Without curiosity, search, questions, analysis, artistic passion and humor, he would not be the multifaceted man he is. “An explorer full of curiosities,” defined his editor at Planeta publishing house.
José Eduardo Abadi He is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, writer and playwright, with an important clinical and teaching career. As an analyst he served and continues to serve politicians, businessmen, artists, athletes, well-known people. He hosted radio and television programs and was a columnist in print media. He is the author of fifteen books, the most recent “Curiosity on the couch” (Planeta), his most intimate and personal work, is a very interesting journey through different aspects of his life and “characters” that he had to meet, from Borges to Alfonsín, passing through Cohn-Bendit and Gilles Lipovetsky.
Abadi learned psychoanalysis since he was a child and is a member of a family of analysts. His father, Mauricio Abadi, and his mother, Dora Kuin de Abadi, were two renowned psychoanalysts and his first references. His sister Claudia is also a psychoanalyst. The same as his first wife Corinne Sacca – art curator – now deceased, mother of his daughters Barbara, Florencia and María.
“I am quite restless, I am attracted to human relationships. I love to think about life in terms of stories and arguments. I often do my work thinking in terms of scenes. I have a vocation for trying to alleviate or cure the pain of others. I also enjoy creating stories and putting them in theatrical terms. I wrote several works, three of them I put commercially. I have a genuine vocation for theater and cinema since I was a child. I am very interested in exploring different areas, environments and people, getting to know them and making myself known, learning, the possibility of creating unprecedented situations. I care about having fun, I write theater of the absurd and I can’t think about life without humor,” says Abadi during his talk with NOTICIAS.
News: Curiosity as a driving force of life.
José Abadi: Yes, since I was a child, it led me to get involved in different situations and discover many things. When there is something that moves me, and I have an important permeability for things to reach me, I am interested in delving into them, knowing who was involved in them, thinking about what happened. An example, in ’68 I was entering medical school and the French May was coming. It captivated me, here was Onganía and in France the students were walking around Paris. I was always interested in this phenomenon, but on the 25th anniversary, by chance, through a German journalist, I had the opportunity to interview for my cable program Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the French May, who was a member of the German Green Party and lived in Frankfurt. It was a lovely interview and afterwards we went to have coffee and chat about everything. It was an important experience. Curiosity, the desire to know something more and to have a personal connection with the protagonists of those stories captivates me.
News: In you, desire and wanting are combined, which are not the same.
Abadi: In my book “You also live with happiness”, which I wrote many years ago, I point out this a lot. Wishing is a dreamy but passive attitude. Wanting has to do with what I desire, what I dream about, wanting to turn it into reality. There is an exercise of effort, a work to be able to achieve what I like and what I want.
News: Did you always have the internal freedom to do what you wanted?
Abadi: I had conflicts like everyone else between the things I wanted to do and the liberties I wanted to take, the inhibitions and many times the mandates or brakes. I think I did many of the things I wanted to do, but not unrelated to the conflict. In any case, the desire always won me over.
News: This is his most personal book, partly autobiographical, where he also explores the lives and thoughts of people he met. He said that the meaning of this book is to share his life.
Abadi: Yes, I say it’s like my open suitcase. So many different things experienced, so many memories, I needed to put them inside again and one of the ways to accept them again was to share them with others. I didn’t want them to remain only in my memory, but I wanted to go back over them, see what they could leave me today, but I needed to do it by telling them to others. It is also a way to rediscover oneself, to redefine oneself, to create something more than what one can know about who one is and what one is like.
News: What have you learned over the years?
Abadi: One of the things I learned is to also be able to accept that life brings us a lot of situations and makes us experience many things that, sometimes, are different from what we would have dreamed of. Begin to accept some of the realities that are sometimes different from dreams and learn from them. I learned to value friendship a lot, to feel indebted to many friends who I feel like I have not given them everything they have given me. The miracle of fatherhood. I am also very happy with the bond I had with my parents, beyond the discrepancies, arguments and differences we had. There was a lot of love and a lot of permission to be different, that helped me.
News: The best thing your parents left you?
Abadi: I had trust, love and support from them in everything I did. My mother was very important, she taught me a lot. She was a fundamental, very important psychoanalyst of children and adolescents. He corresponded with Ana Freud when she lived in Freud’s house in London. He took me to a talk he had with her, the three of us were there, Ana, my mother and I. For me it was an emotion, I couldn’t believe it.
News: His mother took him to the theater too.
Abadi: She took me to the movies and to see musical shows when I was a kid, because she liked them. There his taste infected me and, through Oedipus, he helped me a lot to have fun with it and want to do it.
News: He was just talking about the miracle of fatherhood, these three daughters he has.
Abadi: Yes, they are impressive and I like them because they are different from me and different from each other. Each one rehearses and tries their own thing, they get excited, they think, I have a lot of admiration for my daughters. Bárbara is a doctor in Philosophy, Florencia is a psychoanalyst and María is an actress.
News: Is there an updated psychoanalysis in these times?
Abadi: I try to update it because I am also updated. There may be analysts who seek to preserve more of the original psychoanalysis, perhaps. The world changed, the social environment changed, cultural paradigms changed, certain things that could be talked about in terms of repression and prohibition do not make sense today. The postmodern world has a place of vertiginous acceleration, of isolation, of productivity pathology that creates a whole series of different disorders. You have to know it, investigate it, see it well. Furthermore, no one analyzes themselves four times a week for twenty years anymore. They are shorter therapies, but above all, the frequency is different, which leads, in my case, to a more active intervention and also incorporating things that I learned from other theoretical lines. I also learned from theater how to think about a psychoanalytic session.
News: Is depression the disease of these times?
Abadi: It is one of the diseases. There is a tremendous isolation, a world of connection but little relationship, with which there is a lot of loneliness and a lot of dissatisfaction, which one tries to compensate for by producing and having, but which still leaves one alone. And that generates a lot of anguish, a gloomy experience that is like a path towards a pathology that is almost epidemic today, which is depression in its different clinical forms.
News: I heard him say that error is wisdom.
Abadi: When you make mistakes and learn, the feeling you have is of great fulfillment and of having acquired a much broader and deeper vision of things. I believe a lot in imperfection. I love imperfection, it is what defines us as subjects and it is what leads us to progress, to search. The idea of the narcissistic pretension of perfection, which is another of the dramas of the pathology of this time, seems disastrous to me. He takes refuge in behaviors of voracious ambition, misused power, arbitrariness, and authoritarianism.
News: What is the possible happiness you speak of?
Abadi: It is based on the exercise of the relationships that we can establish, interest in others, curiosity, creation, imagination. Basically, being able to love and empathize with those next to us, prioritizing pleasure, but in a structure in which we admit and accept and also learn from adversity, from the inevitable pains, from what we mourn our sorrows from, from what we also lack. Possible happiness needs to include an order of truth that has to do with how multifaceted life is, in which suffering is included. And it has a requirement, too. You have to be committed to searching for it, to loving it, not just desiring it. We are not going to find it by chance and it is not a port of arrival. It’s a way of living.
News: How would you like to be remembered?
Abadi: I would like my daughters to remember that I loved them very much. That I had fun with what I did and that I liked to treat myself and that it encouraged me and that when I got sad I cried and that I cried in front of them.
