Abstract
This presentation brings together a series of short vignettes and clinical anecdotes that illustrate what I call La Tensa Calma, a South American term that describes the strange way that emotional experience feels off during difficult political moments when the atmosphere is tense but, at the same time, life carries on as though everything were calm. We will explore the affects that attend the tensa calma as well as the variety of ways that it shows up in psychotherapy sessions. Referring both to clinical practice and to examples drawn from the news, I elaborate how the tensa calma permeates the culture and is in no small part a feature of what I have called Reality.AI. AI plays a big role in the tensa calma because of the way it presents information in a decontextualized sequence of statistically relevant facts. Fruitful but without pith, AI presents detail without the thickness of history or experience, without wrestling with what AI is able to name but not feel—which is akin to the kind of atemporal dissociation that the tensa calma mandates.
Learning Objectives
At the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:
1. Identify affects that emerge in the context of the tensa calma and discuss
interventions to address this form of dissociation in psychotherapy.
2. Evaluate relative degrees of stress that attend moments of psychosocial
standstill in the political surround and develop strategies to address them with patients.
3. Describe how AI constructs a new kind of reality and an attendant form of
dissociation, with the goal of addressing it clinically.
Biography
Stephen Hartman, PhD, is a co-editor in chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and an emeritus editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. In addition to co-chairing the Relational Track at the New York University Postdoctoral Program for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, he teaches at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and the Sociedad Méxicana de Psicoanalistas Relacionalistas. His edited volume, Reading with Muriel Dimen/Writing with Muriel Dimen: Experiments in Generating a Field, grew out of his commitment to experimental writing inspired by his mentor, Muriel Dimen. Stephen has written extensively about the interrelation of psychic and political experience in the throes of gender, sexuality, technology, and the psychoanalytic frame. He practices in New York and San Francisco commuting via Zoom and can often be found writing on the roof of his home in Mexico City.
References
Hartman, S. (2019). Hashtag mania or misadventures in the #ultrapsychic. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 20, 84–100.
Hartman, S. (2024). The stork. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 34, 501–521.
Hartman, S. (2026). On noise and noiselessness. Psychoanalytic Inquiry. Advance online publication.
