With the concern raised by the upheavals created by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, it is fashionable to call on the psychologist, an expert in psychological suffering, to ask him something that could often be summed up by “how does- to feel better? »
Although I fully understand that this request is addressed to us, I admit that I have always felt unease with the posture of the expert psychologist, relaying a thought according to which it would be possible to develop a series of personal skills allowing avoid the suffering inherent in going through life, its time and its pangs. I persist in believing that, faced with this question, it is more a question of inviting us to lift the cover of the symptom in order to glimpse something of an existential, difficult, but inevitable task: that of uprooting an intimate, personal and non-standardizable of our discomforts.
It seems to me that my expertise consists neither in allowing people to clear their conscience nor in making them feel more guilty. Rather, it dwells in a form of invitation to dig, rather than to “overcome”, to think beyond what is apparent and to worry about interiority. It consists of activating the “thinking apparatus” that everyone has, and presupposes that human states are not pathological simply because they are suffering. In other words, it seems to me that the psychologist is not there to tell people “how to live”, but to invite them to consider that their inner world demands their attention, that necessary revolutions can be dormant under layers of symptoms. The present chronicle, its appeal to stories, is entirely in keeping with this perspective. You don’t need me to tell you what to do, maybe you need to tell yourself.
The turn of the last decades, which has made psychology a discipline of the human sciences approaching medicine, while distancing it from its sisters in the humanities (philosophy, literature, arts, etc.), is no stranger to this posture of the psychologist as an expert prescriber of “good behavior”. Yet there are those things of human experience that will always elude the language of evidence, that pertain to conceptual thinking, clinical experience, dialogue as well.
At the moment, beyond the annoyance, it’s an ethical malaise that begins to inhabit me when I hear or read the recourse to this benevolent, but reductive, even infantilizing thought, of the “best ways to calm our anxieties” in the face of a war that affects “others”. Beyond recommending what often seems obvious to me, couldn’t the psychologist also support a reversal of the paradigm shifting the “search for individual well-being” to a broadening of the “self-awareness” including a greater tolerance for discomfort, an openness to otherness, a necessary overhaul of our modern narcissism?
Coming to terms with powerlessness, letting it work on us, transforming us, getting us out of our egocentric perspectives seem to me not only urgent, but required by this future which has already begun.
Who knows if, in 2022, it is not entirely healthy to feel something of this guilt in front of our privileged postures? Preamble to essential social transformations to face the many crises that await us, this guilt could only be transitory, leading to an updating of our visions of the world, of our postures that generate meaning, our choices.
Apply the “quick tips and advice” to manage to restore an individualistic bubble, reassure ourselves that “so far so good” does it not keep us in defense mechanisms whose usefulness should be reviewed to think (and bandage) the world of tomorrow? Isn’t anxiety entirely legitimate and, even, evidence of sanity right now? And if we turned to it, if we invited it to speak to itself, to write to itself, to symbolize itself, instead of trying to “manage” it (this term again), what would it push us to do? To change ? May be. It seems to me that is what the times demand of us: changes.
The flood of human migrations associated with armed conflicts, climatic crises or the collapse of political systems will soon enough demand that we seek to make sense differently from our comfortable existences, protected “for the moment”. If we let the dark feelings work on us a little more, maybe we would be able to transform ourselves in a way that would lead us to this much deeper healing than that provided by just exercising, to “manage our exposure time to catastrophic images” and to have good sleep hygiene.
If I have nothing against the lightness of being, I will not recommend, no, that we completely depart from its “unsustainable” aspect.
What do you think ?