While January seems to take “sub-zero” too seriously, we continue to start our cars on the mornings of all those workdays placed under the sign of a strangeness that no longer even has the Freudian panache to be “disturbing “.
No sooner had we engulfed our mobile igloos than the radio announced the death of a young, too young, song fox. At first we remain dumbfounded, before bursting into tears as soon as the first notes of this version of‘Love each other, in which the softness of her voice immediately melts all our ice jams, cracks the coldness of our inner winters to remind us how much “the heart is an involuntary muscle”, but also a great creator of heat.
We will listen to the song four times, thinking that it is almost good to have time for tears. We’ll let the little fox who has disappeared distribute his legacy to us and, for a few suspended moments, we’ll embrace what’s left of the “rite” in our two-dimensional world.
For foxes, we know since Saint-Exupéry, the rite is important.
Fortunately, there is you, who continue to write to me, to offer me this precious something that remains vibrant through what, everywhere else, seems frozen in a slowness that keeps our morale below zero, too.
“Each of us is a biography, a story, a unique story, which is constantly being developed, unconsciously, by, through and in us. […]. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as a story, each of us is unique,” wrote the great neurologist Oliver Sacks.
And nothing can restore my faith in the rest of the world as much as reading people who dare to string together a series of words born from the hollow of their pain.
“I have a restless body
not just the legs
a body without sleep
misadjusted to my minutes
of essential nervousness
looks like i need
to spread the space in front of me
with both my hands
to create air
I will search
with you
the possibility
of love “
writes me this doctor whom we will say “in the front line”, so as not to speak head-on yet, so as not to abuse this warrior metaphor, which is invoked each time that it is a question of making citizens bear the consequences a policy still centered on the short term and the balancing of accounting spreadsheets.
In two days, an additional illustration of what could well be considered the culmination of a slow drift in public mental health care will appear on our screens. A private company will take over a cause that has been neglected for decades to “raise awareness” as if we were still at that stage.
We will be invited to take a selfie in an advertisement and, by a formidable diversion of language, to “talk for the cause”.
If I salute the courage of the people who, on the occasion of this campaign, will dare to reveal themselves in their vulnerable light, I cannot help but wince at the reaffirmation, by the means, by the interface and sometimes the vocabulary retained , a short-sighted vision of the yet so great complexity that inhabits contemporary human despair.
In addition to re-sending the double-bind message to us seeking counseling, when waiting lists are endless just about everywhere — try to find a child psychologist right now — we continue to emphasize diagnoses, medication and tools, as if the psychological symptoms were reduced to a vast “lack of expertise to go through life”.
Knowledge would therefore be in the hands of experts who themselves have no place. Enough to feed vicious circles of despair, right?
In the early 2000s, I set up a play psychotherapy room in the middle of a primary school, already clashing with the dominant culture that reduced my work to its evaluative dimension. As I tried to provide all the children I met with a place, a ritual and the time to dare the connection and self-expansion that play and talking provide, I understood that what was expected of me, it was rather that I circumscribe the despair quickly, without trying to reveal what was lodged under the behaviors, contenting myself with listing them in grids.
They wanted me to be an expert on the surface, a prescriber of “behavioral management” methods, even though I had studied the depths and the art of taming foxes. Like many of my colleagues, it was not for salary issues that I ended up leaving the public network, but because I know the time and the seriousness that must be given to the link for “talking” to be transformed to “cure” it.
“You have to be very patient,” replied the fox. First you will sit a little far from me, like that, in the grass. I’ll look at you out of the corner of my eye and you won’t say anything. Language is a source of misunderstanding. But, each day, you will be able to sit a little closer…”