I no longer remember exactly from whom I had received these words – was it from one of my supervisors, or was it my psychoanalyst, frankly? -, but I know that they continue to distill bits of meaning in me, many years after they were pronounced: “the reverse of love is neither hatred nor even indifference, but good power”.
Once excluded from this logic all the slippery slopes that would leave room for any legitimization of various forms of violence “in the name of a potentially badly expressed latent love”, remain, it seems to me, all the perspectives it offers on the possible outcomes. of certain conflicting dynamics.
Like a turtleneck that we would unfold full length and which, once unfolded, would reveal an unsuspected vulnerability under concrete defenses, power, turned inside out, would finally let something of the “soft soft” be seen under sharp arguments. , a little pink under the dark, hot tears after cold showers.
A little romantic as a vision? Certainly ! For the record, let me confide to you that in August 1998, when I had been accepted for the baccalaureates in psychology and literature, it was a moose on a coin tossed at random from life that had ended up deciding in favor of Freud. Literature has never left my life, however, and the romanticism into which I fell as a child has in fact only worsened over all this time spent loving humans precisely where they could not. to love each other.
The childhood clinic led me to sit down together, in all sorts of uneasiness and very heavy silence, parents who, in the past, had loved each other enough to push into existence one or more children who now demanded that we redo the thread of the story, that we link the versions, but above all that we redistribute “in real life” the permissions to love and to resemble both parents, regardless of the schisms left by the ravages breakups.
If my love for what suffers and my faith in the human sometimes take on the appearance of heavenly, there are situations that quickly bring me back brutally to the floor of reality. These situations are those that can be grouped under the broad term “severe separation conflict”.
With more poetry, I would like to designate them, these situations which are obviously those which have affected me the most in my professional life, as being the “Great Invisible Violence” and all their variations: hostage”, “misuse of language” or even “how to alienate childhood by claiming to honor it? “. If the words are harsh, the realities they designate are unfortunately terrible sources of suffering for children.
Like an enormous magnifying mirror, this phenomenon increasingly invited into our clinics sends back to us a far from brilliant image of our collective tendencies to want to perform well in our parental roles, as if it were an Olympic competition. The “best parent”, the one who has read and absorbed all the mimicry well, without integrating its essence, the one who takes the heart of his child for a boxing arena, in which there is only room for his own reflection, it is of him that I speak.
If I choose not to give it either a genre or a representation that is too close to a possible personalization, it is because I wish here to depict it more as a symbol which, fortunately, is only rarely embodied entirely in a person. I would like us to dare to consider how much it sleeps, in potentiality, in each of us, when we are wounded in “our places of love” and when we “play at power”, so as not to feel the rest.
Hating the one who left us, who remarries, who forgets appointments with the dentist, who does not know how to communicate any more than when we were with him or her, who cheated on us, betrayed us, or threw us away after use are feelings that are not only normal, but deeply human.
It is not on this level that the perversion is played out.
She, she enters the scene when instead of being experienced, expressed, then digested, these somewhat shameful but authentic feelings freeze, are denied or projected, to give rise to a kind of “performance of the opposite”. The real then becomes flexible according to the needs of a reconstruction of a scenario that responds to the image of the perfect parent. We will no longer take responsibility for our own injury, and it is “in the name of the child” that we will precisely maintain in place what damages him, this child.
In this type of dynamic, not only does love (or heartbreak) no longer find its way, but power becomes the only language spoken, on the back, but above all, in the hearts of those who would only need to stick together pieces of identity attached to continents at war: our children.