Feelings of Fear and Creativity (article)

When I saw Bolsonaro supporters invading the official buildings of the Brazilian parliament on television on January 9, 2023, almost coinciding with the anniversary of the Trump supporters’ assault on the U.S. Congress, and the color of the Seleçao football team jerseys worn by the protesters, which reminded me of the yellow vests in France, some of whom had tried to penetrate the Elysée Palace in Paris (the seat of the Presidency of the French Republic), I was very afraid for democracy. The yellow vests marched every Saturday for months to protest rising fuel prices, then joined other groups protesting anti-COVID measures and vaccination. We saw in the demonstrations all kinds of flags: not only those celebrating Che Guevara alongside red and black anarchist flags but also royalist, far-Right, or nationalist flags. They were all chanting the same things. When I looked at and listened to them, I felt an immense resentment and mistrust that seemed to animate them.

How can this be explained? For French psychoanalyst René Kaës, author of Le Malêtre (Discomfort, 2021), it is the rapidity, complexity, and magnitude of the changes we are witnessing at the global level, changes over which we have no mastery. They are indecipherable, difficult to fathom, meaningless, and provoking feelings of persecution and powerlessness. At the very least a mistrust in the environment, in others, and in ourselves. According to René Kaës, the disintegration of cultural frameworks releases psychic elements that attack the work of culture—beta elements on the scale of humanity. It is, therefore, necessary to support the formation of new containers of thoughts and actions, in order to implement alpha functions and, beyond that, to identify the beginnings of new models, new organizing myths, and new ways of living together. The disorganizations are also working, silently and without our knowledge, to open new avenues of creation (Kaës, 2012, p. 91).

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