November, the month of shadows, of the dead, of the absent and of the mourning that drags on, offers, at its mere mention, a great and beautiful opportunity to contemplate the spaces left by everything that no longer exists. Everything is dead, or on the verge of giving up, in fact, in the little wood next to the house, where I walk with my daughter and the dog. Together we throw the pumpkin that was rotting on the balcony while the cold begins to penetrate our coats which are no longer warm enough. We will have to buy new boots and mittens, take the large boxes out of beds and wardrobes, run to shopping centers which will dry out our eyes and our vital energy. We will be a little more inclined to cynicism, when we return, having noticed that the windows have already started to sell us Christmas.
This week, with November, a particular fatigue arises in the faces of patients. The light will have fled too quickly perhaps this year? Do we ever get used to the death of summer? The defensive structures that we had managed to put together for the start of the school year are running out of steam a little. The beautiful varnish of autumn, like our lips and the ground, begins to crack under the pressures that accumulate, the repetitions of routine and the nights that no longer seem to regenerate any of our enthusiasm. Our little personal breakdowns, those that haunt us at night; ruminations, anxieties and other guilts resurface a little more, making us want to barricade ourselves until the first snow, until the whiteness finally reflects a little sunshine on us and the games can take their place again in our days.
November is heavy, certainly, as long as we refuse to enter into conversation with all our ghosts. The analogy with this famous film, which terrified us so much at the time, The sixth sense, comes back to me often, in November, when I try to support patients who dare to look their symptoms in the eye, instead of running away from them, like the young actor Haley Joel Osment. Yes, the symptoms, whatever they may be, often act, one might think, like these specters, refusing to leave us alone.
It is perhaps even one of the propositions of psychotherapy that of taking the time to offer the invisible a curious listening, rather than a series of stratagems to flee it, to get rid of it, so that we can finally live in peace! Our symptom-ghosts don’t let us go, sometimes for years, managing our lives for us, as if they inhabited our houses, making our existences uninhabitable. And a bit like those ghosts who would knock the dishes out of the cupboards in the middle of the night, it happens that the more we deny them, the more they manifest themselves.
We run, we flee, like in all the most terrifying horror films, then there is this moment, in the clinic, that I have observed for years, this moment when, like young Osment from Sixth Sense, we lower our weapons, we put away the exorcism devices, the toolboxes, and other tips and advice, to ask them, finally, these specters, what they demand from us. There is this moment, yes, in certain psychotherapies, where we give up trying to get rid of ourselves, and where we finally ask what haunts us what is this quest for truth to which we are invited.
But there are also, among many people, these stories of real ghosts, these experiences, often reduced to psychopathological manifestations, hallucinations or more or less healthy delusions, which have long been described as “paranormal”. The psychologist Renaud Evrard, who works to document a clinic with this type of experience, takes from the philosopher Georges Canguilhem, the term “abnormal” experiences, to differentiate them from the abnormal or the paranormal and bring them closer from the first etymology of the word. Canguilhem, in The normal and the pathological, wrote: “An anomaly is the fact of individual variation which prevents two beings from being able to completely replace one another. »
In The familiar shadows, by Vincent Brault, published in September by Héliotrope – but which I am reading now because it seems to me that this book should be read in November – we find a collection of this type of abnormal experiences, collected by the author over years. Each of them also speaks of a mourning, of a loss which throws the psyche into the work of digesting something which has neither form nor reality, despite the great tsunami of affects which it creates in us.
Surviving the death of those we love, of parts of ourselves or even of a certain relationship to the world, requires its share of metaphorization. The great place occupied by ghost stories in our cultures certainly reflects something of our great need to give form to all this mystery that we cannot name and place in our rational categorizations. While the majority of people claim to be guided primarily by reason, it’s interesting how many of us also carry a few ghost stories.
A touch on a shoulder, a familiar voice that wakes us up just at that moment before falling asleep, the day before we learn of the death of this same person, those birds that appear on our balconies at the moment when we needed a sign, all these coincidences which seem to emerge from a form of coherence so that our intimate stories find their place in the continuation of these stories chosen by the author. Vincent Brault writes: “People see ghosts, it’s a fact. Are there really ghosts in the world? I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that dwelling on the question of the existence or non-existence of ghosts prevents us from thinking about what this type of apparition allows us to express. »
I want to take inspiration from him this week to open November with the great opportunity he offers us of a real encounter with a form of relationship with death, one that requires us to stop running for a moment — the candy, responsibilities or business – to come face to face with what haunts us, whether they are symptoms or, why not, real, real ghosts.
Clinical psychologist, Nathalie Plaat is an author and teacher at the University of Sherbrooke.