The soul’s writing today:

New afflictions in the poetries of trauma

Abstract

This work presents a theoretical reflection on the notions of “trauma”, “compulsion to repeat” and “disturbing strangeness”, based on Freudian texts and the current pandemic. Through the psychoanalytic theoretical approach, since Freud, the expression "writings of the soul" is a metaphor to designate the unique poetic forms that each human being creates to give meaning to the experience, based on the relationships between their fantasies, cultural elements and concrete experiences. Such poetics is considered as psychic resource to deal with the traumatic events. Finally, it discusses some political consequences of considering the current circuit of affections that plague market societies, based on Joel Birman and Vladimir Safatle, who defend the power of helplessness in the concrete transformation of experiences.