A psychoanalyst and novelist, Natalia Zito once studied theater and even appeared in Hugo Santiago’s film, El cielo del centauro. Zito (born in Buenos Aires in 1977) is also the author of Veintisiete noches (Galerna), a novel that inspired the recent Netflix film of the same name. The book and film recount the story of Natalia Kohen, a woman who, in 2005, was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility by her daughters. They alleged – supported by a controversial diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia – that their 88-year-old mother was exhibiting behaviors “inappropriate for her age,” particularly concerning the management of her finances.
Zito says she didn’t anticipate the impact Veintisiete noches would have, but always sensed the story’s potential for adaptation. “It had all the ingredients needed for a film – a wealthy family, romantic entanglements, power dynamics. And two more: old age, which isn’t often portrayed, and mental health, an even less frequently addressed topic,” she explained. Understanding the complexities of family dynamics and mental health is crucial for public health initiatives aimed at supporting vulnerable populations.
-In fiction, mental health is more often linked to extreme cases, such as adolescents in crisis or addiction. Why do you think more everyday or older adult experiences are less frequently explored?
-It’s difficult to portray the nuances – the grays, the microscopic occurrences in relationships – in literature and audiovisual media. Capturing that subtlety and making it visible or readable is a challenge. I think I’ve found a different approach. I now consider myself more of a writer than a psychoanalyst, although I still see patients one day a week.”
Zito welcomed a visitor at her studio, describing it as a warm, bright space where white walls complemented pastel-colored chairs and sofas, wooden door frames, and abundant bookshelves. A collage adorned one wall, created by Zito herself. It featured overlapping elements – fragments of a letter from her father, a photo of Beatriz Sarlo with a smoking pipe, small pasta shapes, the red shadow of Yayoi Kusama’s hair, an image of a typewriter, old stamps, and graphic clippings, including one that read: “The night weaves.” The studio also functions as a consulting room, complete with a turquoise divan.
-At what point did the writer begin to compete with the psychoanalyst? How did that process unfold?
-I was a psychologist first, then a psychoanalyst for about ten years. When literature entered the picture, the writer and psychoanalyst were at odds for another decade or so.”
-At odds?
-In the sense that I wanted time to write, to read literature, to pursue related activities. I continued to see patients and teach psychology, but eventually transitioned to teaching literature in various ways. The writer and psychoanalyst reconciled thanks to Veintisiete noches. When I began researching the story, I searched online for “frontotemporal dementia,” and it felt like the psychoanalyst was telling the writer, “We can do this together.” The writer looked back and said, “Okay, let’s do it.”
-Was the issue of mental health the spark that led you to pursue the project?
-It was the mother-daughter relationship. I wondered what this mother-daughter dynamic had been like throughout their lives for things to escalate in this way. That was the question I had to reconstruct in fiction, and I had to form an idea, because unfortunately I wasn’t able to interview the daughters. I respect their decision not to speak. These situations often arise after a long history of small gestures that accumulate over the years. That was the spark for me: how does one arrive at their mother’s house with six nurses and nearly forcibly remove her to a psychiatric facility? What must have happened beforehand to reach that point? It wasn’t particularly about mental health in old age, but about the family dynamic. How was this mother, that these daughters would do this after many years? When I interviewed Natalia Kohen, something struck me. I asked her about her mother, and she replied, “My mother didn’t care about anything I had to tell her.” I found that devastating. What is a mother like who doesn’t care about anything her daughter has to say?”
-It’s interesting because it doesn’t create a story of “good guys” and “awful guys.”
-It would have been straightforward to create villains. But I don’t believe in that, and as a psychoanalyst, I see that people always have reasons for their actions, even when they are cruel. I was interested in exploring the roots of that cruelty.
-The increasing lifespan and its impact on different generations, the fact that children are increasingly caring for aging parents, how does this appear in your practice?
-If I think about my patients, it doesn’t present as a problem.
-What about the financial issues that confront elderly individuals and their children? How do you observe this from a psychoanalytic perspective, where money is understood as more than just money?
-Money represents the bond between people. It’s a concrete representation. Within a family, money can represent many things. For example, I think about the time of inheritance. People often say about some children, “Ah, all they cared about was the money.” That’s reductionist because money is never just money. An interest in money can also be an interest in the person who has passed away. Sometimes people need to receive something in monetary form to compensate for what wasn’t given or paid in other ways. This also happens in divorces. Sometimes it’s legitimate for someone to be interested in the money. You’ll often see people who haven’t had contact with their parents for years suddenly appear and claim their inheritance when their parents die. Why wouldn’t they claim it? It’s not that they’re necessarily greedy; they’re interested in that person. We are not created from nothing; we are made up of pieces of others. We need those pieces. An inheritance can help us cope with loss. What one retains from another, for example through inheritance, is like taking what belonged to another, making it one’s own, combining it with something else, and creating something new. This space exists thanks to my mother’s inheritance [she gestures broadly, encompassing the studio: furniture, divan, books, desk].
-There’s an idea that appears in Veintisiete noches, which isn’t unique to this mother and daughter’s story: “Mom is spending my inheritance.”
-It’s a problematic issue. On one hand, you say, “She’s spending my inheritance.” But it’s also true that if she’s alive, she has the right to use her money as she wishes. The issue is complex. It speaks to someone’s position. Generally, the maternal and paternal role is about giving. Essentially, it’s about giving. So, if someone is in that maternal position, they’re supposed to want to give something – not everything, but something. If someone puts themselves in the position of saying, “I’m 80 years old, I may have 15 years left, so I’m going to spend everything,” that position also reveals something about that person. They have the right to spend all their money, of course. Who is that benefiting? Perhaps themselves. Someone who does that at 80 has likely been doing it their whole life; they didn’t suddenly become someone who wouldn’t give anything at 80. The one who always gave will want to exit something. We can never give everything. As you know, it’s always about giving, receiving, and what you do with what you receive. Because that’s also important: it shouldn’t become a stagnant thing.
-Let’s return to the issue of cognitive decline. How does that situation affect the family? What happens there with the management of money?
-I always say that those of us who haven’t reached old age yet look at it from the outside, with many assumptions that are probably false. So, yes, I think vulnerability, as an item, is a construct. But there are also physical issues. Imre Kertész, the Hungarian Nobel laureate, wrote a beautiful book that has a lot to do with old age, called La última posada. [Zito gets up, searches for the book on a shelf, takes it, and flips through the pages]. Here he says, for example: “Old age – I had never thought about it – begins suddenly, from one day to the next, almost from one moment to the next. Suddenly your body posture changes and you can’t avoid it. Suddenly you feel a tremendous urge to urinate as a kind of attack and you have to resolve it in a matter of minutes because otherwise you’ll humiliatingly wet your underwear. The biggest blow is impotence when you haven’t lost interest in women at all. The other blow is insomnia. It’s 3:42 a.m. Right now and I haven’t closed my eyes.” It’s brilliant. I think the key is to neither sweeten it, romanticize it, nor stigmatize it. We need to move beyond ideals.
-And the technological changes? Isn’t there also a humiliation when an elderly person goes to do a transaction at the bank and can’t resolve it because they’re told they have to use a device – an application, even an ATM – that they don’t know how to use?
-Lacan had a phrase that applies to this, although it was about something else. He said, “Let those who cannot unite their horizon with the horizon of the times give up.” In a way, it’s complicated if you put yourself in the position of “I’m the old person who doesn’t understand.” If you put yourself in that position, you’re going to lose. Times move forward. But there’s also another issue: you can choose not to be involved in everything. In fact, I think one of the good things about getting older is that when you start to get older, you’re no longer interested in being involved in everything. And there’s something else, which isn’t specific to old age, but applies to life in general: there’s no shame in not knowing, in saying, “I don’t know. How does it work? Show me.”
-Let’s head back to the problem of cognitive impairment. How does that situation affect the family? What happens there with the management of money?
-There are situations where children really have to do it. Simone de Beauvoir, in The Coming of Age, talks about duplicity. Let me see… [she gets up, looks for the book in the library, which has countless pages marked. She opens it, flips through the pages, finds the phrase]. Here she says, for example: “what is wanted is for old people to conform to the image that society has of them. They are imposed with clothing obligations, decency of manners, respect for appearances, repression is exercised above all in the sexual realm. What characterizes the practical attitude of the adult towards the old is their duplicity. The adult complies to a certain extent with the official morality that we have seen imposed over the centuries and that prescribes respecting them, but it is convenient for them to treat them as inferior beings and convince them of their decadence. They will dedicate themselves to making their father feel his deficiencies, his clumsiness, in order for the old man to give up the direction of his business, save him his advice and resign himself to a passive role.” She was 62 years old, if I remember correctly. For us, that’s not so long ago, but at that time, she was already feeling old and wrote a treatise on aging.
-Would it be about being autonomous? What defines an autonomous person?
-First, the awareness that we need others.
-Oh, I didn’t expect that.
-And yes. You have to have the resources to know where to go to find them. We are born helpless, unable to fend for ourselves. I can say that I am Natalia thanks to the words that were given to me, at best, someone told me “oh, what a beautiful Natalia.” We appropriate the words of others and suddenly we speak: that’s how we acquire language. So, when I say “I am Natalia,” those three words are not mine. They are words I picked up, that I appropriated. Then, when one starts to speak more, one starts to combine the words in a singular way. But the words are never our own; we don’t invent them. Even if I invented neologisms, I would invent them based on an already existing language. That’s why, if you know that we grow and live thanks to others, you start to learn to go where there is. That’s also the great learning: don’t insist where there isn’t. Because there are many places where there isn’t. Sometimes those places are your own parents, your own family. Everything is full of nuances. It’s complex.
-There’s a discussion that, it seems to me, updates your book, and that is Law 26.657 on Mental Health, enacted in 2010. The case recreated in the novel occurred before the entry into force of that regulation.
-Yes, in 2005. There were fewer controls. Just the other day, I participated in a talk with the author of the law, Leonardo Gorbacz, and with Alberto Trimboli, from the Argentine Association for Mental Health, and they often use the story told in Veintisiete noches to show what could happen before the current mental health law.
-Still, the Law has been widely criticized, especially by sectors that claim it prevents the hospitalization of people who may actually need it, and that there is no infrastructure to allow alternatives to that possible hospitalization.
-Laws are always debatable material for improvement. But it seems to me that it’s an improvement over the previous law. We still lack a lot of infrastructure, we lack everything in terms of mental health. There are a number of devices that would be particularly interesting to have, and we’ve never had them. But where we need to go is where this law proposes.
