A Psychoanalytic Approach to Tango

As a psychoanalytic tool, we can liken the tango to a game. As a game, the dance of tango allows us to put ourselves in touch with our unconscious: bodies that speak, and bodies that are heard.
Incarnate bodies, in which life manifests. The dance of tango, is a meeting with one itself, that allows us to stand up, to support our proper balance, our axis, to be able to meet one another.
We see tango as a phenomenon, much more profound than a simple diversion in which we move the body... we speak of an activity that helps us to minimize the loss of that first basic relation with our mother and/or the conscious or unconscious losses of our romantic dreams, our illusions of freedom, of power, and of safety.
Our losses, as they are universal, make tango a universal instrument that facilitates a way of overcoming loss. We believe that all of our experiences of loss return us to the original loss - that primary loss in the relationship between mother and child.
Our search of this relationship, for the mother-child relationship, could be a sign of loosing balance or of health, could imply a shy withdrawal from the world, or a will to expression on it, could be deliberate or unconscious.
By means of sex, religion, nature, art, obviously where we locate ourselves with respect to the tango, we try to erase barriers that separate us; we try to escape from the prison of our condition as individuals.
It is held that the tango is the dance of sexuality, because of this it was prohibited and censured. Yet we know that the fusion that sexual union represents brings with it the identity of our infancy.
In our effort to theorize the practice of the Tango, it becomes necessary to consult experts such as Winnicott to be able to support the position that this potential space that existed between the baby and his mother, between the child and the family, between the individual and the society or the world, depends on the first experience that taught us to trust or distrust.
The search for the mother's gaze, for her embrace, for her contact, is the response of the child expelled from paradise. It leads the adult to find the unlimited pleasure in the dance with another, one who returns the gaze, one who embraces, one with whom to return to paradise, to recover a joyful place.
All human beings in the world of all nationalities, colours and religións, carry the mark of that primary relation with the world and with themselves through the universal mother.
We affirm, as it is written in the famous tango of Alfredo Lepera, "Volver", that:
"We always return to our first love"

Monica Peri

(1 ) "El tango y el mundo Psi" (M. Peri)