I live in a house. I am lucky! First, I am lucky to have been a young thirty-something at a time when it was still possible for us to get into a little debt—not too much—in order to buy a home. I live in a house that is also the only one I have lived in my entire adult life, another piece of luck, that of not having had to say goodbye to walls, to rooms that had known everything, heard everything, contained everything about our family deployments, as men and women, as children growing up. Like in this song—the one at the end of which I inevitably cry, with that cry that is impossible to hold back—like in the song by Ingrid St-Pierre, “on the walls there are still the measures of greatness”; those of my children obviously, but also those of the children who came before our family too. I can read first names growing along the door frame over the years. Christine arrived near the door handle in 2002. She quickly gained three heads, and I sense something of her pride in this line drawn in January 2003.
One morning, while I was writing outside, a woman passed by the house and confided in me that her husband had lived there as a child and that she herself had lived there at the beginning of her relationship with him, whom she now visited at the CHSLD that is right next door. I then realized that, from her tiny window in the CHSLD, it could be that, in the evening, a child hidden in an old man who has lost his memory is looking at the roof of a house that perhaps reminds him of something. That, too, inevitably makes me cry. I am a bit like all those people who watched Céline sing at the Olympic Games: both surprised and reassured to still have a heart that overflows in front of the beauty that lingers in existence.
I am lucky enough to live in a house that is a hundred years old this year. I am attached to the history it bears, to its old stained glass windows, which I refuse to remove to install a double-thickness thermos window. I am attached to the play of light they create on the floor, to these simple little squares, yellow, red and blue, which tell me about the life of the man who put them there in 1924, a Protestant priest, giving the place something resolutely turned towards the sacred.
A house is first made of wood, straw or bricks, like in stories, and it gives us security, a refuge from the wind, from the breath of wolves. The children’s clinic tells us about the symbolism of the house as a possible representation of parental security. When a child draws a house that is collapsing, or burning, we often want to listen to what is possibly collapsing inside him. Sometimes a child draws two houses, with as many windows and doors, and then we are relieved that, for him, security lies in the bonds he has with his parents, and not in the two bedrooms, the suitcases he drags from one place to another. When I was sick, my daughter, who spoke the language of very early childhood, would say “Mom, I’m afraid you’ll die and I’ll be alone in the forest.” I was his home, then. If I disappeared, she would have been alone, even if, obviously, my life insurance would have allowed my husband to keep the house and take care of her! (Smile with me at my pragmatism. When you see your end up close, you develop a sense of humor made up of many life insurance jokes!)
Now, my 7-year-old daughter still talks to me about her fears that our old house is cracking, too damaged by time. My daughter is afraid that I am still sick, but it is in symbolism of the house that she tells me about it.
It is also this image that, this week, has crossed my entire clinic and our discussions together, you and I, on the transformations possible through psychotherapy. You told me about your changes and, you too, you spoke to me in symbolism of a house. To change, for many of you, is therefore a little bit to return to the house of oneself, but it is also to choose a house in healthy, loving, friendly links that become the places of your deployments. But also, and I admit that, this too, made me cry, you spoke to me about your shrinks who had offered you a relational house (relational home), as psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow calls it.
While reading about this wonderful concept, I came across this study, The transformative experience of finding a relational home with a psychotherapistby British psychoanalysts Linda Finlay and Joanna Hewitt Evans, focusing on the transformations made possible by establishing and maintaining a “relational focus” in psychotherapy. Published in the European Journal for Qualitative Research in Psychotherapy in 2022, the study reports on the experience of therapists, by asking them about their own experience as patients. Yes, because, as we all know, almost all shrinks have experience as patients. They were asked what, for them, had constituted the key elements of transformation in the relationship with their shrink. Five themes were identified, and among them, no miracle trick, advice or technique. Belonging, security, containment, affirmation and “being with” (belonging, safety, holding, affirmation And being-with) were designated as the drivers of profound transformation for them within the framework of their personal psychotherapy.
We are talking about the relational house, in its aspect involving something of an intersubjective encounter between the patient and the therapist, in which the patient feels seen for what he is, but really seen, not only from the professional identity of the therapist. There is, in the theme of the relational house, this little extra soul that gives all psychotherapy its artistic character. To dare to grow, in a house, whether real or symbolic, it is true that one must feel sincerely loved, held, protected.
Tonight, my daughter will experience a new ritual that may help ease her fear of living in the forest. We will celebrate, with friends and neighbors, the centenary of a house that has seen others, but also the date that marks one more year since the moment when a tumor was removed from her mother’s body. So, perhaps in her, the wooden house will be able to transpose itself even more into a symbolic interior house, strong and reassuring against the winds.