I don’t know if it’s the summer, the suspension of many activities other than the clinic, that makes me think so much about her. I can’t say if it’s the mark of twenty years of practicing the profession, or even the simple movement of the tides of thought that, with its mysterious rhythm, deposits new treasures on the beach every day, although it’s always the same ocean that we look at and the same beach where we sit. Perhaps it’s also something like love that takes an unsuspected turn, love for that thing that we no longer knew we loved so much?
I don’t know. But I’m spending this summer loving my job as if I were realizing my privilege even more: that of being paid to listen. Already, there is a kind of imposture that we must constantly get rid of, when we are shrinks, the very one that makes us guilty of asking for money in exchange for what, deep down, is rooted in human qualities, available in potential in many people. Far be it from me to diminish the expertise related to my job, but, sometimes, I admit that I return to this essential knowledge, that it is made of simple materials, noble, perhaps, but simple too, of a simplicity that is certainly cruelly lacking in our time.
Concern for others, commitment and all the permanence of presence that it requires… and love too, as in the song, perhaps constitute the elementary particles from which we build everything else. I often tell myself that I am so lucky to be able to pick the truth, hour after hour, in this state so rare, proper only to intimate dispositions, where we lay down our arms, to show ourselves naked, stripped of masks, in this light so overwhelming where the fragile is powerfully sublimated. It seems to me then that all the hope in the world is permitted in the face of this otherwise so reproachable race, the human race.
A psychoanalyst friend of mine often said to her patients, when they approached themselves, discouraged at still finding themselves where they hoped never to return: “Welcome to the human race!” “I admit to having stolen the line from him, which I myself throw at my patients when they find themselves once again in this place of themselves that they had hoped never to visit again.
This week, with each person, I asked myself if, in truth, we really change. This question ends up bothering any clinician in a helping relationship, one day or another. A bit like if humility in the face of time passing on our ambitions sometimes forces us to ask ourselves if our efforts really bear fruit, or if, deep down, our work does not exactly allow the transformations that we thought we were supporting. Do we really change? Céline told us no, that we do not change, that we only put other people’s costumes on ourselves. And I admit that I often wonder about the transformative power of psychotherapy.
Faced with the power of complexes, of all this scaffolding of autonomous, unconscious mechanisms that go into overdrive without our consent as soon as we face the things in life that really matter (love, attachment, intimacy) and all the great threats that they summon (abandonment, humiliation, invasion), can we really turn the tide? Will we die with the same face, the one that Bobin defined as the incurable face, the one below? Or do we live, through the trials, losses, and sorrows that mold us, real major reversals in ourselves, lasting changes, profound molts?
The question remained open all week, depending on the faces and stories that were presented to me. I carried it open, in the back of my mind, like a canvas on which I wrote drafts of conclusions, before erasing them again, that they continue to teach me through the encounter, the possible answers. In front of this or that person, I told myself that, yes, we were there, in the great transformation that makes us change our skin, certainly, but also almost our heart, as if what made it beat changed its rhythm, its identity, its sensations from within. I saw her as someone else, this person, someone else than she had perhaps always been, deep down, which made me return to this idea of an absence of real change, a bit as if, all the work had perhaps been only to bring her back home from herself, to this person that she had known, very early on, that she was.
I was upset again, it was 10 or 11 or 3. The day was so beautiful, already. And later, in the same day, or the next day, I could find myself dismayed with the person in front of me, to return to a previous state that it seemed to me to have surpassed for leagues, miles, kilometers of years. And then, I said to myself “how slow is the time of change”. And, strangely, the day was not uglier, because this revisit was accompanied by novelties, too, as if the cave in which we were, damp, cold, and sad, was illuminated by the consciousness that we both threw into it. Me, as witness, the other as main actor.
That other morning, when I myself was struggling with my being, out of breath from having only him to inhabit, I parked the car in front of the clinic and wondered how I dared to be a guide, when I didn’t know how to climb the mountain of my own shadows. I opened the light, the windows to air it, watered the plants and, at 9 o’clock, I opened the door to the other. As soon as the first words fell into the room, I began to breathe better, to love the human, the one opposite, and at the same time, the one I was too.
We don’t often talk about how much the therapist is healed by his work. Each story has, in part, brought me light on my human condition, I often say thank you, quietly or aloud, to everything my patients have taught me about death, birth, love, war, loss, reunions, defeats and transformations. I don’t know if psychotherapy can change us, but I know that it can make life habitable for us, as we look at it with the eyes of the one who sees us, for what we are with this beautiful face, the one “from below”.
“It takes shape at two or three years and then hides in the shadow of the works. We have a thousand faces that are made and unmade as easily as the clouds in the sky. And then, there is this face below.” – Christian Bobin