For this first round of the presidential election, the rise in prices has become a major concern for the French, and we know the material problems it poses for them. We are talking about it today with the psychoanalyst Claude Halmos, in particular about the way in which it affects them psychologically.
franceinfo: Can rising prices generate particular anxiety?
Claude Halmos: It is often thought that material problems, even very important, could only generate painful, but not very serious stress, when in fact they cause very deep anxieties. And this is the case today with the rise in prices, which is all the more agonizing for those who cannot cope with it, as it concerns the basic elements of a livable life: l gasoline to go to work, the energy needed to keep warm, and food, that is to say everything that allows you to be neither hungry nor cold.
What are these anxieties?
When we listen to people interviewed in supermarkets talking about the food products they can no longer afford because they have become too expensive, we realize that not only do they feel rightly deprived at the level of pleasure (of things they would like to eat), but that the specter of a deprivation of the essential, that is to say a deprivation at the very level of need, is often on the horizon of what they say ; with an anguish that the terrible images of Ukrainians deprived of everything, no doubt help to make even stronger today.
And they also describe a kind of gradual descent that could lead them to destitution: meat for example, twice a week, in the past, then only once and then exceptionally. Could it be the same for other products? For everything ? And this eventuality is terrifying, not only materially, but psychologically.
How ?
A life such as the one these people fear is a life placed under the sign of “always less”, where one can come to the point of having to give up all that is not absolutely essential for physical survival, but which makes that life is psychologically livable; and therefore to switch to another world.
If one can, for example, eat only what one can still buy, one is deprived not only of pleasure, but of the possibility of choosing. And thereby a freedom which gives taste to life, but which also contributes to the image one has of oneself: when one is totally bound by the emptiness of one’s purse while others, as we know, are not as equal, we cannot think of ourselves as their equal. We feel devalued, and helpless in the face of an overwhelming reality.
And it would be urgent for politicians to hear it. Because, in this state, we are as vulnerable as the child in distress ready to follow anyone capable of making him believe that he is going to help him; and therefore at the mercy of all manipulations.
And this can have very serious consequences.