Every time we dare to “throw ourselves into the world,” as Simone de Beauvoir said, we take the risk of exposing something of this tender, this soft, this little intimate vulnerability to the great winds of exteriority. The very existence of this column, the way of holding a column in dialogue, of reducing the asymmetry between the expert and the public, by also revealing the sufferer in me, the sometimes frayed human and all the shadow that comes with it, summons something of this delicious risk, every week.
And every week, your words deposited in my mailbox weave, below the world and these loud cries, a sort of fraternity of the gentle, a vast web made of our feelings, our intertwined sensibilities. Every time I read you, I regain confidence in the future of the world. Not because you tell me about your conquests over suffering. Not because you are overflowing with practical solutions to slow the fall in which we are collectively. Not because you transmit your knowledge to me. No.
Rather because you take the time to sit down in front of your keyboard, for a moment, a moment of “suspension of time and the world” and you allow yourself this descent into yourselves, then this ascent towards the other, me in this case, privileged gatherer of your treasures. Each time, I am moved as in front of these moments of existence where we have the impression of inhabiting the meaning, of having a place in the world and of being where we must be. You also “throw yourself into the world”, echoing my gesture. This dance has something magnificent, and I will never thank you enough.
This spring, I was momentarily overwhelmed by the flood of stories received and I lost the cadence of the rhythm that allowed me to respond to everyone in a timely manner that honored all the precious things that were told to me in this way. I have been catching up intensively for a few weeks and I am slowly going back up the river of your words, returning to the origin of this “duty of the heart” that we have been living together for three years.
This week, I wanted to celebrate this anniversary with you, because without you, this adventure would not hold up. Without you, my eyes would not mist over each week in front of your authenticity, the courage you demonstrate, each time you commit to yourself, daring to believe that your inner world deserves this attention. The dear Carl Gustav Jung said that “man deserves to care about himself, because he carries in his soul the seeds of his future”. I would add that, collectively, we deserve to care about ourselves, not in an individualistic or egotistical posture, but in a posture of “responsibility”, because, more than ever, we carry the seeds of our future, which, itself, seems increasingly threatened globally.
I speak of courage because I believe that daring to support one’s interiority, to consider it without complacency and to reveal it is part of what can perhaps lift us sufficiently towards a real re-humanizing revolution of the world. Each time I let myself be carried away by this thought, I feel within me this strange feeling of fear and desire, which indicates to me that I am indeed in the place of the living, this place from where I dare to believe that the world is beautiful, that it has a sequel and that we can still hope.
Not to despair, that is what you allow me every week. That is what I try to give you back too, a little spark plug for your desires to counter the praise of the same, which erases our subjectivities under a layer of standards resulting from industrial thought.
And I speak of courage because, every week for three years, it has also been a question of exposing the vulnerable to the eyes of all those people who, because they deny their own sensitivity, despise that of others. Fear of the feminine, by the Jungian analyst and essayist Erich Neumann, comes back to me every time I encounter the harshness of the gaze of someone who does not like the soft, who venerates the right and who, from the height of his Cartesianism, considers it pertinent to throw the burning lime of his contempt on the exposed sensitive.
The Jungian feminine, it must be remembered, is not associated with gender, but rather with an archetypal symbolism embedded in Western culture. The famous Swiss psychoanalyst aspired to a certain universalism, by searching in the depths of the collective human soul for the mysteries supporting all individual psychic constellations, a sort of founding symbols that he called “archetypes”. However, to speak like Derrida, let us say all the same that the “place from which he thought this” remained resolutely that of a Swiss-German, completely immersed in Western thought. In this sense, the universal character of archetypes can remain debatable, their sustainability too, particularly when we reflect on the concepts of feminine-masculine in a culture that is currently deconstructing questions of fixed gender and which necessarily, and fortunately, modulates the socialization of girls, boys and people who wish to exist outside of these boxes.
That said, it can nevertheless be meaningful to think like Neumann to designate this fear of the anima — this archetype constellating the elements of interiority, of sensitivity — positive or negative — irrational, ethereal, sentimental more than reasonable inhabiting our inner worlds. Every week, it also happens that they show up, the men who are afraid of the anima, and, on the occasion of this anniversary, I renew my vows to stand tall, heart and belly open, but above all hand extended towards them, because my other hand, it, remains firmly attached to the human chain that we also form, all these times that we dare to think and feel at the same time.
Because both are possible, this is also the challenge of this column, and you honor it every time you take out your pen to exist outside of this more than outdated dualism that divides human experience between reason and feelings.
So, shall we continue together?
A clinical psychologist, Nathalie Plaat is an author and teacher at the University of Sherbrooke.