Discomfort in the present day

Psychoanalysis as a systematic critical discourse on culture and a transformative force in society. This edition features a new cover and a previously unpublished afterword by the author, 10 years after its original publication.

“After every war [...]

Someone has to lie down there

in the grass that covered

the causes and consequences,

with a little weed between his teeth

and the gaze lost in the clouds.”

As if reminding us of the verses from “ The End and the Beginning ”, by the poet Wisława Szymborska, Joel Birman, in Malaise na atualidade , highlights the importance of the existence of a time-space imbued with analytical and transformative power of reality.

By fostering a connection between Sigmund Freud's observations in Civilization and Its Discontents and Jacques Lacan's thinking on the ethics of psychoanalysis and its political implications, Joel Birman reaffirms the idea that, more than a therapeutic method, psychoanalysis is a systematic critical discourse on culture. It is also a privileged subjective space for the reconnection of the individual (and, therefore, for the reconnection of society) with truth, enabling us to experience reality (with all its pleasures and pains) and, in a radical and revolutionary way, transform it.

In this process of artisanal construction of "a style of existence characterized by singularity and difference"—as Birman notes—the subject resembles the poet who, by seeking the name of things from their roots, undertakes a singular life-writing. And in this way, psychoanalysis, like poetry, emerges as a possible path of life, in the opposite direction of barbarism.

This edition has been supplemented by a previously unpublished afterword by the author, 10 years after its initial publication. "Discomfort in the Present Day" is organized into four parts: Psychoanalysis and Its Impasses, New Forms of Subjectivation, Subjectivities and Drugs, and Violence and Its Fates.