Psychoanalyst and writer José Luis Juresa analyzes how childhood shapes the history of a country.

“ Memory transmuted into writing , writing made from memory, the author of this book seems to have awakened, at some point, within a question. And then he contemplated his childhood as one contemplates the curvature of the earth (...) from there one sees things that one could not see before.” These are the words of chronicler and editor Leila Guerriero who, in the prologue of this book, defines the modus operandi of José Luis Juresa .

The psychoanalyst and writer recently published The Childhood of Whom (Nocturna editora). A text that could quickly be labeled autobiographical or fit the label "literature of the self." However, it is much more. It is an essay and, at the same time, an exploration. Investigating the early years of his life , Juresa comes to discern childhood as something that goes beyond childhood. As a state of affairs, a way of being, living, and perceiving. "Childhood is not innocent. Adults may be, believing that children are. Children don't even think about having a childhood, they just live it," he writes.

Thus, Juresa explores the ups and downs of moving from the city to the Buenos Aires suburbs at a very young age, and in between, the history of a country is interwoven. His house, seen by his parents as the embodiment of social advancement and progress, will be one of the many expropriated and demolished due to the construction of the Acceso Oeste Highway. The bulldozers knocking down the walls of what he briefly knew as his home serve as a metaphor for the end of childhood.

In this conversation with Clarín , he expands on some concepts that intersect with his training in psychoanalysis, his own sensitivity, and his interest in childhood , which he defines as “A state that accompanies us throughout our lives but whose orientation we can lose under a mountain of possessions.”

–How did the idea of writing this book come about?

–It arose from the sudden need to continue unfolding the voice I had discovered in my previous book, Reality by Surprise , in a chapter in which I talk about my father's death, his month of agony due to a stroke, and the way in which, during that month, his native language, Croatian, appeared intact, beneath the languages he had learned—German and Spanish—that were ruined like a sort of forcing, paradoxically unraveled by the illness. And there it was, his native language, the language of his childhood. I thought his childhood was already a memory, but his childhood was something current, permanent, just like the language that emerged, intact, in the midst of his physical cataclysm. Of course, I was thinking about all of this as I unfolded my writing. The first thing was this idea: infancy and childhood are not the same. Childhood is the indestructible language of desire.

–Speaking of this specifically, in the book you take pains to clarify the difference between infancy and childhood. Why did you decide this, and how do you understand it?

Childhood is a story already determined, a time of what happened. Childhood will always be a story to be told, a stirring of elements without time or place. This is what Freud defined as attributes of the unconscious, of the Real unconscious, the most radical form of its presence. It would be something similar to the "childhood of the world," as Michel Nieva's book is titled. Freud spoke a lot about this childhood of "the immemorial" in his more anthropological texts, when referring to primitive civilizations and the founding myths of civilization.

–Regarding your writing, there's an exercise in narrating childhood in retrospect, as a memoir. Not narrating it from a child's point of view, but rather reminiscing about childhood and approaching it from various angles. How did that come about?

–Without thinking. Writing is not thinking. Mind you, while one may have an initial idea, or a well-thought-out structure, as soon as one begins writing, the papers fly by and one—at least that's what happens to me—starts to find things, discoveries begin to occur. I used this little word, "discovery," to describe what an encounter with an analyst is all about in an article I wrote for a magazine. A discovery is something you feel, not think about. Then you reflect on that event. The book was written like this; it has that structure of cuts and spiraling returns to the same place, each time making a difference. I see it that way. It takes the form of our relationship with childhood: something we approach without being able to fully name it. Like a poem: the attempt to express the impossible ends up poeticizing reality, constructing it as such, making it a version of our own life. I think the book captures some of this.

–Moments from the country creep into your biography. Were you interested in having that reflected in some way?

–I wasn't interested in them a priori, but they creep in, because it's impossible for that gigantic "neighborhood" in which that child lives, which constitutes a country, a society, and its time, not to be present, not to permeate what happens to him and that family in those years. As I was saying, there was no premeditation, but it appears, because that child's childhood is played out on the sidewalks of the neighborhood, but also on those of an entire country. The street, the sidewalk, is the stage for events.

–Pain emerges as a key factor in childhood. Why?

–Well, I think that child, in that childhood—not in infancy—has happy things and also horrible things happen to him; he feels happiness and pain. Children are human beings (laughter). I say this because, among other things, this revives one of the most scandalous Freudian “revelations” of his time, which was to bring to light the fact that children are driven by the same motives as adults: they have sex, they feel evil, they feel good, they feel love. This child in the book clearly demonstrates all of this. So he's far from being an angelic being, that is, without a body and without a history. Furthermore, pain shouldn't be viewed exclusively from the perspective of discomfort. Every experience of loss hurts, but that experience is also necessary for growth.

–Returning to psychoanalysis and the centrality of childhood there, as you explained, what did this discipline contribute to the writing of this book? Freud himself appears paraphrased in several passages.

Psychoanalysis led me to write this book, because in a way, this book bears witness to the passage of psychoanalysis into my life. Psychoanalysis is the latest discourse to appear in culture—by this I mean a "type of social bond"—and as such, it's incredibly powerful. A conversation that can change lives. It's not a conversation over coffee, or between friends, or philosophical, or paternal or maternal, that is, full of advice. It's something that happens between two people, with words, and two chairs, and it has tremendous power because it follows a logic that absolutely runs counter to the trend in which only the operation of addition counts, for example. Psychoanalysis enables the possibility of subtracting, of subtracting, and subtracting from everything that is superfluous, from everything that's left over, and also of having the same fate as things that are consumed: waste.

–It's interesting how you see children as almost the last bastion before human beings become consumerist machines. Do you find it interesting to revive these ideas in times when consumerism and commercialization seem to be accelerating ever faster? How do you think about this?

–I insist, it's not the child, it's childhood. It's a state—childhood—that accompanies us throughout our lives, but whose orientation we can lose under a mountain of goods of all kinds, material, moral, etc. It's not about being a child—after all, children are ineffective in the adult world—but about relating to childhood as one relates to fire: close to the heat, but without being burned, not too far away, so as not to cool down. Each person must find their optimal distance, their unique distance from the fire that lit their life.

The childhood of whom , by José Luis Juresa (Nocturna editora).