I never know how to say what sensitivity I am draping myself in—that of the clinician, the author, or simply that of the slightly pathetic idealist—when I find myself relentlessly tracking down, under any human manifestation, the trace of the vulnerable. I look for it everywhere, but especially under demonstrations of power, behind exaggerations on the side of power, as if that would allow me to dare empathy again, where I could see only emotional muscle and perversion.
It always seems to me more beautiful, a thousand times more interesting than that of exploits, this story, much less told, which speaks of this precise day when the heart was broken, the first time. It is in this story, often, that we find the zero point, the original source of hatred in humans, hatred of oneself as of the other, as the psychologist Ginette Paris explains so well in her magnificent book Heartbreak, Mourning, Loss to which I often return.
Something indomitable in me thus constantly seeks the wounded child behind those who hold on to power as if it were their survival, to reassure me, to tell me stories, to build a habitable life for myself, to dream of a world in which everyone would go to therapy, without hanging around on waiting lists, not to be narcissistically comforted, not to obtain a diagnosis and intervention plans, not to find what is wrong with the other, no, but to be healed, with great blows of love, and words that heal and tell the truth, the immense crack that saws their heart in two.
Self-loathing, whether visible or not, whether we guess it is well buried under layers of protection that strive to pretend the exact opposite, or whether we perceive it in the full light of a systematized self-destruction, is certainly one of the themes most at the heart of the psych clinic. In each person, at one time or another of any psychotherapy, we will indeed seek to define the contours of this intimate territory, the one in which kilojoules of this energy devoted to the search for power-as-protection are stored. As if, to avoid suffering again, we all declared a little war on this child that we had been, a long time ago, perhaps even before the memory could be imprinted, the one whose heart was free to love and to hope to be loved in return.
Just before the holidays, in one of those moments when the clinic becomes so tender and luminous, a patient and I were thinking about it out loud. His face bathed in tears, half serious, half laughing, he asked me: “Does everyone hate each other?” hoping to find in my answer something that would give him back his share of belonging to a shared failing humanity. I answered him straight away: “Ah, everyone hates each other!” which made us burst out in a great, frank and liberating laugh, as if, all of a sudden, there was only lightness around us, and nothing more of the unbearable, in this human condition of which we had just explored a part.
Not loving oneself fully, developing around shame a whole scaffolding of mechanisms that end up escaping our control is a phenomenon that is indeed widespread in the human race. Blaming oneself for being precisely what makes us unique, wanting to get rid of oneself, becoming this other that we would have so much liked to be, to be more loved, we think, more accepted, more perfect, everyone tastes it, even those – especially those in fact – who claim exactly the opposite.
With my old friend Jean, who has been collecting sufferers on couches for almost half a century, we often discuss this part of our job, which consists of loving the patient precisely where he hates himself. What a strange job, we say to ourselves, to love like this, with strength and sincerity, another who does everything to get rid of him, who enters the office yelling “Get me out of me!”
I even believe that it was his, my friend Jean, that sentence he used for me when I asked him “Jean, after all these years in the psychiatric clinic, what have you seen most often?” “Everyone hates each other,” he told me, before laughing, too, at so much truth gathered in such a simple sentence.
I didn’t expect a diagnostic answer because Jean, like me, like many other shrinks who are a bit on the fringes of a world that classifies, prefers to map the pains of the soul with words that he draws from poems, images, myths and dreams. He is one of those shrinks who, beneath the dramas and tragedies heard, seek to open up worlds, like origami that we would unfold more and more, constantly revealing new unsuspected models, layers and layers of readings for each person. Loving the clinic as Jean loved it and still loves it, often reassures me about the thin layer of RRSPs accumulated at my age, as if I could imagine myself bathing in my passion for a long time, working until I’m 100 because it would keep me young, deep down, to love so much.
Even here, on the ferry that is taking me back from the Magdalen Islands, already at the end of my vacation, relieved of my worries that have offered no resistance to the wind of the gateway island, I still seem to catch, on the screens that follow the French elections, under rebellious attitudes, something of this terror that it will be brought to light, unveiled to everyone’s eyes, this ghost of an old vulnerability. Faced with defeat, we then see demonstrations of power rise a notch, the desire to gather the crowds around the hatred of the other, to erect walls that will separate those who deserve the good from those who do not have the right to it. We speak of “deferred victory”, where, like so many people, I can only breathe a sigh of relief, already afraid for tomorrow.
On the ferry back home, I watch hatred prepare for the next time on the TV news screens. I then find myself very eager to return to my clinic, as if it were my own little way of doing politics. Certainly ridiculous, sentimental, useless in the eyes of serious people, it nevertheless remains the only way that makes me capable of this crazy hope that there would be, for each heart treated, one more piece of territory torn from hatred.