Alexis Hieu Truong: 0:18

more sociologically. I'm Alexis Hieu Truong in Gatineau, Quebec, and I'm here with Rosie Hancock in

Rosie Hancock: 0:25

Hi Alexis, h i everyone. T oday we're going to be thinking about therapy – psychoanalysis, to be precise – Leipzig, Germany. and not how it shapes the way we speak, but instead how we listen and specifically how people in Buenos Aires in Argentina listen.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 0:42

Indeed, you might not know this, but Buenos Aires is oft- described as the world capital of psychoanalysis. According to 2016 data from the World Health Organisation, Argentina had 222 psychologists per 100,000 people, compared to a mere 30 in the U.S. E ven the late Pope Francis, before he was Pope Francis, reportedly did six months of it in his early 40s. It's not very long, but still, right?

Rosie Hancock: 1:11

Well, speaking of durations, our guest Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas d id six years of research, starting in 2012 in Buenos Aires, tuning into how the ubiquity of psychoanalysis has shaped how people interact with and hear each other there. Trained in social anthropology in Mexico City and New York City, Xochitl got her PhD from the University of California Berkeley in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology – a nd don't worry, o ne of our first questions is about exactly what that entails – a nd she's now an A ssociate P rofessor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory College of Arts and Sciences in the U.S. Her book, Genres of Listening: An Ethnography of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires, is the focus of our conversation today.

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: 2:00

Hello Rosie and hello Alexis. Thank you for having me.

Rosie Hancock: 2:03

It's great to have you here. Now, Xochitl , you grew up in Mexico and did field work in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and I'm curious to know, like, what took you there and how you came to settle on and decide this research project. Like, what was it that made you think, ah, there's something interesting going on here. So, if you could sort of paint a picture for us of that little inkling that turned into what I think was 30 months of field work.

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: 2:29

Yeah, I mean it was within a span of six years, so it's not that I was there for the whole time. But I grew up in Mexico in a place where mental health is something kind of like a taboo still and also something that belongs to the middle classes, right? I mean, in the sense that it depends on where you are socially whether or not you're gonna seek mental health treatment. But even there, talking about your mental health problems, talking about yourself, it's something kind of taboo. And I visited Argentina many times because I have a lot of connections with friends and family, and being in Buenos Aires and seeing how everyone was talking about their therapy sessions, about their personal ideas, about their internal states for me was a shock, w as like, wow, this is very interesting, s o this is a) no taboo and b) people are really open about this and it's everywhere. And you start seeing it in the TV, in commercials, in magazines, in late night shows. So, it was the strike difference between Mexico and Argentina in terms of speaking about your mental health issues that drove me to do field work in Argentina.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 3:41

Your training in linguistic anthropology kind of comes in here, yeah, because you would have been maybe more alert than the average person to what was going on here in what you call the city of listeners. Can you tell us a bit more, like, about what linguistic anthropology is, how it sharpens the senses?

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: 4:00

So, linguistic anthropology sits at the intersection of language and culture, but it has a distinctive set of commitments than just analysing pure exchanges. So, it is not primarily interested in grammar or syntax, as the way linguistics, for instance, is, or not interested in social variabilities, as sociolinguists do, but what linguistic anthropologists are fundamentally interested in is in how language and communication more broadly is constitutive of social life. So,

think about it: 4:31

the way that we live in the world, the way that we think about it, it's through language. So that's what interests us. So, one of our founding fathers or figures – his name was Dell Hymes – coined the term ethnography of communication, and basically it's the idea that you have to study communicative practices in their full social context with the methods of ethnography. So, you have to learn the language, immerse yourself there, u nderstand the full social context in which you are dealing with, because we , we don't – as linguistic anthropologists – we don't take what people say at face value necessarily, right? But how do you say it? Why do you say that? What are the registers that you use? And especially lately, the idea of linguistic ideology. So, think about it, l anguage is not just to communicate things and ideas, but when we hear an accent and we immediately categorise that person as X, that's, that's just linguistic ideology, right? I mean, like it's not about language; it's about how people say things, right, and, what the words they're using. So, those are some of the things that we, as linguistic anthropologists, focus on. And the field has a strong tradition in what Roman Jakobson – which was a Russian American linguist and literary theorist – called the functions of language, r ight. So, there is an emphatic, empathetic, t here's poetic function, so language does a lot of different things in the world, s o linguistic anthropology is where we are attuned to that. So, when I went to Buenos Aires, my first idea was precisely to think about how people talk about psychoanalysis and, of course, I wanted to experience first hand the clinical setting, which was impossible, as you can im a gine, bec a use it's a private contract. So I stumble into this fantastic place, which is the multifamily therapeutic community at the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, where you have like around 80 analysand and between 15 and 20, sometimes, analysts there doing these psychoanalytic therapy sessions together. A nd that's where I was like, okay, I'm gonna focus on language. How do they talk? What are the silences? What do they focus on? But then the listening question kept coming up and, and that's when I switched my, my interest.

Rosie Hancock: 7:01

Yeah, so you you did essentially conduct an

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: 7:01

This is a great question, and a question ethnography of listening, and I would love to hear how you go about doing that. I mean, because listening is understood, I think, often as a sort of biological function and often a really silent thing. And so, how do you record it and how do you study it? that I really like to to talk about because it's a methodological problem, right? Whereas with speech, it's very easy to record, right, r ight now, I'm, I mean, we're recording this session. So, how do you do ethnographic of listening practices? And there are different ways to do this. So one is the most basic one, which is how do people talk about listening, right? Another way of going through it is the embodiment of listening. And what do I mean by this? So, for instance, Charles Hirsch kind , in his great book Ethical Soundscapes, he , he talks about how, for instance, young Muslims in Cairo who were smoking, they stop smoking when they start listening to these prayers. So basically, this shows you that they are listening in a particular way. It's an embodied form of listening. So, that's another way in which you can analyse listening practices. A nd, of course, the body dispositions. Right, I mean, like empathic, empathetic listening. I mean, are you paying attention? How are you moving your body? But in my particular case, it was about what are some of the key phrases or moments in which that emerge during conversation that you can actually see, like, oh, they are listen in g in a particular way. So it's a combination, right?

Rosie Hancock: 8:49

Yeah. So a lot of the time, it's like listening emerges through a sort of like a dialogical encounter, and so then we can sort of listen to the listening. But I'm, I'm, I'm wondering, do you think doing this kind of work led you to become more aware of how you listen too?

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: 9:06

Maybe this is a time to talk about how do I came about my idea of genres of listening. So I went to Buenos Aires, as you know, for a very long period of time, and I immersed myself into the psy- world, as they call it, r ight. So I went to these multifamily therapists that I was describing. I went to therapy, right, for the first time. I went to analysis as a participant observant, right, s o I was there. I, I became kind of like a believer, to be honest. But at the beginning, I was just there to, okay, let's see what people do when they go to therapy. And third, well, you are just talking to friends and to, to acquaintances, and yeah, and, and I also took classes at the La canian School of Psychoanalysis and the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association. So I was just there trying to immerse myself, and yet I came back to the U.S. empty-handed. Every time I came back, I was like, well, this is very i nteresting, and then I would talk to my advisors, and they were very like, "Yeah, but where's the question? Where's the question?". And I remember one of my advisors said, l ike, you have to let data speak to you, kind of like this almost mythical thing. So he said p ut on your headphones when you're running, when you're doing the dishes, whenever, and listen to your recordings and see what you can hear, right? I mean, he didn't say that, but he's like, let the data speak to you. So at one point, literally washing dishes, I was listening to these multifamily sessions, and then suddenly everything came up together. Everything I was like, oh, th is is about listening. I mean, it was kind of in my face all the time and I wasn't able to see it. And th is is one of the characteristics of psychoanalytic listening that I found, which is that listening is cumulative, r ight? We tend to think that when we listen, it's like when you hear the knock of a door, r ight? Y ou listen, t he sound comes, t he sound goes, i t's done. But what my research shows is that some kinds of listening, first of all, are learned, r ight. So it takes time to learn how to listen in a particular way, especially psychoanalytic listening, but also that it's cumulative, r ight. That sometimes you listen, you listen, you listen, and then at one point all of that cumulative listening experience gets a concrete meaning. And I think that in this sense, psychoanalytic listening and anthropological listening are very, very similar. You listen, you record, you take notes, but there's a moment, right, in which you actually get that, o h, so this is what my project is about, because it's all of this cumulative listening and I think that in the clinic, specifically, it's about that, right? And that's why in psychoanalysis it's so long. So, one of the characteristics again of psychoanalytic listening is that it's cumulative. Another one is th a t it's a learned process in many cases. I mean, think a bout a doctor with the stethoscope, right? Listening to the sounds produced by your body. I mean, that's something that you have to learn. That's something that we might call semantic listening, right, b ecause you have particular sounds attached to to meanings, right, t hat are kind of fixed, right? I mean, if the heart sounds in a particular way, or if your body, or when you cough, right, your lungs sound in a particular way, there's a particular sign assigned to that. Whereas other forms of listening, like psychoanalytic listening, which is more about suspending attention, right? I mean, the idea is that you are not going to focus necessarily on the words per se, but somehow what the words invoke in you. And then a third one, it's a very good one, I think – which is what the analyst told me – y ou have to listen from what they call in Spanish, from lo vivencial or the lived experience, which basically means that you have to really let yourself resonate with the other person, right? So rather than again using a logical engagement with the words, you let yourself resonate, see how you feel.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 13:21

On these aspects that you mention about learning and about like also listening to yourself and such, I suddenly become quite conscious of the way that I'm listening to you, so I'm kind of reflecting on that. It made me think about a situation where I was, when I was doing my PhD, I did my field work in Tokyo, I was speaking to a professor and actually, when when we were discussing, he had his eyes closed, his head a bit down, listening surely quite intently, a nd afterwards he provided me very generous feedback. But at the time, I was really worrying that I was being very boring, and so it was a very different culturally specific way of listening, right? But I kind of also learned to internalise that, and I think that now I do a kind of hmm, hmm, I close my eyes to listen, but then here it kind of clashes and people are, are sometimes like, yeah, what are you doing, t ype of thing. You mentioned that what you observed kind of boiled down in many ways to a kind of like when you say X, I hear Y formulation. Can you elaborate a bit on that, Xochitl, tell us more why it struck you?

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: 14:36

Well, one of the characteristics again of, of psychoanalytic listening is that what you say is not necessarily what you want to say, right? I mean, like the idea that your words betray you, and there's the famous slips of the tongue, right, t hat Freud discusses. So, the main idea is that, yeah, when you say something, you might want to say something else, but y ou don't know, right? So again, this goes beyond the level of awareness. So, for instance, to give you an example, in the multifamily sessions that I attended to, there was this woman who will raise her hand and will always tell the same story, right? I mean, like, well, everybody is mean to me. My kids don't come and visit. Everybody hates me, and she was kind of an annoying person in this setting. And every time she raised her hand, everybody was like, o h, here she goes again. And at one point, this, this other person who was present in during that session raised his hand and he said, "Hi, my name is so and so, and I've been coming to these sessions for a, for a year, and I am really sad to hear this lady repeating over and over the same story. I wonder what she really wants to tell us and I just want to raise that". And an analyst was like, w ell, I'm so happy that you raised that Juan, l et's call him, because she touches in you something, right? So that compel you to actually, I mean, participate, right? And so when you say that her story keeps repeating and doesn't have any effect, it did have an effect on you. You felt compelled to talk. So that's an example of how, well, it's taken at face value in this setting that when you say something, you mean something else, right, t hat there, and especially when you repeat a story, right? And this is what analysts will tell me, and that's why we're not interested in the referential meaning of words, but we're more interested in what the words, I mean, and the repetition. Like, why are you saying that over and over? So I formulated that in a very, very short formula – w hen you say X, I hear Y – because in everyday life in Buenos Aires, outside of the clinical setting, what I discover or what I experience is that when I was with friends and acquaintances, I would say something and they would say like, "Oh, Xochitl, what you really mean is X" and I was like, "What? I just told you what I thought". And like, n o, what you said sounded to me like, and I was that was a very big surprise to me. And I was like, w ow! So, I started following that w hat you really mean is because that , that sounded very interesting to me. But I still didn't think what, what was the value of that until I came back to the U.S. and then I talked to my advisors – two white men, very privileged and older – and when I told them about this, they were like,"What? Somebody's telling me what I really mean? I mean, my most precious self. That's horrible". So they got so upset about it that I was like, w ow, there is something interesting here. Why is this causing so much discomfort? It didn't to me. To me, it was more like I took that as almost like a friend telling me about my horoscope, like, o h, you're a Pisces, so this is what I think happens to you, or something. But no, s o then, this for me was kind of like the signature way in which we could see how psychoanalysis, which is one of the points I make in my book, have left the clinical setting and has become a way of listening socially.

Rosie Hancock: 18:17

I think it's so interesting what you just said about your advisors sort of being offended, or, or sort of saying that they would be offended if someone said that to them – w hat you really mean is, is this – because that's sort of what I wondered, whether there are contexts or particular people for whom actually that, that would really get on their nerves. It seems like a power play, and is this sort of like you know a sign of the psychologisation of everyday conversation in like, in particular context s that's viewed in a negative and it's viewed in a negative way, right? Like, you know, well being discourse and all of that. I'm just kind of curious, like what's going on here when, when people are having these negative reactions to it? You seem, because you seem very generous in your interpretation, l ike you're writing about like a positive interpretive stance on it.

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: 19:08

Well, that's a great point, Rosie. Thank you for bringing it up. I mean, every single time I present my work at any conference or any place, they're like, o h, this is a power trip. This is power just being totally like projected, right? Like you are interpreting people, you are imposing interpretation, right? And I'm like, actually, that's precisely not what is happening here. And one of the things that I really tell people is that I'm not interested. I mean, yes, there is a way in which you could potentially see this as a power play, as an imposition of interpretation. But honestly, what I found out a) is that people actually accepted the interpolation 99% of the times. I mean, in Argentina, right, I mean, I'm talking about Buenos Aires. So for them, it was not an issue. And secondly, I mean, I was more interested in, not necessarily in this kind of analysis of critique, but I was interested more about how people experience this, and they experience them as positive, right? I mean, it was part of their everyday life and I think that I'm more interested in how people again experience that in Buenos Aires, rather than, and I think that in the U.S, Canada or British a cademy, we're so used to critique, right, I mean, and to always analyse everything on the power struggle, which of course it's true and you can make that analysis, I'm not saying not. B ut I'm from Berkeley, as you said, I was trained at Berkeley and that's like the Foucault c hurch, I will call it, right. So, Foucault was there, so everything is always transversed by this power- knowledge kind of. So I wanted to, I mean, I'm not interested in that reading, although of course I understand that it could be read as that.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 21:00

I'd really like to hear more about your favourite anecdote illustrations here, maybe perhaps even more on experiences with taxi drivers in particular, because this , this is taking therapy speak and indeed like therapy listening to a whole new level that maybe if we hear correctly like transcends class in this particular context, yes. And indeed, when you say psychoanalytic listening is a social fact, I think in your writings, right – as Marcel Mauss would call it – in Buenos Aires . Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: 21:36

Let me first address the, the class issue, right, b ecause this is one of the first things that people always tell me. I mean, like, isn't psychoanalysis just for the middle class, the educated middle class, and it's expensive? Well, first of all, part of my research implied, I mean, I really went to, to how do you get trained as an analyst and a lot of people study psychology in the Buenos Aires University, which is free, and then I went to the last 30-year exam, exams, and I discovered that in order to to become a psychologist, not an analyst, you have to pass this 100 question exam, and for the past 30 years, between 55 and 49 questions were about psychoanalysis. So, that was already interesting that the way that they are trained in the public university as a psychologist, it's very much influenced by psychoanalysis, and therefore they practice in a lot of public hospitals, right? I mean, so public clinics because Argentina has a universal healthcare system, so therefore anyone can go, I mean, for any different class strata and get like psychological services for free. But most likely, these people are going to be attended by people who had been trained in psychoanalysis, and a lot of them actually went on to have masters and other specialisation in psychoanalysis besides their training in the public university. S o what this means is that everyone has access to psychoanalysis in a way. And an anecdote that I have is that when I rented an apartment in Buenos Aires, it came with a service of cleaning, right, I mean, like a cleaning service came and cleaned the apartment once every two weeks. So, I became friends with this woman, this woman was from a very working class background. She actually had to travel from the province of the, of Buenos Aires like almost two hours to get into my apartment, you know. But then we will always talk, and she one day, well, I saw her limping, and I was like, oh, Rosita, why did you came, r ight, I mean, if you don't feel great? A nd what she said was like, o h no, don't worry, Xochitl, t his is psychosomatic. Every time my, my son gets into trouble, I start feeling, I mean, all these ailments in my body. So I was like, o h, well, tell me a little bit more about this. And she said, like, w ell, you know, it's all about the mind, you know, and how we process all of this trauma – I mean, she uses these words – in the body. I mean, someone who can barely write, you know, and read. So, so that actually, it's an example of how widespread these ideas about trauma, about psychosomatic, I mean, all of these things that, that circulate in, in Buenos Aires, and part of it is also that it's on in all of these advertisements. They advertise couches, right, with the stereotypical idea of an analyst, right, like a man with a beard and like a jacket, and he goes to stores and you know lays down. They also sell literally chips. I mean, so this, this analyst is looking at his clock because he wants to eat c hips. They advertise, I mean, anything. So I think again, these ideas, I mean, the media in one hand, but in the other hand, the fact that it's available to everyone in the hospital, I think creates this awareness. A nd of course, the taxi drivers, which a lot of people have different anecdotes, and I mean, I have many. So, I was with a friend in a, in a cab and then there was this group of kids crossing the streets, and my friend said, o h, I don't like that combination of colour, the uniforms, and the taxi driver was like, o h, nobody dislikes a colour for no reason. Does your mother wear that colour often? And then two weeks later, my friend was like, o h, I feel so bad because my, I realised that my mother-in-law has a swe a ter with those colours, but I love my mother-in-law, so I got very conflicted. So, the words travel, you know, what in linguistics we call, they have this speech act, kind of meaning that words do things in the world, right? They linger.

Rosie Hancock: 25:57

I mean, like that was just really fascinating to hear about how the psychoanalysis is so widely available in terms of both in terms of the number of people being trained in it, but also in terms of kind of the, the cost of it within Argentina, b ecause, you know, I wanted to know about why psychoanalysis has taken root so strongly in the city. A nd if I'm right, you know, I guess there's not necessarily a single clear reason, although lots of ideas, and this is certainly like a really good one, and, and perhaps we can all pick up your book to read a bit more about that as well. But what I wanted to move on to now is how this kind of ubiquity of psychoanalytic listening relates to people's understanding of selfhood and kind of people's concept of the political, because I guess we're not just talking about small interpersonal stuff and you're not just talking about the sort of small interpersonal stuff in your book either.

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: 26:55

Yeah, thank you, Rosie. Well, so I know you ask for why is this a social fact? So let me go back to that, and then I can respond to this question. So Mauss borrowed from his uncle Durkheim the concept of the social fact, h e actually said the total social fact, Mauss. A nd a social fact, it's something that exists external to individuals and constraints or shape their behaviour. And this concept is useful in Argentina precisely because, as I mentioned, right, it surpasses class, gender, even the Pope, right. So, it's everywhere. And how does this relate to personhood or to, to a form of being? Well, what I think it's , it has to do with this particular way of understanding liberal theory. So, how I mean, if you actually think about psychoanalysis, you have to think about a particular way of understanding the self, right? I mean, the first thing is that you have an interior life, right? I mean, like that idea, it's not universal. We tend to think that it is, but as a lot of people working in New Guinea, right, in a lot of different places in the Pacific, will tell you this idea that we have an internal self that we can talk about, that we can discuss, is actually a very particular historical construction of the self. So, I mean, one of the things that I explore in the book is well, so this form of listening, right, that actually it's attuned to, to the idea that you have that your self is unique, r ight, first of all, right. I mean, a nd a lot of people like Chakrabarty have, had explained how modernity actually for them it is precisely with the birth of the biography, r ight, the idea of the uniqueness of the self. So, it seems to me that the first thing that we need to, to think about when we think about listen in g in this particular way is that it points to a very particular way of understanding selfhood, right, and personhood, and it has to do with the the liberal idea of the rational self. But it's interesting because at the same time it's, it's in conflict with psychoanalysis because psychoanalysis, in the other hand, tells you well actually you're a split subject, right? And maybe we can t a lk a little bit about what psychoanalysis is, b ut psychoanalysis, it started with Freud at the end of the 19th century, and it is, it's a theory of the mind but also of the self that argues that there are unconscious drives inside of us, right, s o therefore, that we are not aware of, but that somehow they shape the way that we think, the the way that we behave. Again, all of these are particular ways of understanding the self. So, what I found really interesting is this tension within being a rational self, right, who has an internal self, which is individual, but at the same time, psychoanalysis kind of like disrupts that because there is not really a rational self because all of what you do is actually unconscious in a way. So, my idea of thinking about the political, right, in this particular way is that when we think a bout psychoanalysis, there is a philosopher, Jill Stauffer, s he wrote about what she calls ethical loneliness, and what she says is that who gets hurt and who doesn't get hurt, right? So she's especially working with victims of genocides and victims of horrible conflict. And what she said al so , so there's the political of listening, the politics of listening, right? Who gets heard, who doesn't get heard? So I think that listening again, more, I mean, it's not a natural thing that is just a biological reception of sounds. You learn it, you make decisions and it's political in the sense that you decide who do you listen to, w ho you don't listen to, b ut also about how it creates personhood and particular subjects.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 30:51

Like, as you point out, like identifying the genre of psychoanalytic listening shows us that actually there are other genres also out there too, right, o f listening. C an you reflect a bit on the implications that your study has for thinking about listening more broadly, basically? A nd, and kind of as an extra, a lso, would there be – w e mentioned the negatives, right, s o – the negative genres of listening too?

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: 31:17

So yeah, I mean, like the concept of genre, i t's one that I borrow from Mikhail Bakhtin , which is, w a s a Russian literary theorist who foregrounded the social multi- voice nature of language. A nd so a genre refers to a recognisable recurrent form of communicative action that has both formal features and social functions. So, when I describe psychoanalytic listening as a genre, I mean, it, it has a distinctive, learnable, recognisable shape that's tied to a particular social purpose and institutional context. So yes, so the whole point of thinking about genres of listening and using psychoanalytic listening as an example was to open the door to well, are there other genres that have this recognisable structure that you can actually follow? And of course, I said yes. So let's use this to understand how can we actually, by focusing on genres of listening, we can learn more about institutional settings and other social relations. And my recent work on asylum adjudications, actually, I think it's a good way of talking about another form of listening that I found when I interview one of the USCIS agents, so the migration agents in the United States, s he told me, i n this job, you learn to listen to lies. So for me, that was like, w ait, what does that mean, r ight, w hat does it mean to learn to listen to lies? And I think that this is what I can call maybe suspicious listening, I don't know, I mean, I don't have a name for that, but it's a particular genre, right? I mean, you're position ing your ear to find the discrepancies, right, t o find the hesitancies. So that's, for instance, a great example of another genre, right? I mean, that you learn, that it's institutional and that if you don't pay attention to that you are going to miss out on why some people get denied asylum, r ight? It's not because they don't deserve it, but the way that they tell their story doesn't comply to a particular way of listening that we have. Oh, a story has to have a beginning, an end, and write this particular structure. And another example, of course, empathetic listening, which is very different from psychoanalytic listening, which is the form of listening that most psychological therapeutic systems in the U.S. use, r ight? They want to affirm you, r ight, t hey want to to say that you're fine, y ou know, rather than disrupt, which psychoanalysis sometimes they do. So, I think that all of these things can be conceptualised as genres.

Rosie Hancock: 33:47

So Alexis mentioned the possibility of negative genres of listening, and feels like the world is pretty stuck at the moment in terms of, you know, how we listen to each other and whether we, whether we actually are learning from any of the listening and so on, particularly politically. Y ou did this research a while back. Do you have a sense whether anything's changed either in Buenos Aires or more broadly?

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: 34:12

Well, yeah, in Buenos Aires, unfortunately, now they have a disaster of a president called Javier Milei, who is a right wing populist. But it's interesting because yes, I mean one of the things that I, when I've been back to Buenos Aires, just visiting friends , not doing research, I realised that they are more and more now interested in neuro sciences, right? I mean and that's I think the paradigm that is moving, I mean, and maybe in some years will replace psychoanalysis. B ut, again, Milei being this very wild figure, right, h e sometimes acts very, very strange, right? He talks to his dead dogs in open TV, you know, and asks for advice. There's a lot of psychoanalysts discussing him in the media, again, in the newsp apers, in places saying like, well, Milei, it's because he had a father who castrated him. You know, like using all of these psychoanalytic nomenclatures and concepts to describe his very chaotic government. So, I think that psychoanalysis is still there, but it's, it's a great question, Rosie, about the negative of listening, right? I mean, right now, part of my research also, I mean, in this forensic listening that I'm interested in, is what happens when you are listened by a chatbot. I mean, more and more in the, in the U.S. for instance, they are using chatbots for the first interview for, for mental health assessment. S o, it's not a person. You are telling your most intimate stuff to a chatbot called Avi, by the way. So those are things that we need to consider now. So, you are, what happens when a chatbot is listening? I don't know the answer to that, but I know it's happening. So, I think that this can open the possibility to explore more the negative. What is it when there are not even humans, right?

Alice Bloch: 36:15

Hi, it's Alice. I produce Unc ommon Sense. Thanks for listening. Two things we really want to let you know about today. The first is the Sociological Review Foundation's P ublic L ecture, which this year is on the 2nd September at SOAS in London. It's with the science journalist Angela Saini, and it's called Anatomy of a Myth. It's on the fatal consequences of sorting people by race and sex. So, how gender, race and history continue to shape critical aspects of our lives, from medical diagnoses to government policies. Y ou can get your tickets on our website or via the link in our show notes. And, as we always remind you, we are a charity. We're the home for sociological curiosity. We believe sociology is a really important tool for understanding, but also changing the world around us. And this podcast is a big part of working towards that change. If you like what you hear and you'd like to directly support the making of this show, head to our Donor Box page at donorbox.org/ uncommon-sense, t hat's also in our show notes, to make a contribution. We're grateful for your support. Thanks for listening.

Rosie Hancock: 37:24

Okay, so we're back and wanted to talk to you more about psychoanalysis. You touched a bit already on what it means to take a kind of psychoanalytic approach to selfhood, but there are different kind of types, I guess, of, of psychoanalysis or different schools of psychoanalysis. A nd there's a guy called Lacan who pops up in your book quite a lot, and so I was wondering if we could hazard a description of what we mean when we say Lacanian.

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: 37:53

So psychoanalysis is both, as I mentioned, a theory of the mind and a clinical practice originated with Freud in Vienna at the end of the 19th century. A nd the core theoretical commitments are that much of our mental life is unconscious, t hat unconscious material, nevertheless, I mean, somehow dominates our, our waking life, if we might. And they actually – and this is interesting, right – t hey talk about the talking cure, right? I mean, so for, for Freud it was just about speech, right. I mean, like if you talk about it, then we'll be able to listen to the unconscious, etc. But within psychoanalysis, there are many different schools of and many different theoretical traditions. And what's distinctive in Buenos Aires, as you very well pointed, Rosie, and about Argentina more broadly, is the overwhelming dominance of Jacques Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis. So Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst working in the mid 20 th century who returned to Freud through the lens of structural linguistics. So , for Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language, and this is very different from Freud. What does this mean? It, i t means that desire is always mediated by what he calls the signifier. What we want is never quite what we think we want. It is always displaced, deferred. So for him, so structural linguistics, in a nutshell, it's a response to evolutionism, right? The idea that there are some languages that are better than others, right, o r the history of language in a diachronic way. So structural linguistics, it's like no, actually, there is a structure of language inside our heads. It's almost like a, like a hard drive, right? And it doesn't matter what language you speak; all of the languages are equally difficult, different. But it's about the substitutions, right? So there is a structure and you just substitute particular words for others, but the structure remains the same. So, for Lacan, who was very much influenced by Jakobson and by Saussure, and then Lévi-Strauss right – I mean, famous structural anthropologists – said, like, well, what we should do is look for this structure, right? So, let's take a way all the context and let's just focus on that structure. So, for Lacan, the unconscious was formulated by, what he said, nodes or these signifiers, right, throughout the speech . So, let's say I tell a story and then I keep saying "father, father, father", right throughout all the context. So, for him, that, it's an anchor, a node, a signifier, but it doesn't matter, right, t he context where I mention it , it always appears. So that's very interesting, right, b ecause then the idea is that the psychoanalyst, the trained psychoanalyst, can listen and find those nodes and somehow be able to give a structure to your unconscious. Now, why Lacan dominates El Rio de la Plata, right, w hich is that area, I mean, Buenos Aires, i t's a fascinating question that a lot of people have tried to answer and nobody really knows the specific answer. But I can just very briefly say that some of the things that they said is, of course, the French intellectual influence of Argent in e in universities, t he fact that when the psychology subject at the university was created they didn't have really any psychologists, so they brought like philosophers and humanists. So, it always coloured psychology with a more humanistic taste. I mean, these are speculations. These are some, a combination of reasons of why maybe Lacan has been so so prevalent.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 41:25

Could you elaborate a bit more on how or where does psychoanalysis kind of meet anthropology and sociology?

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: 41:33

Both sociology and anthropology, at their core, are committed to the idea that reality is not what it appears, r ight, that there's a surface of social life that somehow conceals these structures that we were talking about, dynamics and different forces, and that they need to be excavated, r ight. I mean and that's the social scientist role is to actually go beyond what's evident, right. S o, in this particular way it actually connects very neatly with the idea of psychoanalysis, right, w hich is like there are things that you see that are out there in the world, but actually there's a meaning behind it. And also Franz Boas – who is one of the, I mean , fathers of the four- field anthropology in the United States – he talked about secondary rationalisation. So this idea that you have what the people that, I mean your subjects right, the people that you're studying, what are the rationalisations that they have which he calls second order and then there is the anthropologist, right, the social scient is t who is going to really discover, right, I mean like the structures, the functions, everything behind the evident, r ight. S o I think that the social sciences and the psychoanalysis has this in common, but also, of course, a lot of humanistic and philosophical people, like, like the Frankfurt School, for instance – I mean, we're talking about Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm, Marcuse – all of these people who were very, very Marxist, right, I mean, they're the Marxists of the mid 20 th century social theorists, but they were deeply committed to psychoanalysis, right? I mean, so they use Freudian concepts to theorise authoritarianism, mass culture, I mean, so they were all very much influenced by, by psychoanalysis. So, the entanglement between psychoanalysis and critical social theory has been there from the beginning.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 43:24

There's like, as a discipline, it's kind of working on the collective unconscious, right? There's this, this aspect and it does feel like Lacan is kind of like the, a cool author, right, t hat people get to a bit later in their careers sometimes. But finally, Xochitl , would you like to tell us a bit more about your current work and what kind of listening are you presently applying for that?

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: 43:50

Yes, I'm working on two projects. One it's called, one that I call S ilencing as C are, and this is about the adjudicated system of asylums in the United States, although, as you can imagine, right now that has been paused because there are no asylums in the United States under the current administration. But this is a work that I did back in the day when I was a student at Berkeley. I served as a translator between unaccompanied minors who were coming from mostly Latin American countries into the, the country soliciting for asylum. S o I was very much interested in what I call the politics of vulnerability, s o how vulnerability is constructed verbally, right, I mean discursively, because these kids are minors, right? I mean they are spoken through the whole process of the interview of how, when even when they are constructing their own narratives and testimonies, so I was interested in, or I am interested in, this idea of vulnerability and translation and what all of the things that happen in during the actual interview to, to be granted asylum or not, and that's when I also realised that listening was very much present. And I'm interested also in analysing this, this idea of suspicious listening. And my other project, which is really really beginning, is forensic listening and the chatbots and mental health.

Rosie Hancock: 45:16

Xochitl, thanks so much for joining us today. It's made me, you know, particularly reflective about how I listen and why I listen in the way I do. We're going to put everything that you've referenced in the, in the show today into our show notes, like we always do.

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: 45:32

Thank you, Rosie.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 45:34

We're off for summer break over August, but we'll be back in September. In the meantime, why not enjoy our episode on listening with Les Back, which is a really great partner show to this one with Xochitl.

Rosie Hancock: 45:45

And do also take a moment to complete our listener survey. It's in our show notes. It's there to help us listen to you and it takes only a couple of minutes. Thanks.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 45:56

Our producer is Alice Bloch. Our sound engineer is Dave Crackles. Thanks for listening. Bye.