We have reached the year 2050 and Sueños de los androides con ovejas electricas editions has decided to publish a book that appeared in 2007. The reader will have to get used to a type of design, font and paper that has not been used for a long time. We believe that the difficulties that your reading may present will be rewarded with the possibility of better understanding the texts gathered here.
These are 17 stories published in Topía magazine between April 1994 and April 2000. Only in October 2007 were they compiled by its director, the psychoanalyst Enrique Carpintero. In that edition he gave the following acknowledgments:
“I thank all the authors who agreed to participate in this game: to imagine a story about the future of a psychoanalyst in a time that, for most of us, is very far away.
I also thank all those who make Topía magazine:
To César Hazaki, Alejandro Vainer, Susana Toporosi, Susana Ragatke, Alicia Lipovetzky, Héctor Freire, Alfredo Caeiro, Carlos Barzani, Alejandro Maritano, Víctor Macri and Andrés Carpintero. To Mario Hernandez for his correction work."
In the first of the articles he defined what the proposal was: “A ghost haunts the end of the century that Western humanity is going through: the future. Perhaps, never like today has the future had the characteristics of the certainty of its uncertainty. If the future was always unpredictable, they tried to capture it through different forms of knowledge that today bear witness to questions that reflected the time in which they were written. Insisting on the stubborn capacity of the human being, in this region of the planet, to imagine possible futures, we started a new section in Topía magazine entitled 'A psychoanalyst in the year 2050'. To this end, we invite you to display the imaginative capacity of psychoanalysts and professionals from other fields of knowledge.”
A whole intention so that the reader of this edition can find questions from another historical era that also refer to problems of our present time. Obviously in these fifty years the world has changed. The sensation of a catastrophic future, typical of the end of the 20th century and the beginning of ours, has turned into other forms of subjectivity. For this reason, these stories are not anticipatory since they speak of the anxieties, fears and hopes of their authors. It is that every manifestation of subjectivity is traversed by the conflicts of his time. Freud extended this idea to all artistic creation by stating that the author expresses his intimate problems from the issues of his time.
The need to publish this book is part of our editorial commitment to a humanist and political perspective in different fields of knowledge. Psychoanalysis continues to be that place of resistance that allows us to find ourselves in a world that has expanded its borders by feeling that we are inhabitants of the solar system. Scientific and technological developments have been able to solve problems unthinkable fifty years ago. However, its consequences have led to the need to rescue the importance of the practice of psychoanalysis. The well-known psychoanalyst Philip K. Dick recently commented: “Today the practice of psychoanalysis has changed radically. The couch is a museum piece whose photo many analysts have on their computers. The youngest use it as an icon to confront the psychotechnodirectors. I can't imagine what it would be like to lie on a couch to talk for several hours a week. We know that it has been abandoned for a long time as innovative forms have been found not only in the individual field but also in the social and political field. However, for me it symbolizes the specificity of our practice: rescuing that space where the conflicts of subjective suffering are resolved in the encounter with another human being. That meeting between patient and therapist as it was said in the old days.”
Hence the importance of reading these texts from an era that prefigured ours. For this reason, nothing better than reminding the new generations of this phrase by the writer Victor Hugo:
"The future has many names. For the weak is the unreachable. For the fearful, the unknown. For the brave is the opportunity.”