© Sérgio Spritzer, 2021
"What's going on between us?" Exclaims almost in unison a couple in therapy. Everyone knows what is happening to them and has interpretations of what should or could happen to the other. But both of them have no idea what's going on between them. This is usually how therapy and consulting demands arrive.
Only recently have people realized that it's no use just taking care of your own life. We don't live alone and it's not about taking care of each other's lives, but about having a quality interaction between us.
We wait individually, each one waits for something to happen and it comes out different. We expect the other to move in one direction and it doesn't. When we combine our expectations, which is radically different from someone imposing theirs on us, then we compose realities.
The more civilized we are and the more technologies mediate our relationships, the more the imaginary of who we are and who the other is we identify with a codified representation such as function, social position, religion, profession, gender and not as a singular person. in the here and now. The challenge is to examine the relationship beyond stereotypes of social rules that flatten relational patterns by inducing abusive generalizations such as gender, race, professional and cultural stereotypes.
In society, the role we play as children, grandchildren, fathers, mothers, friends, colleagues, determine our identity. It is not so naturally given by our genes. We have no idea how our identity that we find so authentic is derived from a composition of socially determined imaginaries, from the earliest times of life.
The understanding that each one is a point of convergence of a relationship with so many other points as a node of a network of human relationships changes the understanding of the self as the solitary skull imagined by Hamlet, by Shakespeare who asks himself holding a skull: “ To be or not to be, that's the question. This is an individual's question to his own navel. Are we or are we not a human species with a sense of collectivity, that is the larger question.
If we are points in a network of implications among many others, we have a responsibility to position ourselves in the face of it. We are not alone with the world at our feet. Being networks in networks, the change of each one does not guarantee the change of the relationship.