Events pass, traumas remain. I know this well, in theory, and sometimes in practice as well. On my very small scale, this week, I was nothing but reminiscences, wandering and dissociation, a veritable “little lexicon of trauma” embodied in flesh, bone and tremors.
The phone has been turned on, placed near the therapy chair, on the desk during teaching, or even in the pocket of the coat, checked a thousand times with the fingertips, almost glued to the skin, near the heart, near where something important is expected. I was waiting for the call, that of the “Hidden number” which, like an intruder who does not even deign to announce himself with his face uncovered, would burst onto the telephone screen to deliver information to me which, for me, determines percentages the chances that I have to push the audacity of living beyond the majority of the greatest perhaps, or at least, I beg you, my God, until the end of the primary of the small.
I am awaiting the results of the “PET-scan”, the positron emission tomography examination. Between patients, it is referred to as being the “full scan”, different from the MRI, the magnetic resonance imaging which produces the sound of bad German techno from the 1970s. The PET is the one, methodical, which carries out its work slowly and silently and which aims to make visible the stains, those which one does not want to have anywhere, as in nowhere, not even on the tip of a toenail, but especially not on the bones, the lungs, the brain or the liver, organs preferred by the recurrence of breast cancer.
Chances are my footage will be pristine like a Caribbean beach.
Great and immense chances that I am busy unfolding in vast illuminated rooms in my mind, in which I return from morning to evening, from evening to morning, resuming the pose, in a kind of infinite meditation which takes on the appearance of a makeshift camp set up above nothingness.
Waiting is unbearable, in the sense that it cannot be sustained. To survive it, you have to know how to tinker in the void, activate the walls of denial, close your eyes, hold your breath, repel all the attacks of “what ifs”, while you watch, proud, the exhibition. science or ballet class, don’t take the rain falling on the glass as an invitation to dissociate, don’t look down, don’t look down, don’t look down.
To the lexicon already exposed is added a word which could well be the one which exercises the greatest mental attraction in the psyche of any person carrying traumatisms: exile. Widely documented by psychoanalysts such as Robert Stolorow and Doris Brothers, the feeling of exile designates something like this alienation, to oneself and to the world, that the traumatized drags with him, everywhere, wherever he is.
Stemming from the protective mechanisms deployed in order to protect psychic integrity, exile results from this dissociative principle which aims to “cut oneself off from the indigestible part” of oneself, from that which contains the image, the affects and the feelings related to the traumatic experience.
Brothers calls “corridor vision” this perspective experienced and felt during the traumatic event, and which persists beyond, which aims to no longer take into account the whole situation, but to narrow the perceptual field, to spread the horizon into a long corridor leading to a single outcome: to survive. It is this mechanism that no longer allows us to take into account all the complexity of a given situation, the one that transforms our world into a series of close-ups on details. The snowflakes on the blue hospital gowns are sometimes the triggers for internal torrents, for me, even during a simple routine examination. This is how the psyche works, which seeks only to digest what is not yet, what possibly never will be, what says “here, I encountered the real of death”, according to the expression of the psychoanalyst François Lebigot.
This week, I’m standing somewhere in a makeshift camp above nothingness, but I’m lucky enough to actually live in a big, heated house in a neighborhood where I’ll go to coffee, everything on time, drinking an aperitif with friends and children, holding my phone clasped in my hands.
This week, from my imaginary camp, I thought about what exile would be like, doubled, tripled by the loss of loved ones, of home, of territory and of language, by the horror and the visions that it implanted in the psyches of so many humans. I thought of how lucky I was to wait for fate on the phone and still be able to hope for it sweetly, this fate.
War kills. Then there are those who remain.
All those who, for the moment, are flocking to Europe, but who will soon come to join those who are already here and who carry their exile with them. This chronicle is dedicated to all the new exiles of the century.
Some say: “If you want peace, prepare for war. »
Others say: “If you want peace, prepare peace. »
This week, I want to say “if you want peace, prepare a room”, for the reception of the traumatized.
Several makeshift camps together, above nothingness, it might start to look like our new humanity.