It was his first time: a big IVe secondary school that all the girls in the school dreamed of. After the budding love, over the years, and through their breakups and their recoveries, his reason began to waver. He sailed from psychosis to psychosis, but, between them, the thread nevertheless held, until about five years before his disappearance…
In Dying of cold is beautiful, it’s long, it’s deliciouswith the title taken from a song by Richard Desjardins, the psychologist and columnist of Duty Nathalie Plaat tells the story of her relationship with this man who went mad and disappeared about ten years ago. This man gave her “everything,” she says, from the discovery of love to her current practice of psychology.
“In hindsight, I realized that he taught me everything about my job,” she said in an interview from Sherbrooke, where she lives. “He was really important in my life.” It was partly because she couldn’t understand him that the profession of psychologist attracted her. But it’s also because first loves shape us more than we think. In psychology, she says, we focus a lot on relationships with the father and mother, but first adolescent loves are also very formative. “And, in fact, the book is a letter to him, it’s a thank-you letter to tell him that he taught me my job.”
Freeing yourself from guilt
But, Nathalie Plaat acknowledges in an interview, this book also freed her from her guilt, the guilt of having also broken ties with this friend whose behavior was increasingly strange, while she herself had built a new life, a new house, with a husband and children.
“That’s why I don’t look down on anyone,” she says, even though she generally suggests a more inclusive approach to people with mental health issues. “But we have to look at ourselves, we have to ask ourselves the question. I did it, too, to draw a line between the ‘healthy’ and the ‘unhealthy’. I did it because I was afraid, out of cowardice, and for all the same reasons that make us do it collectively.”
However, she is looking for a way to “reach out” to those who are no longer understood, who often find themselves wandering, and whose exhausted loved ones can no longer find resources.
In this regard, Nathalie Plaat begins a critique of the profession of psychologist which has deserted, she says, the front line of care.
“It would also be necessary [comme psychologue] “Be a little humble,” she said. “We do something that consists of reaching out to our neighbor, and we should ask ourselves why we are no longer on the front line. It is the psychiatrists who are on the front line in the hospital. But we are in private, we are in the cozy comfort of our private offices. We have become very capitalist, it is money first.”
In fact, the book is a letter to him, a letter of thanks to tell him that he taught me my trade.
Personally, she believes that even if she had not broken off ties with her former lover, the defeat of this friend would have been the same. “It would not have changed the outcome of the story, but I still feel guilty,” she says.
In her speech, we also find a critique of individualism. “Collectively, we have no container for people who are really crazy, who have lost touch with reality. We have a nice speech on mental health. We sympathize, but there is really a disengagement with these people.” In other societies, however, “the village madman has a place, he does something.” She also criticizes the “over-professionalization of an ethic of caring for others.”
When her first lover took his bike in November, ten years ago, never to return, Nathalie Plaat had not seen him for five years. The body of this lover was never found. So there was no ceremony, no way to say goodbye to this body, which she nevertheless remembers in the smallest details, despite the passage of time. Her relatives presumed that he had died of cold, perhaps in a river. And that is why this song by Richard Desjardins, which the young lovers had hummed before kissing for the first time, seemed premonitory to Nathalie Plaat.
“I remember that body perfectly. But since it was never found, I couldn’t say goodbye to that body,” she recalls.
The psychologist did not write this book to grieve, “It’s as if it wasn’t legitimate for me to grieve in fact, because I was no longer with him, I was no longer around him.”
Romantic love
Perhaps she wrote it rather to stop maintaining a maternal feeling for this ghost, of the same order as that which she feels for her children. She also recognizes in herself the impulse of romantic love, that of the woman who wishes to save her man, without necessarily receiving the equivalent in return.
“Yes, romantic love, above all other forms of love, I fell into it completely,” she admits. “I got out of it through literature and now it’s no longer in my life. The girl who wants to save the man, who accepts a lot without receiving anything in return, that’s deconstructed in me today.”
Nathalie Plaat did not get out of it alone. She says she spent “the value of three mortgages” on psychoanalysis. However, she believes that we live in an age that is disproportionately filled with anxiety, a far cry from the 1990s when she emancipated herself, an era where the fear of danger can be disproportionately paralyzing.
“I find adolescent love beautiful,” she says, “because it is absolute, it is raw, it does not protect itself. In any case, in the 1990s, we did not protect ourselves from anything. [… ] There is something good, though, in embarking on an adventure. Then, afterwards, eating garnotte, because it’s sure to hurt at some point.”
By comparison, she notes, today’s teenagers are “extremely anxious.” “They’re in control, we’re in control,” she says.
This title by Nathalie Plaat is the first in the collection Les salicaires, directed by Nicolas Lévesque at the Presses de l’Université de Montréal.