I spent my last weeks with them. Some mornings, I will not hide it, while the sequence of gestures commonly grouped under the term “routine” was becoming more and more painful, I first wanted to be somewhere else.
I admit it, I no longer had the spring necessary to put on my sweater printed with the logo of a film festival, nor the momentum to go and throw myself in the face, not of wolves, but of teenagers, which sometimes can be experienced in the same tones.
It’s because, let’s say it, you need some resilience to stand in front of all these faces displaying true casualness with such panache, true sounders of the authentic, detectors of all the hollows that can sprinkle a speech, all well disposed to make us feel promptly that our word does not reach them, without the veneer with which adults know how to cover themselves so well.
Fortunately, almost every time, the meeting with them gives me back a hundredfold energy of what the start-up had asked of me in the morning. The merit does not go to me. He returns to the cinema, to them, and to the psyche, which, as the great thinker of archetypal psychoanalysis James Hillman said, reveals itself essentially through a language made of images.
This is the proposal of this tour, organized by the Cinéma du monde de Sherbrooke festival in secondary schools: talking about mental health with teenagers, but in a way that would avoid the agreed places, the words that they already know well. better than us, but of which they feel more and more a certain nutritional deficiency.
It’s that they too, finally, are beginning to find it strange, not to say boring, that we look at them as if they had “caught” mental illnesses, unrelated to the spirit of the times or our way of life. educated them. Our tendency to place their symptomatic outbreaks well outside our own discomforts does not fool them.
While they feel like perfect teenagers, positioned where time has left them, using the ‘tools’ that we ourselves have given them, to scream something that reminds us that ‘we are racing in a wall”, collectively, we lead them to the shrink saying “can you give him tools to better manage anxiety / addiction / depression / eating disorder / aggression, please? »
Rather, here, aided by films which also circumvent the usual clichés, we dare a discussion which keeps the language of symptoms at bay, checklists in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and “self-management” language.
lady birdfor example, film-jewel by Greta Gerwig, opens with a scene of mother-daughter relational tension, where the protagonists pass from an emotion of great complicity to the most vile shouting match, in the car, a bit like that happens, sometimes, “in real life”, with “real people” not at all smooth, far from the footballers and other cheerleaders from the usual American cinematographic imagination.
The young girl, in a gesture that does not fail to stick to the impulsive flash of adolescence, concludes the argument by jumping from the moving vehicle. The film is launched on a broken arm.
You wonder what can be extracted from the symbolic analysis of such images, when discussing with them? Phrases such as: “Sometimes when we try to get out of a close relationship with our parents, we go so far as to hurt ourselves, to express something that cannot be said in words” . The sentence is not from me, but from a 16-year-old girl.
In Me and Earl and the Dying Girlanother little independent treasure from Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, the music of Brian Eno, when it coats the scene where Greg projects his film at Rachel, ” the dying girl », draws us to tears as a group, which we gather as a moment of communion containing our respective sensitivities.
Together, we then play to interpret the images, yet completely abstract from the film created by the character.
Fabrics, imitating closing curtains: “Isn’t this the end of an immensely important cycle, the end of secondary school? »
Shapes reminiscent of spermatozoa: “Do you think that after each little death, there are also births? »
We then laugh and tell ourselves that, no, we didn’t take any drugs to “take off” like that, together, on a Friday morning at 9:20.
Sometimes, I must say, what tires me the most is the invasion of the lexicon of my field, psychology, by a discourse of empty calories: symptoms, intervention plans, turnkey advice to become the best “managers” of adolescents in the world and, in doing so, to take away from adolescence its most constitutive right: that of questioning ourselves.
Adolescence, in its intensity, its chaos, its suffering and its beauty, is, like any transformative experience, an experience which cannot be “managed”, but which is crossed.
Fortunately, there is still art and its images that continue to build symbolic bridges between generations and to say that existential pains can carry meaning.