Sign of the times, the word is pronounced to perfection by my five-year-old daughter. Having visited, since the fall, all the variations of possible decision-making algorithms in the event of “symptoms”, she has become accustomed to the word, the 24-hour observation period and rapid tests. She also plays alone “like a grown-up”, in half-hour segments interspersed with reunions, while I type on my keyboard, write about our collective mental health or listen, on Zoom, to the putting into words of the suffering embodied in a someone who tells me.
Inhabited by feelings of absurdity and parental guilt during these days of balance-work-family-version-pandemic, I often take refuge in the memories of my 1980s, when boredom was less dramatic, while I discovered what would instead become both a refuge, a place of healing, a way to heal myself from everything and, ultimately, a profession. My creative space, this word from within, can only arise in me today if the other is somehow absent from me.
While I am in no way minimizing the psychological agonies that this pandemic can cause our children, I sometimes like to think that there are also, perhaps, some possibilities created by these new contingencies, in particular a regression of a pendulum who, for several years, had reached a form of excess in this figure of the parent — or adult — totally and entirely devoted to the child.
“Helicopter”, ” overparent “, or even “encroaching”, this parent whom I sometimes recognize in myself, in friendship or in consultation receives nothing from my judgment, but a benevolent invitation to turn the camera towards him or her, instead of keeping it attached to the close-up face of his beloved offspring. When this father or this mother talks about himself on the sofa, we very often discover the wounds of children which have turned into a compensatory parental posture which, subsequently, has only been reinforced by the dominant diktats of the ‘era.
Determined above all not to make our children experience what would have been a source of suffering for us, here we are creating, unwittingly, of course, an unexpected and entirely new form of suffering.
But isn’t this the universal parental adventure? Think “do better than”, before accepting more humbly that, like those who precede us in the line, we will only have been able to “do our best”?
This very contemporary claim to inhabit an irreproachable parental posture even contributes, one might think, to a certain obstruction of the speaking space as well as to a slowing down of psychoaffective maturation in certain children and adolescents. So sometimes only the body and its symptoms remain, acting like real resistance fighters, to demand the fall of the tacky dialogues learned in the guides and the establishment of a true, unvarnished word, which would require everyone to assume its shadows. , too.
In the clinic of childhood as in that of the adult, it happens that the body speaks and claims, beyond what is made aware in the family container, precisely a little “air”, space or even opportunity to criticize this parent who is so “adjusted”.
The so-called psychosomatic symptoms exist and are embodied well beyond a reductive folkloric imagination composed of black and white images of women suffering from “conversion hysteria” under the gaze of Charcot and Freud or even textbooks with blankets new-age that would invite us to “listen to our body”
We have pain in the stomach, in the heart or in the lungs, which seem compressed to us. We do not sleep or so too much. We develop tics, migraines or even various compulsions that involve the body, our intimate and personal relationship with this end of us that we sometimes drag around without inhabiting it in the least.
Unfortunately, in the current movement of medicalization of psychological suffering, the symptoms are often read and treated as being phenomena almost “foreign” to the inner life. Yet it is quite reasonable to understand them also as gateways to singular worlds, which are linked, not causally, but “globally” to what is suffering in the individual who Express. On this subject, to be enjoyed, both visually and meaningfully, the sublime comic book by Catherine Ocelot, from whom I borrowed the title of this column.
And to see a teenager filmed close to the body, catch up Euphoria, which is already in its second season on HBO.
We often look for where the light is on, says the old story of someone who lost their keys in the dark woods while still looking for them under the lamppost. And the light of the primacy of the biological is particularly blinding in our time.
Next week, I will take a break to spend time with my children. They won’t say that I wasn’t there for them!