of grief. We are in mourning for the ongoing, daily losses of life, and of faith in our medical systems; for the irrecoverable loss of sharing this large swath of our lives with beloved family and friends; for the cancelation of hopes and plans for the future we took for granted; and for the future, especially that of all the younger generations whose lives we and they did not envisage would be taken over and deformed by the pandemic. We had expected their young lives to be, if not unrealistically carefree, at least unencumbered by the physical and psychological paraphernalia of COVID-19, with potential long-term psychological damage. My online provision of psychoanalytic treatment at first required of me containment of shock, horror, disbelief; as well as long silences, sighs and whimpering which I could only imagine expressed how unspeakable my patients’ horror and fear were. My treatment soon began to coalesce around the themes of grief, loneliness, dread and despair, as well as outrage at our human culpability for this catastrophe. We are all bereft. If we have learned anything from Bion, it is the necessity to take several perspectives on any phenomenon we are contemplating. Psychoanalysis and tango are both premised on the establishment of an intimate emotional relationship, however different this intimacy and emotional connection might be, with their different temporal dimensions, methods and aims. My primary thesis is that tango like psychoanalysis is at its most profound a therapy for grief. To establish this, several perspectives that will converge to inform my thesis are warranted. Firstly, I summarize some of the notable historical links between tango and psychoanalysis. Then I describe the context for the development of tango in Argentina, the conditions - both objective and subjective - of grief, for which tango became the prevailing therapy for an entire population. My love of tango is not simply because tango has been sustaining me in my work through this pandemic, but more significantly as the iconic feature of the dance is the tango embrace, and opportunities for embracing and for simple hugging are immeasurably decreased now. The embrace is, I believe, in its own right therapeutic. Argentines have a long history of finding joy in adversity and I am gratefully taking a page out of their playbook, deploying my love for Argentine tango to maintain my aliveness and faith during this pandemic. I have been dancing 5 days a week, masked, with my teacher, in a deserted grand ballroom, and taking two private technique lessons weekly on Skype, with my Argentinian teacher, who now lives in New York. I continue by describing intentional contemporary uses of tango for therapeutic ends, both for psychosis and neurosis. None explicitly privilege the embrace as the curative factor, as I do. And finally, I discuss why I have felt impelled to write this essay, linking these two abiding passions. I first saw tango in Buenos Aires in 1998, where Dr. Elizabeth Tabak de Bianchedi, my training supervisor in psychoanalysis, was hosting a Bion conference. Arriving jetlagged, I wandered around the city and in this permeable state stumbled upon couples dancing tango in the street, to music from a couple of bandoneóns and violins. These were true porteños, (originally a term for dock workers, now used for all Buenos Aires’ dwellers) a far cry from the glamorous show-dancers with whom Europeans and Americans became familiar when enterprising tangueros imported their art to Paris and Broadway, hybridizing it into flashy and lavishly-produced musicals, fantasías. i While in Buenos Aires I attended several tango performances in the grand old dance halls with high ceilings, chandeliers, black and white checkered marble floors, spectators seated at tables around the perimeter of the stage, drinking, smoking. The elegance of this setting impressed me deeply. Show tango is athletic, melodramatic, extraverted, flamboyantly sexual, almost campily so. I was wowed, though rarely moved. ii Salón or social tango, by contrast, is subtle, intimate, more sensual than erotic, inward-gazing, almost private. It is a couples’ relationship, not intended for others’ eyes; often slow, dreamy, sometimes moody, as dancers bring all their emotions of the time to the dance, including happiness, anger, hurt, resentment and playfulness. Being compact in movement it is well-adapted to the crowded dance floors at milongas (dances). In short: I was entranced; my fascination with all things tango — the dance, the music, the culture – began, and I have spent the past few years being very intimate with strangers, dancing in their arms. Links between psychoanalysis and tango What brings these two disparate disciplines into the relationship proposed in this essay? They rhyme, chime and resonate with each other - analogous with the relationship between tango couples, sometimes moving in opposite directions, at other times in parallel, and always mutually resonating. They also share some significant ancestry. To begin with, some thought-provoking historical synchronicities: they were born in the same year. In Vienna in 1880-82 Anna O had her treatment with Josef Breuer. While she was “chimney sweeping” – her term for their free associative conversations —down in the Rio del Plata, during those same years an experimental blending of music and dance influences from the indigenous Amerindian natives and various immigrant groups, mostly Italian, Spanish, Jewish and Eastern European, eventuated in Argentine tango. Psychoanalysis and tango music also share a defining moment: psychoanalysis arrived in Buenos Aires in 1910 when a Chilean physician Germán Greve held a conference in Argentina where he spoke about Freud. During the same year the German bandoneón, the iconic musical instrument for tango, arrived in Buenos Aires. Bion’s concept of “thoughts without a thinker” (1970) suggests that these seemingly disparate phenomena emerged from a global zeitgeist in which the blending of ideas and approaches became possible. In psychoanalysis, Freud was influenced by Franz Mesmer’s “animal magnetism,” by the hypnotism of Jean-Martin Charcot, and most significantly by Breuer’s discovery that neurotic symptoms are generated by unconscious processes. Another rhyming of tango and psychoanalysis: the earliest outbreak of tangomania began in the salons of Paris in 1912. Wealthy Argentinians sent their sons to Paris for education and these so-called niños biensiii who frequented brothels and learned tango, delighted their wealthy Parisian hostesses with it. Tango born in the tenement patios around the brothels, was laundered in Paris, its bawdier, blatantly lewd movements refined, and returned to Buenos Aires where the elites and middle classes could develop its elegance. When the junta fell in 1983, tango, which the military had outlawed and which barely survived underground, resurfaced and was claimed with pride as an essential aspect of national identity for all Argentina’s people. Both tango and psychoanalysis have evolved far away from their early origins, and both continue to evolve with the times. iv A predecessor to Freud was the 18th century Austrian Catholic priest Johann Josef Gassner who performed faith healings and exorcisms for the many hillside peasants who flocked to his ministry. They share a circular developmental trajectory from work/play for the poorest, to the same for the wealthiest and then a return to serve the entire population. Freudian psychoanalysis proper began as a treatment for the wealthy of Vienna and Western Europe. When the Austrian and German Jewish analysts fled the holocaust and took psychoanalysis with them to Buenos Aires, it soon became the national therapy for all classes of people and remains so to this day. v Both tango and psychoanalysis are transgressive disciplines: tango against the elites of Argentina who wanted nothing to do with the “dirt and suffering” of the porteños of which tango music sings (Peri, 1981), and psychoanalysis against European Victorian-age prudery and Enlightenment rationality. Tango and psychoanalysis share a recent pattern of evolution. In the 1990’s revival the younger generation of tango dancers clamored for a return to the early focus in tango on the intimate relationship between the couple, as opposed to intricate choreography.
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