Tremors and Transference: How Psychoanalysis Helps Us Weather Inner and Outer Earthquakes
There are times when the world shakes—sometimes literally, more often psychically. Whether it’s political unrest, collective grief, or personal upheaval, we all live through moments that disturb our sense of stability. These moments don’t just happen “out there.” They echo within us, unsettling long-buried feelings, unresolved losses, and fragile hopes.
Psychoanalysis is not immune to these tremors. In fact, it is uniquely positioned to help make sense of them.
Living Through Earthquakes—Inside and Out
In Buenos Aires, a city often referred to as the „capital of psychoanalysis,“ societal turmoil has long left its imprint on the consulting room. Earthquakes—metaphorical or real—become part of the therapeutic encounter. And while this article references Argentina, its message resonates far beyond: that therapy does not exist in a vacuum. The personal and the political often mirror one another.
The psychoanalytic space holds both.
For those in analysis, this means something important: what happens outside—wars, elections, pandemics, or social unrest—will likely appear inside. Not as news headlines, but as dreams, fears, silences, outbursts. As symptoms, regressions, or sudden clarity. The world’s chaos is often felt before it’s fully understood.
How We Survive the Shake
When the ground shifts, our first instinct is often fear. The second is suppression. Over time, a kind of psychic scar tissue builds up—an adaptive way of carrying on. But buried fear does not disappear. It shows up in the body, in symptoms, in relationship patterns. Psychoanalysis provides a space where these suppressed tremors can be revisited—not to relive the chaos, but to slowly digest and symbolize it.
As one psychoanalyst, D. W. Winnicott, once wrote, the goal is to develop “the capacity to be alone in the presence of another.” In times of upheaval, this means holding onto oneself while feeling deeply, not collapsing under the pressure of fear or uncertainty.
The Therapy Room Is Not a Bubble
The consulting room is not disconnected from reality. It remembers what happens outside its walls—sometimes explicitly, often symbolically. In places shaped by dictatorship, censorship, or systemic violence, the therapy space becomes a container for unspeakable histories. But this is true even in quieter moments. Our personal histories are never separate from our cultural ones.
A psychoanalytic process can help explore how inherited trauma or societal pressures shape our inner world. It offers a space where contradictions—between love and anger, desire and guilt, hope and despair—can be explored without judgment.
This is not easy work. It involves grieving what has been lost, tolerating uncertainty, and learning to stay present with what once felt unbearable.
Why Psychoanalysis Takes Time
Change in psychoanalysis is often not dramatic. It’s slow. Like glaciers, it reshapes the landscape silently beneath the surface. Over time, what once felt impossible becomes thinkable. Feelings that had to be pushed away can be felt safely. The past becomes something we can live with, not be ruled by.
This is especially important in times of fragmentation—when the world feels hard to understand, and we feel hard to understand ourselves. In such times, psychoanalysis offers a rare gift: a space where meaning can slowly be rebuilt.
There Are Always Missing Pieces
Life brings inevitable losses—some final, others transformable. We carry absences, disappointments, wounds that never fully heal. Therapy doesn’t offer to erase them. Instead, it helps us relate to them differently. What once felt like a dead end can become a site of growth.
In psychoanalysis, even the silences matter. Even the missing pieces become part of the story.
Psychoanalysis Is Not About Being Fixed—But Becoming More Fully Alive
There is no ideal version of the self waiting at the end of therapy. No perfect analyst. No perfect patient. What psychoanalysis offers is something more real: the chance to come into fuller contact with your own experience. To feel more deeply. To relate more openly. To live more meaningfully.
Especially in chaotic times, this process becomes not just therapeutic—but necessary.
Suggested Reading
Bion, W. R. (1970). Attention and Interpretation.
Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.
Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia.
Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The Capacity to Be Alone.