The title of this column is a nod to this absolutely delicious article by Roland Gori and Marie-José Del Volgo: “Each society has the psychopathology it deserves”, published more than ten years ago in the French journal of psychoanalysis. The two psychoanalysts, one also a philosopher, the other a hospital doctor, both continue to produce writings whose reflexive background is a dialogue between our contemporary sufferings and the more or less apparent socio-political-cultural structures in which we let’s evolve. Their reflections, far from making the sufferers more guilty individually, aim to make aware of the normative processes in use, particularly in the discursive devices of public health.
Straddling philosophy, sociology, medicine and psychology, their reflections lead us where the word of any expert in the public space should, in my opinion, lead us, that is to say towards an increased capacity to think the world by ourselves, to reach an intelligibility which allows us to free ourselves from certain totalizations and other reductions of our experience. Shouldn’t the intellectual, in particular in the field of the human sciences, first and foremost, allow us to set our own thinking in motion, rather than telling us “how to think”?
For example, in his latest book, care under threat, published by Éditions du Croquant in 2021, Del Volgo examines what she calls “the contradiction between the purposes of our professions and the new technical and financial organization of practices”. How not to want to follow her in what appears to be at the forefront of many current drifts in the organization of mental health care, in the crisis of accessibility that we are experiencing, but also, and this is that I would like to reflect with you this week, in the rise of certain entrepreneurial phenomena such as those observed earlier this month around the Dulude affair?
There is no need to add to the clarifications that were brilliantly made on the definitions given to the term “feminicide” on the show two girls in the morning by Guillaume Dulude. Psychiatrist Marie-Ève Cotton, in particular, on her Facebook page, made the necessary adjustments. Patrick Lagacé, with his usual verve, noted the inconsistencies brought about by the very posture of the one who, if he puts forward his degrees in neuropsychology and clinical psychology, does not clarify that he is not a psychologist, that he is therefore not part of a professional order which would impose on him, as on me, for example, a duty of reserve.
If it was absolutely necessary to carry out these reframings, it also seems to me essential to open up a reflection on the cultural phenomena which lodge behind the so great popularity of this type of “expert-entrepreneur-of-well-being” who , in an increasingly worrying way, inhabit our news feeds, our consulting rooms and therefore, inevitably, the universe of meaning of many people.
Because contempt for all those who follow them seems short-sighted to me when it comes to promoting social dialogue, because we have learned well during the recent pandemic that the more we scorned the Other, the more the social fabric was crumbling, and because it is certainly not the role of the shrink to fuel divisions in the public space, I sincerely want to adopt with you a posture which, in my opinion, characterizes first and foremost the scientific expert: a posture of curiosity, tending towards the desire to understand an otherness that escapes him.
I wonder what Dulude as well as a host of other coaches more or less serious lives inhabit as space, borrow as discursive modes and how they could also benefit from a cultural conjuncture based on what we collectively overvalue. Could it be, for example, that by confining the expert more and more to a strictly positivist, rationalist and pragmatic public discourse, we have, unwittingly, both abandoned certain intellectual spaces attached to what could be described as the “mystery of existence” (which is not always expressed in conclusive data), while defining the expert as “someone who knows” and, less and less, as someone who “seek to understand”?
How many times, in the media, are we asked: “Madam shrink, explain to us quickly, but above all, tell us what to do, how to live, how to think? Rare are the opportunities — and fortunately there are, including the one offered here by The duty – in which an expert can resume this posture essential to his role in the public space: that of dialogue, which involves constant back and forth between necessarily incomplete knowledge and all the “holes in understanding” that emerge from the encounter with the otherness.
These “holes” in no way testify to incompetence, but, on the contrary, to a necessary humility, to a posture that seeks “with the other” to constantly bring out new interpretative meanings. However, as the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer put it so nicely, “dialogue is not possible […] when a social partner unreservedly believes that he is in a superior position to that of the others”.
So, without the experts always wishing it, they often find themselves placed there, in an asymmetry which confines them to “explaining, reframing, providing”, which, paradoxically, possibly cuts them off from a dialogue with precisely those with whom the exchange would be beneficial. When phenomena like Dulude arise, it seems to me then that the duty of the expert, the media and all the actors involved in the transmission of knowledge, is also to question oneself on what can participate in this rupture of the dialogue between them and an important part of the public, which deserves much more than contempt.
What do you think ?