In the clinic, I often have this feeling of touching the “very little” which characterizes the essential part of what we call our humanity. It will be, for example, a particular pause, appearing in the middle of a sentence from the person sitting opposite me, as if, suddenly, they became aware of something that had always escaped them, this thing that she needed to understand, to move forward, to cry or to live, downright. Privileged I then feel to be thus only deposited in my quality of witness, erased before the beauty of human truth.
This is what documentary filmmaker Nicolas Philibert managed to make me feel, again, almost twenty years after his equally successful documentary To be and to Have, by focusing his tender camera, this time, on the passengers of a unique place called: L’Adamant. He made a work of it, On the Adamantwhich “gives us something to think about” in its own words, and which above all reminds us how the encounter with otherness remains the royal road to defeating all our reflexes of stigmatization.
By documenting for us hope, finally what remains of it, in this world where “thinking is so often reduced to checking boxes”, Philibert offers a work which also rekindles in us the flame of struggle, necessary, to the creation and preservation of such places, too rare, so rare. On this post-PL15 gag Monday, we have the right to believe that these places will perhaps become even rarer than they already are.
But what places are we talking about?
In this film, it is a boat, relatively small, designed, thought out and built first with a rare desire to involve all the actors involved in its mission. The architects, in a spirit of close collaboration, in a creativity that one imagines would be difficult to dare in the megastructures that we know, have thus solicited, from the beginning, both psychiatrists and patients suffering from mental disorders, in the design of a space where everyone, regardless of “where they think”, would have a say. The magnificent result therefore comes from a process which, in itself, already carried respect for a plurality of ways of seeing and living life as well as the desire to reposition each person, even the sickest, at the heart of his creative process.
Placed in the Seine, at the quay, L’Adamant, with its multiple windows, its wooden shutters and its oval shape, already escapes the aesthetic language of the flat, smooth and bleached squares of psychiatric care institutions. Every day, speakers, psychiatrists and patients mix together, in a posture which tends to erase the caregiver-patient asymmetry to return to the foundations of a shared humanity.
We offer the people who come there real listening, in a form of living together which includes great flexibility both in the relationship to time, to speech or to silence, which allows a completely restorative simplicity to emerge. No one “performs” their profession here, constantly affirming the specificity of the professional acts that are theirs. On L’Adamant, everyone is simply in the same boat.
Art is placed at the forefront of putting the self into language, regardless of the state of this “self”, whether it is fragmented, broken, etiolated, mounted on “slightly broken faces” as the saying goes. one of the passengers. Poetry, cinema, dance, drawing, music, but also sewing, cooking or cash register management are offered in turn in the form of workshops where everyone will be listened to, but really listened to, not as in a technique learned, then mastered, then noted in the file.
The more the film unfolds, the more we believe we are seeing an image of Emmanuel Levinas’ thoughts, with his close-ups of all his faces which, despite the trace of suffering they bear, look right at us through the lens. , reminding us each time to what extent we too are in the same boat as them, whether we suffer from psychopathology or “normopathology”.
The “normopaths”, yes, according to the expression used by Philibert at the microphone of Penelopeit’s us, who so often forget that we are also, trying to survive a crazy world, without going crazy ourselves.
But there you go, some have more chances than others. And on L’Adamant, the shadow bearers of our societies, with their “porous sensitivity”, also have the right to beauty, to listening, to all those things which protect them from feeling dehumanized by systems of care. which too often evacuate the deep meaning of the word “care” (the root of which refers to the fact of having a “concern for the other”).
Caring therefore means caring about others, and this concern requires time, patience and a form of radical commitment which very often exceeds what the framework of psychiatric care practice allows (and above all encourages) in our institutions dominated by economic pressures.
Last Wednesday evening, we were alone, my friend Noëlle and I, in this cinema room at the Maison du cinéma de Sherbrooke. Alone in front of all this beauty hunted down in a place where, again, a form of resistance to the flattening of roughness was observed. After having enjoyed our chance to be able to laugh loudly, comment and cry without worrying about disturbing, we, the normopaths that we are, left the screening, galvanized, with this desire to shout to everyone to go see this film , first, but above all, to be inspired by it to create as much Adamant as possible.
Then on Saturday, Bill 15, which will place captains at the head of a huge boat. top gun » from the private sector in charge, which will aim to deploy even more standardized protocols, the very ones which will always involve reducing singular experiences to series of symptoms to be checked off, was adopted, under gag order.
I thought about the last sentence of the film, which I had missed because I found it too perfect.
“In a world where thinking is so often reduced to checking boxes, and where the welcome of the singular is increasingly crushed, there are still places that do not give in, that try to keep alive the poetic function of the man and language. »
So, when, how and with whom do we build our little boats?
Clinical psychologist, Nathalie Plaat is an author and teacher at the University of Sherbrooke.