The magic block and the spool. Psychoanalysis and modernity

The authoress reconstructs two grand Freudian metaphors: the magic block and bobbin spool, which enables her to juxtapose the experience of a psychical human from the Freud's time, referred to, for the present purpose, as 'oedipal', with the experience of a modern man, called 'late-modern'. She confronts five tendencies: (1) indestructibility of mark vs. randomness of construction; (2) absence as the condition of symbolisation vs. presence that prevents it; (3) ban (of incest) vs. order of self-fulfilment; unmanageability/non-disposability of what is human vs. creation of prostheses-fetishes; (5) circuitous path of the psyche vs. 'fast track': discharge or instantaneous fulfilment. The authoress shows how comprehensive processes of modernity have contributed to altered methods of shaping subjectivity in the space between the individual's social and biographical situation and his/her internal experience, which space has been opened by psychoanalysis. These reflections are illustrated with clinical cases from her own several years' psychoanalytical practice.