The word absence, then, serves us to express distance, separation from something or someone. If we think about it carefully, separations, whether temporary or permanent, are a constant in our existence. The young child who enters preschool has to temporarily separate from his mother, his father from him, and the physical space in which he has lived on a daily basis. All this will be absent, temporarily, from his perception of him. For the mother and for the father, this also implies a separation, a temporary physical absence from that young child who is now in the care of people other than them. Years later, at the end of primary school, that child will be separated from his teachers, his friends, and his classmates to enter the next school level. Something similar will happen at the following school levels. Let's think when a child leaves the parents' house: these, the siblings (if any), and the physical space where they have lived cease to be present in their daily perception. When parents divorce, usually one of them stops living with the children; there is a physical absence of the father who leaves the home, which is often very painful for the children.
Now, with the pandemic, physical absence has been the daily bread. We have been absent, physically, from our workplaces, from the classrooms for whom we teach, and from the consulting room. For months, there was an absence of family gatherings, friends, etc. Paraphrasing the phrase by K. Marx and F. Engels (1848), with which they begin the Communist Party Manifesto —“A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism” (p. 21)— we could now say with the pandemic: a ghost haunts the present world, the ghost of physical absence. What consequences has this multiplicity of physical absences had in the minds of the subjects? How have we dealt with these absences that for many have been terribly painful?
Freud speaks, in his text Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), about a game he observed in his grandson —son of Sofia, his favorite daughter— who would later die of Spanish fever. This little boy, eighteen months old, played to winnow and disappear the objects of his perception of him, pronouncing the word fort, that is, far away, he went away. In a second moment, Freud observed his grandson of him, throwing a spool to make it disappear and then pulling the thread to make it reappear. This last action was accompanied by the word da = here it is. In the Freudian interpretation, the child is representing the cycles of absence and presence of the mother, a fundamental staging that allows him to discover the possibility of permanence, of continuity; that is, the possibility of building a psychic representation of the mother. For Freud, the instinctual renunciation of admitting, without protest, the departure of the mother constitutes a great cultural achievement of the child. Thus, the absence of the mother is necessary, since it enables the construction of a representation of her in her mind. If there is no absence, what exists is not a psychic representation, but a perception of the mother in external reality.
A year later, when the boy was 30 months old and had been told that his father was away because he had gone to war, Freud mentions that when he got angry with a toy he would throw it on the floor and say “go to bed” !” war!". Therefore, what Freud called a great cultural achievement of the child - the staging of the absence of the mother that constitutes a painful fact for him and also the absence of the father - became a great Freudian discovery to be able to explain the importance of the absence in the formation of the psyche. Some years later, in his text Of him The negation, Freud (1925) argues that "it is necessary to remember that all representations come from perceptions, they are repetitions of these... thinking has the ability to make present again, reproducing it in the representation, something that was once perceived, for which there is no need for the object to continue to be out there" (p. 255). With this, the field was opened to continue reflecting on the importance of absence in psychic life.
Indeed, for Lacan, this game of absences and presences is the necessary foundation for introjection and the elaboration of both the symbolic and the imaginary. Klein emphasized the early development of the psyche and proposed that the internal world of the subject is built based on these constant cycles of absences and presences; first from the breast and then from the mother until, ideally, there is an integration of objects and a primacy of love over hate.
Daily life and clinical work show us the relevance of absence in the formation of the psyche and, therefore, in the way we deal with absences of various kinds that occur throughout our existence. For example, there are young people who go to study abroad and find it hard to tolerate the absence, and separation from their parents, their siblings, their friends, their boyfriend, and their culture. Others, even if they don't leave the country, leave their parent's house, but there isn't a day when they don't call their mother or father. Not doing so generates anxiety, guilt, etc. In other words, it is very difficult for them to tolerate the physical absence of the parental home, which is nothing more than a reflection of the difficulty of the psychic separation from the parents. Now, with the pandemic, the absence of the places that were frequented daily and of physical contact with people, especially with loved ones, has generated many emotions and fantasies. An older adult, as a result of her confinement de Ella and the absence of her children and grandchildren who visited her periodically, made the following statement: “Damn pandemic. She took my children, my family. I don't know if I'll ever see them again. There is no time for this."
The vein that Freud opened, with this theme, has given rise to innumerable texts that deal with absences, separations, and losses in the constitution of
