So, you have come to the rendezvous. Barbara would already tell you about a love story. I will only tell you that I am honored by the word received in one week. Already, many of you have dared to recount your losses, and have sent it to me. In this step aside from the imposed choreography of the days that fly by at high speed, you courageously put some language about what made you suffer in my inbox. I will continue to read you until the end of the month, before reverberating in this column a few selected pieces from your magnificent and touching stories.
Yet there was something improbable about this date I invited you to, right?
It seems to me, yes.
First of all, because it is held in this invisible place, in the process of extinction, that of dialogue, but also that of the meaning given to what lies behind our famous symptoms of “mental health”.
Big evacuated from the massive institutionalization of psychosocial care in recent decades, the search for meaning in our psychological suffering is very often crushed under the dominant discourse of psychopathology, “self-management” and tools.
Even with the shrink, can it be that we no longer seek much to descend into ourselves, to tell ourselves about ourselves in order to discover ourselves in our uniqueness, to dare the irrational and the encounter with our depths? Are we not rather massively doomed to this “regaining of control” or even to this “self-normalization”, in phase with a certain economization of all spheres of existence?
Like small human resources directors who would have to watch over the continual restructuring of our internal departments, we apply to our psychic pains a host of principles devoted to the erasure of what nevertheless constitutes the bases of “becoming oneself”. Standardization, the abrogation of what exceeds a certain behavioral average, the search for proven protocols, supporting evidence, thus embody the new lexicon associated with a quest for well-being which, also, takes on a performative aspect.
However, who can speak of a dense, rich human life, lived in coherence with a certain non-reproducible singularity, without this one containing great moments of suffering? Growing pains aren’t just physical. Growing up can entail its share of visits to the dark side of the world, where, if we dwell on it, often powerful and necessary intimate revolutions lie dormant.
This culture of “the anti-tragic”, to use the phrase of the psychoanalyst Luigi Zoja, could even contribute, one might think, to add, to the one who finds himself caught up in a symptom or symptoms, an additional suffering: that of to feel exiled from his community.
My recent foray into the world of disease made me understand, in a very subjective way, to what extent finitude – and all the suffering it imposes on our consciousness – arises, between those who know it and those who know it. deny it, an immense schism. Suddenly becoming a stranger to the world of the “living-forever”, I slipped into the world of “dying-from-birth”, a nod to Cioran and his downside.
Exiled. It is the word which often seemed to me the most correct to designate this state which now placed me on the other side of this vast defense against the consciousness of death, in The other life by Marie Uguay, perhaps.
However, what other binder than this finitude common to all? Besides, I am not surprised that you already spoke to me so much about death. You could have told me about other softer losses, but as if you were just waiting for it, a barrage of words-to-name-death came to me.
Reading you, it seems to me that, perhaps, under the symptoms of all of us, there could be, among a thousand other things, a great need to overturn the pyramid which places the human above all mystery, in order to give back to this question of death his great authority over our consciences.
You tell me about your mothers who died during this first wave, your own worries that have become obsessive about your health, your painful separations from those who constitute the salt of your existence.
You miss them. All.
In the thought of the philosopher Gadamer, dialogue is an integral part of treatment. So, I wish that, if you take the time to put down your pains in this way, we manage, together, to restore them to you in a digestible form, that you enlarge yourself, that you become even more and better yourself – same, for the time allotted to you.
Are we not already less alone?