Betty Milan wonders about extending life through science – 04/15/2022 – Photographer

Writer and psychoanalyst Betty Millan released her first book, O Jogo do Concenderijo, an essay work, in 1976. It is a “courageous discourse, embarking on lost paths of hiding, in order to force the act of hiding to speak for itself and for itself,” she wrote Philosopher Marilina Choi at the end.

In the new Hersia, his twenty-seventh book, there are no games or imitations, everything is rigorously exposed. “Over time, we became less attached to works of art,” says Milan, whose truth can only be accessed through imagination.

When she was 97 years old, the writer’s mother had a fall and fractured her forearm, which greatly weakened her, including progressive memory loss. At this point, Milan is beginning to take notes on the routine of the nearly century-old mother, not knowing where those writings will take her.

Always accompanied by a caregiver, her mother lived another seven years amid a mixture of pain, medication, delirium and a hospital stay, an exhausting journey that now results in “fad,” the 77-year-old author’s tenth novel.

As critic Manuel da Costa Pinto notes in his ear, as in much of Milan’s bibliography, there is a “tension between the real and the imaginary”—perhaps it is her book in which this friction emerges and reveals. On the first 112 pages he says, “I will attribute what I write to another narrator. With her, I go forward without fear of saying what I feel.”

In this sense, “Heresy” forms a double-header with “The Eternal Mother” (2016), which already deals with the dramas of aging with extraordinary frankness.

However, in the new novel, the narrator is particularly sharp in her criticism of the means used by medicine to prolong lives that no longer make sense. I wondered why assisted dying remains a taboo even when there is no medicine capable of relieving the brutal suffering whose end is not in sight?

The mother is described as a “totem”, one of those centenarians who become respectful, even if they are no longer aware of their surroundings. The daughter finds herself increasingly embroiled in an ambiguity in the face of her fading existence. “I wanted, despite the decline, I wanted it, but I didn’t really want you to die.”

Very close to the work of Jacques Lacan, with whom I analyzed in Paris for five years in the seventies, the writer draws on the experience of a psychoanalyst. “I have a deep listening, permeating my literature,” says she, the newest member of the Academia Paulista de Letras (APL).

“The Heresy” is not his first novel in the presence of Lacan, albeit in an indirect way. In “O Papagaio eo Doutor,” Seriema, the granddaughter of Lebanese immigrants living in Brazil (as the author), goes to meet an analyst in France (as the author) to try to better understand her family’s background.

In fact, this 1998 book recently made a movie, “Adieu, Lacan”Directed by Richard Leeds. The production has been shown in recent months at psychoanalytic events in American and European countries, and production is scheduled to begin on streaming services in May.

Thanks to Betty Milan, Lacanian psychoanalysis from a Brazilian perspective has extended one hand to literature and the other to cinema.