You have written to me a lot this week. It seems that this question of humility has greatly stimulated you. I read you and remain fully drawn to the search for the possible meanings behind our / your contemporary sufferings, particularly those of “youth”, knowing full well that it does not constitute a homogeneous block either. You bring me new angles, make me think upside down on consensual realities. You remind me how the multiplicity of subjectivities is of an inestimable richness when one seeks to think about the world in which one evolves.
In particular, you tell me about these trajectories where performance is by no means a choice: “When you come from a privileged background, you can criticize surpassing yourself, developing your full potential and achieving success. But when we’re struggling to get our heads out of the water, our only buoy is these three values, ”Sandra wrote to me.
You also tell me that there is indeed, in ourselves, a desire to be fulfilled which is not only driven by the response to performance injunctions.
Absolutely. A whole slew of philosophers and psychologists have even defined this desire as one of the fundamentals of the meaning of human existence.
Let us remember, however, that “becoming oneself” requires, in the thought of the psychoanalyst Carl-Gustav Jung, to disalienate us from our cultural and personal complexes. Realizing that we are steeped in a culture that revere in control can already be the starting point of this process. It is all the same questioning to note that, faced with our psychological symptoms and those of our children, we tend at the moment to answer by… more control.
Thus, in an anxious child brought to my clinic, I should instill methods of “managing his anxiety”, techniques of self-control of his fears, whereas I tend to believe that on the contrary, he could already be. find it overloaded by the injunction to control everything. However, existence tends to invite many contingencies. It seems that we are having a hard time accepting it earlier and earlier.
Then, I listen to Tamara:
“I am this youth
I look at my system and I suffocate
I am the bound walk of humans horizontally
I thirst for respect for the unique and I am not afraid of the other ”
How not to extend a hand to it, then, after the ear, while it demands that we get rid of our vertically asymmetric systems which standardize living things, classify them from their birth by applying to them standards to which they will have to to refer throughout its development?
The collective tragedies that are coming, climate crises in mind, indeed seem to call for another way of connecting us to each other.
I also read, moved, the work that time can do when it allows you to look back on your youth and the pains that it left in you, a long time ago: “Our parents did what they could, crumbling. under the weight of their ancestors and passing on their misery to us. “- Ghislain
While many dissensions reign between the different schools of psychoanalytic thought, almost all agree to understand psychoaffective maturity as an accession to the possibility of establishing a relational mode based on a form of intersubjectivity. Thus, we go from one relation to the other “objectifying”, that is to say oriented towards the response centered on our needs, to a relation which manages to come to terms with otherness.
It is a little as if, as we get older, by dint of being nailed to the floor of our disillusions, of “making us work through existence”, of losing love because we wanted to win the war, became more and more possible to get out of one’s egocentric perspective to hear and deal with the subjectivity of the other.
With the work of time and consciousness, our narcissism can thus become more flexible.
Thus, it is important to specify, for those who would like to condemn the youth, that it is not to them that my appeal for humility was addressed.
In my language, humility is in no way a proof of submission, it only refers to what is called maturity.
Call for stories
Tell me how you hear, receive or even live
youth, their sufferings and their demands. Yours, past
or present, that of your children or even that your parents are unable to grasp.