**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 : 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: “ 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 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 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 (). 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 . Similarly, in psychoanalysis the Relational movement with its central tenet being the emotional connection of the couple as opposed to complex interpretations gained popularity worldwide, with too little acknowledgement that Freud’s personal practice was de facto very relational, including touch, even though he emphasized his theories.vi

The birth of tango in Argentinavii Convert the outrage of the years into a music. J. L. Borges, Ars Poetica in Dream Tigers, 1960. Tango is the quintessential art form of displaced, marginalized and exploited people. Borges was profoundly attuned to the historical realities that gave birth to tango and wrote frequently about it, including the elements of outrage and aggression in the dance and the music. In the 1880’s several populations converged on Buenos Aires (and Montevideo), all displaced from their homelands, whether captured as slaves from West Africa, many of these arriving via Cuba; or Jews escaping pogroms in Eastern Europe; or European workers in search of employment in the mines and on the ranches of Argentina. A second wave of immigration landed even more mostly-single men in Buenos Aires: WW1 veterans in search of employment and a new home; and later in the 20th century Italians fleeing Mussolini. A third wave of immigration included survivors of the second world war, mostly Jews.

Affect in tango and psychoanalysis Tango music’s lyrics are mostly about heartbreak: loss, grief, nostalgia, yearning, regret — the Argentine version of Fado’s saudade.viii With the bandoneón sobbing, the violins weeping and the guitar thrumming its steady (heart)beat, this is a potent emotional offensive on one’s heart and body, evoking the dancers’ griefs and informing the emotionality of the dance. The lyrics are also about love: love of a woman, longed-for or unrequited,ix but also love of tango, of the bandoneón, of Buenos Aires.x In the words of the renowned dancer and choreographer Juan Carlos Copes, the dance is clearly “this beautiful anguish called tango”. (Sabá, 2010, p.11).xi The immigrants who originated tango were understandably steeped in saudade; and the famous tango lyrics express the experience of loss and grief poignantly. xii An Argentinean analyst writes: “Curiously enough, the psychoanalytic theory that most captured the minds of Argentine psychoanalysts was the Kleinian depressive-paranoid position….” (Astigueta, p.484). The immigrants were also understandably enraged by the inequalities in Argentine society, and by the exploitation of their labor. Some of this outrage gets expressed in the dance. The historical reputation of tango as a louche and low art, full of violence and cheap sex derives from its origins in the courtyards of the conventillos, community housing near the brothels. A famous tango song sings of tango’s cuna de fango, its cradle of mud. Over the decades of its evolution both the aggression and the sexuality have become refined, symbolic. Anyone watching good dancers may read these vestiges in many of the moves. The leader may introduce a corte, a sudden, sharp interruption of a figure, that could dislodge his partner off her axis. She could retaliate with an amagué, a low, sharp thrusting of the lower leg, mimicking a knife thrust; or a high rear boleo, which resembles kicking up mud in his face. As Borges writes: “The tango is a direct expression of what poets have tried to state in words: that a fight may be a celebration.” The follower’s embellishments that include caressing her own or her partner’s legs with her foot are clearly erotic. All’s fair in love and war, when elegantly executed. While on one level patients bring a wide variety of disorders, moods and affects for analysis, Freud himself postulated melancholia, incomplete mourning for an often-idealized past, as a prime one; and Klein offered her Depressive Position as the developmental achievement in which one relinquishes omnipotence and mourns.

The presence of “the third” in tango and psychoanalysis In tango several thirds exist. There are strict codes of behavior for milongueros in traditional milonga settings. For example, the man must establish eye contact with a prospective partner and only walk over to her when his invitation has been acknowledged by a smile or nod.xiii He allows her to choose the closeness or distance of the embrace. And he escorts her back to her seat when the tanda ( a sequence of three or four songs) has finished. In this way, the codes determine how a couple may be formed, how long they may dance together, and when and how they must break apart. This third insists they must now dance with others: a protective code that functions like Lacan’s “law of the father” (Lacan, 1966). This ritual or ceremony of separation closely resembles the ceremonial quality co-created by the separation after each hour of patient and analyst. “There is no leader, no follower and no tango in the absence of the music.” (Roséan, p.23). The music needs to be heard and interpreted, i.e. responded to in the choreography created by both members of the couple. And there is the creature they make when they are each dancing on their own axis, heart to heart, and thereby create a tangible central axis, that some writers refer to as “one heart leading all four feet and being led by the music.” (Denniston, p.50). In psychoanalysis, we are all familiar with Thomas Ogden’s work on “the analytic third.” (1994). He writes: “The analytic process reflects the interplay of three subjectivities: that of the analyst, of the analysand, and of the analytic third. The analytic third is created by the analyst and analysand and at the same time they are created by the analytic third.” In numerous case studies Ogden demonstrates how the unconscious and conscious reveries are generated by the pair and are not only the intrinsic feeling/thinking of each individual. The three essentials in tango are the couple, the embrace and the music. In this context, the couple implies more than simply the dictionary definition of “couple”: it is what the two people transform into when they join on the dance floor. They are coupled for the four dances of the tanda (musical segment), for about twelve minutes, and then they separate. The initiation by the couple of their embrace has the feel of a ceremony. This resembles the ceremony of arrival that each analyst and patient implicitly co-create for their meetings. Maintaining the embrace correctly throughout the dance is a part of the art. To start the leader extends his right arm, with his palm facing upwards; the follower looks at his palm and then places her hand in his. He then circles her back with his left arm and they subtly negotiate whether theirs will be a close or more distant embrace. The follower then puts her left arm on his shoulder blade, the right one, in a distant embrace, the left one in a close embrace. The experience of being held securely yet softly in a close embrace and of being surely yet gently led approaches the ineffable. It includes our universal human desire to be understood wordlessly. Just as it is difficult to describe psychoanalysis to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, so for the tango embrace when the couple is profoundly in sync. Dancing with strangers is in no way comparable to the intimacy of the myriad choreographies of touch of lovers who share a life. But the tango embrace is not a hug. It is the signature stylized figure of the dance, not a personal, intimate gesture. And there is a particular poignancy in strangers dancing tango in an embrace, wordlessly sharing their healing, exchanging comfort and the joy of dancing.

Practicing psychoanalysis during COVID-19 Every one of my patients has bemoaned the “confiscation” of our familiar container, my consulting room/womb/nest, my bodily presence/lap/ breasts, my couch/lap, my blanket/skin. (Anzieu,1985; Tustin 1994). This is in itself a catalyst for grief. It may leave some patients adrift in a field of internal objects, as a face-on analyst is less usable for projections, being too “real.” Winnicott writes about the analytic couch: “In so far as the patient is regressed, (for a moment, an hour, or a long period) the couch is the analyst, the pillows are breasts, the analyst is the mother at a certain past era.” (Winnicott,1955). The sense of deprivation, loss and resentment is palpable. The way we are now required to live is throwing into sharp relief the wide repertoire of physical contact in which we previously engaged, and which we took for granted. Its absence emphasizes how significant mutual touching - of different intensities and with different communications inherent in it - has been for our sense of wellbeing, arguably even our humanity. None of my patients has welcomed the transition to face-to-face online sessions. In fact two have refused it, one insisting on telephone; the other reclines on his bed, using his telephone on speakerphone. He experiences my voice as coming from behind him, slightly over his right shoulder, replicating the arrangement of couch and chair in my consulting room. This hallucination has enabled him to continue to do psychoanalytic work, to bring in real dreams, amenable to useful interpretations. He is also my patient most adept at compartmentalizing, a talent about which we laugh together. He has a characteristic gesture with which he sweeps away unwanted thoughts/feelings with his right hand. I imagine his implicit thought: “COVID be damned, my psychological work will not be derailed.” Others have described the shocking impact of seeing my face full-frontal for longer than the few minutes of arriving and departing. Several have spoken about discomfort at being seen so close-up, “too much”, their privacy invaded, “no place to hide”. Several months into Zoom sessions and this novel container most people seem to have submitted to it, even if no one has mentioned liking it. Similarly, I have adjusted and have become more able to access the states of reverie I need in order to process my patients’ communications. I am also able (silently) to make use of the new forms of information, such as subtle shifts of facial expression, that may be meaningful or even interpretable. Tele-analysis changes everything about the container and about the kind of work we are called on to do. Sessions are regularly interrupted by wifi issues in my patients’ homes, which they sometimes respond to by moving to different rooms. So I receive fast-moving and peculiarly-angled glimpses into their homes too. The impact of Zoom sessions on the analytic frame matches the radical impact of the internet on our traditional frame, which included non-disclosure of our personal lives. Now patients not only Google us but also see into our homes, which surely fuels their fantasies about us. I am surprised not to hear more complaints about these interruptions. It is painful to imagine we are becoming immured to this added source of violation of our pre-COVID conditions. One patient, a single father with two pre-teen boys, has been uncharacteristically late at times, when grocery shopping has taken much longer than usual. Without a nanny, he has had to permit his boys, one of whom is autistic, to interrupt us frequently. Another patient, an elderly artist whom I have been treating since 2005 has been the most vocal and eloquent about her disappointment in our work on Zoom. “I’m not able to let go into the introspective, free associative states that have been conducive to our most profound work. Seeing each other in close-ups of our faces does not contribute to intimacy and trust in the way my lying on the couch in your room has always done. The ritual of driving in from the countryside to our sessions is part of the work. It is the time I start to think about my dreams and whatever else I want to talk to you about. I miss all the familiar rituals that are integral to our work: walking through the garden to reach your consulting room, my excitement as I cross the threshold from the profane space of my everyday life into the sacred space of analysis. I miss the beautiful images and objects in your consulting room. They have been companions on my journey, holding the pivotal points, whether of important insights, or painful realizations. I also much prefer the ritual of handing you my check, the giving and receiving of this token of my gratitude for our work. I dislike the impersonality of PayPal but would of course continue with it as it is safer, for now. You and my children always remind me that I have difficulty with change, but I wouldn’t want you to consider that as the source of my distress.” I assure her I do not, I take her to heart, and we have been meeting in my consulting room, naturally with all safety precautions in place. My patients young and old all report feeling unusually tired, depleted. I understand this as a response to living in a toxic zeitgeist, full of fear and foreboding. Several patients have been reporting dreams that seem both to me and to them to be especially opaque and impossible to interpret meaningfully. I wonder whether this might be a response to the psyche-numbing effect of living through a pandemic with no end in sight. The only common thread in these dreams is seemingly random, bloodcurdling violence. Sometimes I attempt to connect these dreams with the violent films my patients report watching, but little psychological work can be done with them. Short of a lame idea that we are all living through mostly random viral attacks, as well as racist police violence in the USA, and the political violence instigated by Trump, I remain at a loss to shed light. It pains me to experience the paucity of containment I can provide online and the cliché that something is better than nothing offers little consolation. Those most deeply affected by this absence might be those for whom the loss has its deepest source in our earliest experiences of bodily contact with our caregivers, mostly mother. We know from several lenses that have been applied to these earliest days, weeks and months in our lives, how formative of character and mood they are. (Tustin,1994, Bowlby,1969, Winnicott). My personal experience as a placenta previa birth, a newborn snatched away from my mother and rushed to NICU for a week while my mother almost hemorrhaged to death, was deeply embedded in my subsymbolic framework. Fortunately my mother was warm, affectionate and comfortably physical herself. This, as well as long analyses have gone a long way to mitigate my “basic fault”. (Balint, 1968). And when I started to learn tango two years ago, I experienced a transference to this dance, an immediate sense of coming home, which evoked my devotion to it. Now regular dancing supplies continuous balm to this old injury. I am indebted to the work of Wilma Bucci and of William Cornell for my articulation of the meanings of the tango embrace. Bucci’s research extends our understanding of the enduring effects of our earliest experience, encoded in subsymbolic, sensory schemas, which frame our experiences of intimacy, and of therapy as the means to modify negative experience. In this she extends the pioneering work of the Boston Process of Change Study Group. She brilliantly adds the dimension of neuroscience and its contributions to our understanding. xiv Diverse neuroscientific studies of tango, including measuring responses of actual tango dancers in vivo concur that tango alone among dance forms generates significant positive experiences, in the areas of sensory awareness, a sense of well-being, and enhanced sociality. Biochemical research adds the datum that dancers in close embrace release high degrees of oxytocin and endorphins. Cornell emphasizes the somatic and sensory provision of the analytic therapist who is somatically trained, to effect positive changes. (2009). He describes positive intimacy as “the fittedness of two bodies”, and “shaping one’s body to another” which originates in the fittedness of mother and infant in the earliest embraces: nursing, sleeping in her arms, and also playing. He references Winnicott’s “psychosomatic partnership” between mother and infant (1965). Downing (1996) also describes the importance of the infant’s development of affect-motor schemas and affect-motor beliefs that are an elaboration of the infant’s sensorimotor development within the relational and affective patterns with the caregivers. He describes this as “the sensorimotor infrastructure… for bodily connectedness, differentiation and agency”. And he describes how the vestiges of these earlier experiences and beliefs will later affect adult behavior (p.150). Downing stresses the importance of “the earliest relationships fostering a sense of embodied agency”, and writes that “the infant’s ability to impinge on the other must equally be unfolded and that “the infant must build up a motoric representation of the other as engageable and of himself as able to engage.” (p.69). Any tango dancer will resonate to these words. For “followers” especially, beginning lessons are usually devoted to training us in both owning our independence as opposed to “following” in the usual sense of the word; and to tolerating impinging bodily on the leader’s body, overcoming any inhibition about using the leader’s body to aid balance both for walking, the staple of tango dance and especially for fast-moving and complex figures. My teacher praises me when he feels me available for engagement and chides me when he has lost contact with me as I have unconsciously moved off his body. Depending on the individual’s characterological make-up, this training may take years of practice to master. Somatic analysts hold that the therapist’s body must at times “contain, carry, metabolize and/or give meaning to what has been cast out of the patient’s body and psyche …” (Cornell, p.77). Body- centered theorists call this “somatic resonance, in contrast to “projective identification”. This formulation resonates with tango teachers who counsel the necessity to “walk through each other’s bodies” – a metaphor for the profoundly empathic mutual understanding of a well-connected couple - and to cultivate sensory awareness through one’s torso and arms in contact with one’s partner, of the other’s position in space, and his/her intended movement. The embrace constitutes the frame within which the couple dances. It is flexible: couples may start in a close embrace, moving as a unit, or in psychological terms, in symbiosis. When the music and the mood changes, they may then open into a more relaxed embrace that allows space for more individual creativity, embellishments. In order to truly follow, the follower must enter into an active meditative state, in which subtle cues may be received from body to body. A good follower remains on her own axis, carrying most of her own weight, and the function of the left arm in the embrace is to stay connected to the arm of the leader, in order to follow cues from his chest through his arms as to where he intends to lead her. In the words of Professor Clair Wills: “A follower is all antennae. She must cultivate a kind of active uncertainty, a positive doubt. She must be relaxed enough to feel the slightest of cues from her partner, and yet sufficiently poised, mentally and physically to be able to play – to respond, to hold back, to make form out of commitment, interruption and hesitation”. xv This easily transposes to the Bionian tenet: “when there are bees, go with the buzzzzzz.” All communication is sensory and physical, and beginning dancers benefit by closing their eyes, to develop their sensory receptivity. This is analogous with the use of the couch, with the analyst sitting behind the patient, and of our practice of conscious and unconscious listening to our own and our patients’ bodies. One of my teachers, correcting my posture, admonishes: “Be glorious”! - a far cry from dependent; and he teaches me never to instantly move on his cues, but to hesitate briefly, consider and take my time to execute. This exemplifies Ghent’s distinction between submission and surrender. (Ghent, 1990). The dance is all in the delay. “The rhythm is all in the retard,” says Pablo Casals. As analysts we too are sometimes skeptical of overly-compliant patients. The tango leader’s implicit question is “where are you in your body”? while the analyst’s might be “where are you in your mind”? Bucci shines a different light on this moment: “In the dance we need to have a moment of waiting, not knowing what is coming next, for the dancing to be real.” (p.46). No memory, understanding or desire, for us analysts. My tango lineage founder, Carlos Gavito adds: The secret of tango is in this moment of improvisation that happens between step and step. It is to make the impossible thing possible: to dance silence. This is essential to learn in tango dance, the real dance, that of the silence, of following the melody. (Oral transmission). Tango requires a mutual surrender in the embrace to each other, establishing a symbiotic bond which is profoundly pleasurable and consoling. The optimal state of mind for dancers is a sensory meditation, far from conscious thinking. The dance is not choreographed and experienced dancers play with spontaneous expressions of , cued by the leader in their figures and responded to by freely- introduced embellishments by the follower. The close and wordless embrace, together with the follower sometimes closing her eyes might facilitate regression. An evening of dancing tango releases enough oxytocin to render dancers blissful, and to create the experience of being held in the m/other’s arms. It is easy to imagine how necessary the consolation of a warm embrace was for the young men who had left their mothers or wives so far away when they emigrated. Devotion to tango understandably becomes an “addiction” popularly called tangomania. Countless tango dancers who have been interviewed by Roséan, Kavaler-Adler and others attest to this. We milongueros are as devout as synagogue or church goers. The opening chord of the bandoneón is for us like the muezzin’s call to prayer. There are even “tango gypsies” who travel to all the cities of the world where tango is a widespread cultural phenomenon, and famous visiting teachers from Buenos Aires give classes and performances. This is the equivalent of a pilgrimage. On the conscious level tango dancing affords the experience of being extravagantly alive, joyfully embodied, and at-one-with the “other”. Tango addresses our earliest needs for attunement and pleasure – it is en-joy-able, it engenders joy. Attunement to the music by both parties is essential to the joy; and my visceral displeasure when my partners are not musical would surprise me, were I not imagining myself at these moments as a discerning infant with a mis-attuned caregiver. The music itself links us to somatic memories of our early objects and affects, including longing and satisfaction. The rhythmic 4/4 or 4/8 beats per measure might conjure the heartbeat of the mother in utero or in close holding. And since salón dancers dance heart to heart, this association might be unconsciously triggered.

The Embrace is to tango what Containment is to psychoanalysis In psychoanalysis, the structure of the setting and methods are likewise conducive to regressions in the service of development, in which both the analysand and the analyst engage in a symbiosis, which is mutually satisfying. The use of the couch is intended to facilitate an active meditation, in which “free associations” – in reality mostly cued unconsciously by the exchange of analyst/patient reveries – may evolve. The analyst remains aware that in ordinary reality, there are two people in the room and eventually, the patient comes to realize that too, with the depressive affect that gives Klein’s Depressive Position its name. In psychoanalysis the frame within which the analytic “dance” takes place may adjust according to the analyst’s assessment of the developmental stage of the patient and his/her characterological needs at specific times during the treatment. The analyst must determine what kind of frame best contains the work in any stage. And in psychoanalysis as in tango at a certain stage in the evolution of the therapy, the parties may relax into mutual play. Erotic transferences occur equally in tango and psychoanalysis. The codes and the frames confine the intimacy essential to both modalities to the dance hall and consulting room respectively.xvi The essential elements in psychoanalysis are the analytic couple, the use of the couch and the language and narratives they co-create. The analyst and analysand are a couple, for the 45 minutes of each session, and if they remain so after the session ends, it should be only in the psyche of the regressed analysand. The equivalent in analysis for the tango embrace is the “embrace” constituted by the setting: the room, couch, pillows, blanket and the analyst’s mind that holds the patient. The couch is frequently experienced as the mother’s embrace or her lap, by both the analysand and the analyst; and enabling this train of association may be deeply restorative for the patient as well as satisfying to the analyst’s maternal instincts. Both tango and psychoanalysis are complex and layered experiences, inevitably containing contradictions and paradoxes. In tango, one maintains one’s separateness by staying grounded through one’s feet on one’s own axis, rather than leaning on/depending on the partner for support.xvii Tango demonstrates through sheer movement that real intimacy is only possible between two independent people.xviii This is a version of the interplay in psychoanalysis of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. “Leader” and “follower” are misleading translations of Argentine Spanish. They are increasingly replaced by “partner” wherever possible, to counteract the sexist connotation of submission. In describing the male role, the verb llevar is used in Golden Age tangoxix from 1935 through the 1950’s. Its meaning is “to carry,” in the sense of hold, support and cherish,xx a far cry from “dominate.” And the female role is to accept this caring from her partner. The verb dejar is used, meaning “to allow oneself to be carried”. Another is accompagner, the couple accompany each other. This is one critical paradox in tango: “it is by following the follower that the leader gets the power to carry the follower wherever the leader intends to go”. (Denniston, 2007, pp.22-29). In this vein, the follower can never make a mistake, or be wrong, as it is the leader’s job to adapt his choreography instantaneously to her move. In the event of the occasional misalignments/separations that may occur it is both parties’ responsibility to repair the relationship between the two bodies as quickly as possible. In psychoanalysis, a skillful analyst might privately take note of any defensiveness in the patient when his suggestions, questions or interpretations are not responded to, but will also immediately adjust his responses to re-link with the patient, wherever s/he is. Psychoanalysis is often described as” the talking cure” even though we know it involves very specific qualities of talking and implicit ways of relating without words. Tango is a non-talking cure in that one of the valuable codes is that the couple does not engage verbally; all communication occurs between their bodies. One is a dance of words with no physical contact, while the other is a wordless embrace. Both tango and psychoanalysis could be said to be (in different ways) “walking cures.” In each of them there are many schools of thought concerning the best way to walk, and the best way to talk. Roséan writes “choreographed tango exists for the stage…this is a very aggressive style much like Freud’s early analysis of Dora in which he admitted to having ignored the transference and verbally bludgeoning her with interpretations about what was going on in her unconscious.” (p.4). She also reports that Freud loved to walk in the Austrian and Bavarian mountains, taking fast-paced daily constitutionals counterclockwise around the Viennese Ringstrasse. He describes these walks as essential to his states of mind conducive to thinking. He also conducted several successful analyses while on walks with his patients. For example his long walk in the hills with Mahler helped Mahler recover from a performance paralysis and enabled him to resume rehearsing his 8th Symphony. (Freud’s letter to Theodore Reik, 1935). Later they met in Leiden in 1910 and took a 4-hour-long walk, after which Mahler’s impotency disappeared and his marital relationship with Alma improved. I wonder about the harmonizing effect between two bodies moving in synchrony, while they talked. Freud’s daily counterclockwise walks is another rhyme with salón tango: dancers move counterclockwise around the ballroom. In his encyclopedic chronicle of everything tango, Thompson (2005) writes that tango got both its name and its group movement from a Congolese dance movement, identified with the immortal path of the sun, Ntangu. Roséan brilliantly speculates: “a path to the sun is a path to light and enlightenment, a path of making the unconscious conscious.” (p.7). “Counterclockwise” also suggests regression, one of the analysand’s experiences and the analyst’s methods. Tango, while clearly an art of surrender on many dimensions, is also an art that takes years of dedicated learning and practice to achieve the finesse in technique that makes “two people just walking together” look so elegant. As Carlos Gavito writes: “The tango is a way of walking in an embrace with another person, always seeking to understand each other and have a conversation, by way of walking. It is the understanding of two people who walk as one.” Unlike most ballroom dancing tango is unchoreographed, valorizing improvisations. And the reality that each partner dances her/his unique essence as well as her present/immediate emotional state implies that “you cannot dance the same tango twice”. Correspondingly, psychoanalysis, which is “two people in a room talking” xxi or “meeting, telling, parting” xxii also takes years of dedicated learning and practice to become both “natural” – i.e. purified of dogma and clichés - and effective. Whether as analyst or analysand, you cannot do the same analysis twice.

The Non-talking cure: tango as therapy The use of movement and dance therapeutically has an honorable history in psychoanalysis. In 1947, Marion Chase started to work with schizophrenics at Chestnut Lodge, where Frieda Fromm- Reichmann and Harold Searles worked psychoanalytically. “Chase understood that movement was symbolic of the unconscious…” (Website of American Dance Therapy Association). Similar work is currently being done at Borda Hospital in Buenos Aires, with male schizophrenics. This impressive and moving project is documented in detail, with transcripts of interviews as well as photographs by Roséan. (pp. 42-101). Roséan who, as her title tells us “danced with the locos” (danced with the crazy people) describes how it feels to be held by men who for reasons of their own severe illness and sometimes heavy medication cannot be present, except for rare and thrilling moments when they are able to “arrive”. A few women come as guests to partner the men. All the team who are present for Roséan’s visits agree that the men seem more alive after the dance. She interviews in depth one of the two psychoanalysts who created the program which is entitled “We are all Crazy for Tango”. This Director describes how tango is used to demonstrate to psychotic men the difference between the genders and their roles; and to provide the experience of structure via the rules/codes of tango, to counteract their chaotic interior worlds. They also are forced into awareness that the other exists and must be related to. This weekly milonga facilitates her patients in making social links, which according to the long Argentinian psychoanalytic tradition originating with Pichon-Riviere, is the optimal treatment for psychosis, as opposed to individual analysis. The spontaneous tango community created in Borda counteracts however fleetingly the isolation and stigmatization imposed on these men. Roséan concludes: “She is dancing her patients into the symbolic order of Lacan”. (p.67). The tango teacher who comes weekly describes feeling how powerful a creative force tango is for these men “who are forced to go inside themselves to find their tango… “When the class is beginning, many patients come, and when it ends, many men leave the class, not patients…There is a transformation every time”. (p.68). Finally, this teacher describes how a patient who had recently almost succeeded in a suicide attempt, and was considered mute, was brought to her for tango. He told her his name, responded immediately to the music and proceeded to fall in love with her. He made great progress in learning to dance and was able to leave the hospital. A transference love to her and the tango proved curative.

Tango for neurotics Psicotango, “the dance of tango as therapy” is founded and directed by two psychologists in Buenos Aires, in collaboration with Dinzel Tango Group. One director, a Jungian, published a paper “Tango as interior dance” in which he investigates the archetypes of anima, animus, psychoanalysis and philosophy in tango. The other trained in psychoanalysis - Freud, Winnicott, Lacan. They use many body- based modalities and they teach that tango is a metaphor for all one’s emotional life experience. All “clients” are referred to Dinzel studio for tango technique, while Psicotango claims their own work is on the soul and psyche components: “The body is the same as the soul” a director says, and quotes Blake’s belief : “Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age”. This analyst does not use the conventional man/woman language but refers instead to “energies” – yin/yang, feminine and masculine. Interestingly, he adds significant connotations to the Spanish word entrega whose common meaning is surrender: to enter into the other person, transmit energy to her; and to transmit tango, its essence. This entrega could well describe training analyses and consultation too.

Tango is in my blood

My desire to explore the relationship between two of my most enduring passions, tango and psychoanalysis, is overdetermined. Among the layered reasons for my quest for psychoanalysis was my experience of homelessness, loneliness. Of course, this was psychic and developmental. But it is also on another level a transgenerational transmission from my refugee ancestors, who fled pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, and later the holocaust. A sense of homelessness and deculturation is in my psychic history. I fled persecution from the apartheid regime in South Africa, and am an immigrant here, however well assimilated. I imagine this is the source of my instant empathy and identification with Argentines, and especially with all things tango. The Argentine population has the greatest concentration of Jewish immigrants in Central and Southern America. Over the past few years I have contracted my analytic practice into three days a week and started using the liberated time to take Argentine tango lessons and attend many practicas (group classes in which specific figures are taught and practiced) and milongas Simultaneously, I have started to learn Spanish. These two activities, tango and Spanish, had been pent-up desires through my decades of working full-time, desires which ignited two years ago into wholehearted action. My Jewish ancestors played a significant role in the evolution of tango and of psychoanalysis in Argentina. My mother was an excellent accordion and piano player and my parents loved Latin dance, though they were not exposed to tango. But we rolled up the living room carpet and danced every other Latin dance.xxiii Jews were instrumental in the formation of tango in Buenos Aires right at the outset. They were the main brothel owners, and Jewish women found employment in the cabarets and brothels. On top of this, the first evidence of tango being danced on stage comes from the Yiddish Theatre in Buenos Aires in the 1890’s. (Denniston, p.170). Early tango music includes strains of the Klezmer music the Jews brought to Argentina, and the Eastern European accordion is the ancestor of the German-made bandoneón. In the concentration camps, Jewish prisoners played Klezmer/tango music and danced Yiddish Tango too. (Czakis, 2003).xxiv Tango music has long been the soundtrack for my life. I hear just one phrase of the music and my entire bodymind lights up. I have been learning Spanish, both as I love the sound of the language and its emotional registers, and also to be able to translate tango lyrics. A resounding echo in it for me is my father’s collection of cantorial and Klezmer vinyl records which he played often on weekends, singing along, tears streaming down his face. During these times he was liberated from the dissociative states in which he mostly existed. I listened with him, as this was the rare opportunity to glean fragments of stories about my paternal lineage. My few living elders compare living through this pandemic with surviving the pogroms and the 1918 influenza pandemic that devastated their entire world. This one seems like a cakewalk to them, comfortably ensconced as they are in super-sanitized retirement homes, all needs provided for. I think to myself: This IS a blessing. But you aren’t dancing tango now, as those in the camps did. They knew and used the music and dance that made some moments at least bearable. However unspeakably abhorrent their conditions and final fate were, I like to imagine that their spirits flamed and soared before their bodies were burned to ashes.

ENDNOTES

i Tango Argentino had a “forever” run on Broadway, starting in 1985 and was followed by Forever Tango. Hollywood soon picked up the craze and a succession of tango films began to pour forth.

ii Carlos Saura’s film Tango is a rare exception: a tour de force. The narrative has substance, the film within the film depicting Argentina’s violent history in magnificent dance routines. The dancing is both athletic and intimate, running the gamut from murderous rage to heartbreaking tenderness.

iii The equivalent of our “frat boys.”

iv The Berlin tango scene is famously experimental, with a growing group that blends contact Improvisation with tango. See documentary film, Tango Pasión. In Italy, Tamara di Tella has created a blend of Pilates and Tango, “Tangolates;” while at Malmo University in Sweden, Dr. Kenjiro Sato pairs Tai Chi with tango, therapeutically. (Woodley, p.132 and p.172).

v Argentines joke: "There are two psychoanalysts for every Argentine." vi This was understandable given the struggle for recognition he was engaged in for psychoanalysis to be recognized as a science, in a hostile medical environment.

vii Tango was born simultaneously in Argentina and Uruguay, which had similar immigrant populations. . viii The lyrics express saudade very poignantly. This is why understanding the lyrics adds dimension to the experience of dancing; and a prime mover in my study of Spanish is for this dimension.

ix The typically Hispanic Madonna/mother and whore/lover complex is rampant. Desired women are often reviled as treacherous, deceptive, and the men often turn to mother for solace.

x “Mi Buenos Aires Querido” (my beloved Buenos Aires) is the porteños’ anthem, and when it is played in milongas, everyone stops dancing, and sings along, hands over hearts.

xi Comparisons with American country music, the blues, miss the incomparably greater complexity of tango orchestration and lyrics. The range of emotion in the tango music genre is extensive, and includes different qualities of love, loss and resentment too. The difference is arguably that between the Argentinian soul, and the American one.

xii Examples include Anibal Troilo (1944), “Mi tango es triste” and Osvaldo Pugliese, “Why do I sing tango?” and Verdemar, by Pugliese, a song which is rarely danced, due to its raw power of grief and sorrow. “She was snatched away from us in the prime of her beautiful life,” cry the lyrics.

xiii In many USA and European milongas, women and men may invite other women and men to dance.

xiv There is a burgeoning literature on the findings by neuroscientists of the powerful beneficial effects of tango dancing specifically on the dancer’s states of mind and relational capacities. This cannot be included in this essay, for reasons of prolixity.

xv Stepping out, in NYRB, August 20, 2020. Vol. LXVII, number 13, pp.4-8. xvi The psychoanalytic literature which distinguishes erotic from eroticized transferences and countertransferences is illuminating in this regard. (e.g. Mann, 1997, Bonasia 2001). Briefly, eroticized transferences are overt or covert demands on the therapist to reciprocate the desire. They foreclose on deeper analytic work. Similarly in tango, either partner may cross the line physically, by inappropriate touching and broadcasting of arousal, to the detriment of the dance. Even so, acting out does, as we know too well, occur in both venues, though probably with less dire consequence in tango.

xvii Except in the volcado, a figure in which the leader intentionally draws the follower’s torso far forward on to his body. xviii When I am dancing well — being present in the moment, attentive to remaining on my own axis and not being induced to follow my partner at the expense of my independence — I begin to feel how clearly I belong to myself, how surely and elegantly I walk in this world. This is no easy achievement for a psychoanalyst who is used to inhabiting my patients’ psyches, while bracketing off my own. It is liberating – part of the joy of this dance, for me. xix This is when music, dance and lyrics all came together. xx Carlos Gavito taught: “embrace the woman as if she were a precious crystal.” xxi Momigliana, Luciana Nissim, and Robutti, A. In Shared Experience, pp.5-20. xxii Di Chiara, G. in The Psychoanalytic Dialogues, pp.21-42. xxiii My mother’s ancestors came from Germany and Hungary, to which I attribute her love of “gypsy” dance and music. She encouraged me to learn , which I danced from the age of 15 through my early 40’s. xxiv A gifted singer, Rivka-Rebekah has revived Polish tango dance and music. Her work is available on You Tube, replete with archival footage of milongas in the ghettos.