Natalia Pasternak is the Mara Maravilha of psychoanalysis

Natalia Pasternak was a redheaded woman who talked about the coronavirus, as I remember from the pandemic. In the years she was on the air, she lacked the care to acquire an adequate camera and microphone. She was a journalistic source molded into a television character, which is the general rule of extended relationships with TV (Drauzio Varella, the benevolent doctor; Caco Barcellos, the infallible journalist; Gil do Vigor, the eccentric ex–Big Brother Brasil economist).

I do not think that lady realized she was being used in the role of shrewish teacher (which she seems to play very well). She was useful as long as she granted immaculate seals of “science” to anything opposed to Bolsonaro (although all help against that president’s ignorance was very welcome, in any case).

One need not be a genius of infectious disease to say that a dewormer is not very good against viruses. Besides, it was not an intellectual or technical discussion but the confrontation of a health crisis that was simultaneously biological and psychic. The journalistic framings, understandably, because we were all caught by surprise, were almost the whole time an illness of their own.

At any rate, I challenge anyone to present me a convert to Natalia’s ideas (it is a figure of speech, do not waste time on it). Is there anyone who, through the oracle (hm) of science (hm, 2) that spoke on Jornal Nacional, stopped taking chloroquine, or had the dignity to stop defecating early treatment out of their mouth?

When science is cast in the role of god, whose perfection is an inseparable attribute, it merely changes the language of a religious experience, and, fatally, becomes a religion and denies itself. Science is expected to be able to improve Newton’s Laws into the Theory of Relativity (in that physics case, a substantial change).

Faced with the impossibility of criticizing the “science” that forced masks and social distancing on us (I do not dare to claim it was right or wrong), without doubting it, liberation through rationality is reduced to one more sect.

I carry the pride of having been publicly humiliated when I contested the shrewish pandemic “science.” I suffered, you may laugh with me, an involuntary transfiguration. I appeared before my listeners with a square mustache and a Hugo Boss uniform. But that never happened, not in the pandemic, not before, and never will, in the company of true people of reason. In the company of those people I am encouraged to doubt my own shadow (which has been a little strange these last few days, by the way).

Natalia overreached when she preached from her pulpit (her latest book) that psychoanalysis is not science. Not that it is, in any case. And even less that psychoanalysis cares about it. Except in very specific programs like those found at the University of São Paulo (USP), the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) and the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR), it is hard to imagine the “scientific” community, a Natalia of the world, going to the trouble of reviewing its own existence while applying psychoanalysis to an object of research (because that is an individual cost in research in the philosophy of psychoanalysis).

Brazil has psychoanalytic research observed internationally. The country shares some foundations with the French. For a hundred years, the English tradition has denied psychoanalysis the status of science. That tradition is so unreconciled that there seems to be no intention of ceasing to research — what irony — scientifically what is scientific in psychoanalysis. Meanwhile, the German tradition is to correct what it considers insufficiencies of psychoanalysis. But so. Either shrewish behavior did not happen or it is not on record.

What can be written against Natalia’s ravenous prejudice is in the latest publication (in Portuguese) of USP full professor of Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology, Christian Dunker. It is the latest gossip of the scientific-coronavirus world. That group is to science what the coverage of Operation Car Wash was to journalism.

Natalia Pasternak is the Mara Maravilha (a Brazilian singer and TV personality) of psychoanalysis.