Clinical practice: one of the forms of hospitality for the subject in lack of a place between exile and wandering.

Clinical practice: one of the forms of hospitality for the subject in lack of a place between exile and wandering.

Auteurs : Ilaria Pirone et Jean - Jacques Tyszler, traduction de Nancy Knezevic.

J.J Tyszler:

I will start our evening with a few words of introduction after which our speaker Ilaria Pirone - my colleague from the CMPP  (Centre Médico Psycho Pédagogique) unit -  will kindly continue on the same theme evoked during our last meeting around clinical issues.

For several years now, we’ve been working with the NGO France Terre d’Asile to meet with families seeking asylum in France. There are several CADA (Centre d’Accueil pour Demandeurs d’Asile) in and around Paris, including our unit, which have signed an agreement with France Terre d’Asile to help with children.

Along with several other colleagues, Ilaria has been working for years on this new migration which isn’t necessarily comparable to older forms of migration. The difference will need to be addressed at some point.

With partners at the CADA, we’ve been preparing a training day at the CMPP in my service for late March 2018. Units like ours focus on children in exile, among other issues.

More recently, we contacted the CHUM (Centre d’Hébergement d’Urgence des Migrants). As you know, the so-called “migrants” ( who don’t yet have the status of “asylum seekers”) are gathered in two locations in Paris, the infamous one at Porte de la Chapelle (infamous because the media has focused on its difficult conditions), and another center at Ivry sur Seine, where families and children are gathered.

I visited the Ivry center right after Christmas 2017, and I first must point out how well managed it is. I contacted the Health Coordinator there, a woman whose professional position is tied to the Samu Social, to discuss the need/legitimacy of setting up a unit for children, one similar to the CMPP. I asked whether such a unit would support her own work with families and children in Ivry.

This challenge, this contemporary clinique, should be taken seriously. This specific aspect of segregation and exclusion has created a new psychic economy.

Ilaria gave me the idea of starting a workshop named Mythos - or “From Mythos to Logos”, if you want the more sophisticated version. This workshop brings together children of all origins, religions, ages and ethnicities, without any prerequisite pathologies. We don’t reserve our work for the traumatised. All children are welcome.

We provide a psychoanalytic approach to the children’s stories, and precisely of the place of RSI (the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary).

You’ll probably meet other professionals along the way who will tell you about different types of work they’re doing on the question of cultures, what is often referred to today as transculturalism, and ethnopsychiatry, not to mention some who over-specialise on the issue of trauma. There are many highly (overly?) specialised units around. We aren’t. We’ve made the choice to remain universalist in our way of welcoming those children. This doesn’t preclude our seeing them as individual psychotherapy patients outside of the workshops.

I’ve turned towards colleagues who focus on these issues because one can’t just “invent” a clinical practice that deals with exile. One needs to be working within those places that welcome these children. Otherwise, it’s too facile to just talk and say anything one wants. But there aren’t so many of us who work with these families. Thus, I’ve asked my colleagues to recount some anecdotes to you.

One could have asked why bring children who come from different countries and languages, such heterogenous places. In this respect, Pierre-Henri Gaudard would say they aren’t “knotted” (noués) like us; that they are “differently knotted” for the most part - therefore why bring children into logical narrations that speak of universals like love, knowledge, and action? And so we had the idea, thanks to Ilaria, to use as our starting point muteness and silence - a psychoanalytic virtue.

Keep in mind that the term myth/mythos stems from the Latin mutus: secrets and repression, in order to make heard the repetition of the same mysteries since time immemorial.

The big questions that haunt humans and their children aren’t that many: who decides on fate? Why is love always a drama? Why is there inhumanity in humanity? Can one forgive?

So, in these children’s work, the novel - which we can also name the “family novel” - is often a novel full of sorrowful connotations. But the novel is a time reserved for another narration which more often than not includes authentic historical episodes, and other parts purely symbolic - what we call a myth. if you read one of the great myths, the Minotaur for instance, you’ll see that the trials narrated (for both us and children) are always at the limit, at the edge of the precipice, the edge of the hole. Quid? Do I fall in, or not?

We asked ourselves this uneasy question. Should we summon the traumatised children we see to the edge of the precipice in order to offer relief from the “excess” of memories. I shall use a rather lapidary sentence: I shall say that the imaginary of myths verifies Lacan’s proposition: R, S and I are primary names, names of the father (noms du Père).

Through reading, the imaginary of the myth has the power to produce this triple axiom. During a session with children, you can provoke the appearance of all three Lacanian categories simply by reading these myths out loud. No need to give you a lecture in theory, all you need to do is come and observe. Read myths out loud: the territory of logos generally confronts the child to what we could call (in the best of cases) literal memory.

For those kids, the long, continuous ribbon of “jouissances” forms trauma, mourning and exile. They, like us, must accept (if only for an instant) that his/her memory - indeed our sacred, singular, fetishised memory - be merely a “snag” (un accroc) within the space-time of language. This is our aim.

Now to you, Ilaria.

Ilaria Pirone: Good evening, everybody. I had thought of a title for this evening, one that could serve as an introduction.

“Clinical practice: one of the forms of hospitality for the subject in lack of a place between exile and wandering.”

A clinical approach to exile implies going beyond the technical questions it poses and asking ethical questions about our position. Such a clinique demands that we keep an eye onto the polis precisely to avoid mistakes about our position as practicians. First, not be mistaken about the terms. Who are we seeing? We aren’t seeing “immigrants”, nor “migrants”, nor “refugees”. As the anthropologist Michel Agier reminds us in his book “Defining Refugees” (Définir les Réfugiés): “These are institutional, political, social and administrative categories which, moreover, correspond to the legislative and political sphere’s binary logic which separates foreigners from citizens. We cannot be both. “

Thus, we see families, children who are experiencing a situation of exile - and that very term is already inherently complex. Indeed, although it is used to qualify a situation, its etymology implies the notion of banishment. So perhaps this evening I could suggest this idea that we see children and families “without places” (sans lieu). Because for most of these families, exile is immediately followed by wandering/roaming (errance) - meaning a period of time during which they remain without a place. That’s how I would name their awaiting for their asylum application to be processed…when this period actually and finally does materialise as an official application - we all know this is increasingly more difficult - and when, by chance, it is actually given a positive answer…Thus, there is this intermediary, suspended period of time - nothing like what we can read about in Ancient Greek epic poems - and consequently, in order to define the framework of our conference, we must define the terms we use, which unequivocally conjures the ethical issue of the clinician’s position.

So ultimately, our work consists in permitting the emergence of the subject in exile. So we aren’t speaking so much about exile as a social position but as a subjective position. This is indeed the place where are allowed to use the term.

In the CMPP where I work, we’ve chosen to work on narration, on the place of narration in this clinique. In several ways, it has its own specificity. As the narration oves forward (au fil du récit), the point will be to shift from “weaving” (le tissage) to “knotting” (le nouage), as Charles Melman brilliantly puts it in his text about Zeus’s “profession” (métier).

But perhaps in order to perform this shift (from weaving to knotting), there needs to be a necessary period of time to “make the story” (faire récit). Although we may feel like we all agree when we use the term “story”, it is nonetheless true that “story” opens a wide plain of possibilities. It would require a class on post-classical narratology.

For example, Roland Barthes reminds us that: “The story is present at all historical times, everywhere, in every society. The story is there, like life itself.” But we do mean when we say “story”? In my view, when I talk about “making the story”, I mean a compromise between putting forward narration - therefore the act of recounting/telling, which is in fact what our work most consists in, more than the object itself.

Thus the story interests us because we first need to go through the labor of weaving, since the effect of trauma is to “unweave” the various threads. I think we can’t turn the question of exile into an identity issue. Our own story doesn’t impart us with clinical legitimacy. Our experience as migrant cannot replace the other’s knowledge nor stand in its stead - ever.

Let’s refer back to a conference entitled “Foreign to one’s self” (“Etranger à soi-même”) given by Paul Ricoeur in 1994. At this time, the use of the signifier “migrant” had become secondary in public discourse, and “refugee” wasn’t yet used; it’s simply the word “foreigner” that was prevailed. In this text, Ricoeur cites Leviticus and reminds that the only thing that permits hospitality is memory - the “duty” of memory, as Primo Levi says in the introductory poem of If This is a Man:  

You who live safe

In your warm houses;

You who find on returning in the evening

Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider if this is a man

Who works in the mud

Who knows no peace

Who fights for a bit of bread

Who dies because of a yes and because of a no

Consider if this is a woman,

Without hair and without name

Without enough strength to remember

Vacant eyes and cold womb

Like a frog in the winter:

Reflect on the fact that this has happened:

These words I commend to you:

Inscribe them on your heart

When staying at home and going out,

Going to bed and rising up;

Repeat them to your children:

Or may your house fall down,

Illness bar your way,

Your loved ones turn away from you.

I take this poem to be a call for memory, to describe a place where identification is legitimate, identification meaning the comparison between different moments in History.

After this rather serious introduction, and in order to illustrate the image of the text’s “unwoven thread”, I shall now discuss my encounter with a child whom I shall name Raphael. I’ve used this clinical encounter to try to demonstrate how trauma can indeed unweave the various threads, thereby leaving the subject to struggle with an “un-narrativised imaginary” (“dans un imaginaire dé-narrativisé”), atemporal, without edge or limit, simple a juxtaposition of images.

This clinic first requires a lapse of time during which the various threads must be rewoven, not so much in order to reconstitute a story for the patient, but to avoid the risk of following a single thread, unwoven/untied from the others, and therefore, as the clinician, to avoid risking, to also avoid the risk of remaining “stuck” on a specific image (une forme d’arrêt sur image).

When one meets these families, it’s the narration of trauma that is first put forward, a story that they must first tell/reconstitute for the social worker and the staff from the various administrative services they meet so that their request be known. That same story is also the same one we first hear.

To avoid remaining stuck on this initial story - therefore on only one of the many threads of their story - it seems to me that there is indeed one moment which we must also reweave.

In his 2006 seminary on fantasy, Dr Tyszler reminded us that there are some people who, for historical reasons, have experienced things that we’ve never experienced. This difference needs to be handled with care, with tact. But what remains crucial for the subject is the possibility - whatever the traumatic breach may be - of moving onto the plane of fantasy. That’s his or her chance, his or her opportunity. Thus, the purpose of this labor of “reweaving” (retissage), is to accompany the subject in this passage from trauma to something that could enable a reconstitution/recomposition of fantasy, or at least, a reemergence of fantasy.

There’s another beautiful article written by Martine Menez: “From one trauma to the other: what is translated in exile”, in which she cites a moment in Freud’s life.

Although quite different, these two articles provide indications for the work to be done: to weave various signifiers with this child, to provoke the emergence of the stories’ multiplicities, the story of the family and of the History from which they come, with a capital H; to create a space for the parents to talk about themselves, beyond trauma, beyond the event which has caused a full stop in their lives, the event that has caused the decision to go into exile.

Here are a few elements of the story:

When I meet Raphael, he is 8 years-old. His family is of Armenian origin, and they have just fled Russia. They lived in one of those regions that Putin wanted to repopulate in order to control the borders. There, in this incredibly remote area, Raphael’s family would help other migrant families.

This “detail” is crucial because this is how Raphael tells us the story: they used to help other migrant families in their administrative solicitations. The police ordered them to stop. Following this order, Raphael’s family is threatened by an ultra-nationalist Russian party, and the police do not offer their protection. Until that fateful day when the threat becomes an actual assault: Raphael’s father is severely burned; his life is in grave danger. That’s when they decide to leave for France.

That is the story of the trauma, the story that accompanies the asylum application.

But you’ll soon see in the anecdotes I am about to recount for you of my sessions with this child that if we focus on nothing but this trauma, this fragment, our framework remains dramatically restricted.

One of the important elements in my work with this child was also the story told by his maternal grandmother, who was very present in his family.

Thanks to the secretary’s translation skills and to her high level of culture, we were able to link everything this family told us with the history of central Asia and Russia. The work needed isn’t necessarily one of our culture, but of “encounter” among cultures (rencontre entre cultures).

Each time we meet different cultures, we must reopen our history book to understand what our patients are talking about, what happened in the past. Karen Akoka wrote this beautiful sentence for the work “Defining refugees” (Définir les réfugiés): “To be a refugee refers back to a collective belonging, and not to an individual situation.”

On the grandmother’s side, the family had a comfortable life in Ouzbekistan before the fall of the USSR in 1992, when the various republics started seeking their independance, pushed as they were by nationalism(s). The family lost their status; the grandfather died of a heart attack on the very day he lost his job as the CEO of a large company. Left to their own devices, the grandmother and her two children (Raphael’s future mother and uncle) find refuge in Armenia, since they Armenian nationality. There, Raphael’s uncle must enroll in the military service. A war follows; he is MIA. The mother finds him in a state of shock and, once found, they can no longer remain in Armenia since the son has been discharged from the Army. They find regue in Russia. There, as Armenians, it’s no easy task finding acceptance from others. Nonetheless, they decide to ask for Russian citizenship, which they obtain. That is when Raphael’s mother meets his father. But it’s also a time when Caucasians aren’t welcome. Thus, the family is constantly threatened - and thus decide to move to a remote part of Russia, to find refuge - again. Once there, they start helping Armenian refugees with their administrative solicitations.

As a reminder, it’s most interestering to consider the issue of the Armenian genocide  between 1915 and 1916: Armenians are one of the first peoples to obtain the status of refugees, through the Geneva Convention, which alters slightly the said status.

What’s fascinating in this part of the story is how other people are actually the refugees. Beyond the “anecdote”, what’s remarkable about this family is the way successive exiles have marked its history - the exiles within the exile of part of a whole people.

Another important element is the whole family’s Armenian origins. Because even we had lost sight of the fact that they were, in fact, Armenian - since they introduce themselves as Russians, with Russian passports. Thus this clinique requires a lot of institutional workbecause eveyrthing I am recounting for you is in fact the product of institutionnal work: Dr Tyszler’s meetings with the family, the secretaries who had a priviliged relationship with the family and the social worker - a three-tiered way of collecting the various pieces of this family’s puzzle.

We must add an important element to these life stories: silence. The silence about the father’s story, about the events that lead them to leave. This fragment of trauma - the burned father - that whole side of the story remains untold. And that’s an important part of the child’s story. Another key piece of the puzzle is a meeting during which the mother was able to speak about herself as a woman, and not as a refugee. During this meeting, she was able to tell us that Raphael was the product of a miracle.

So there you have several different elements of different stories that show the need to tie the story fo the trauma to the subject’s story and to each person’s place in the family configuration - imaginary and symbolic. This is a crucial point to remember because when we work with children, we’re always working with the issue of the child’s place in the maternal fantasy - as Maud Mannoni reminds us in “The Child, his “illness” and the others”: “The child is the prop for what the parents cannot face: the sexual problem.” Similarly, Lacan says: “The child’s symptom takes the place of the answer for what is symptomatic in the family structure.”

Shackled within the trauma story, we run the risk of covering up the hole and forgetting to retrieve the threads of infantile sexuality. Why wouldn’t these children have a right to the maternal fantasy, nor the right that we work also on their place within that fantasy?

That is what I call the “duty of hospitality of clinique” which, as you know, was a sacred law for the Elders - hospitality, the duty of hospitality… Not easy to say in French nor English, but in Italian, the beautiful verb “hospedare”  - to “hospitise”, to welcome the other, the foreigner. Thus the Elders had to welcome the foreigner without even asking his name: you simply had to pen your door and welcome him in.

But all these pieces of story don’t tell you much about what happened during my encounters with Raphael? You should know that I anticipated things because I discovered these fragments of story over the course of our sessions. I therefore was able to follow several threads to tell you the story of this encounter, including the issue of how to write the family surname. The Name of the Father was always an ongoing question. But I am choosing to narrate it all by following the letters which marked a turn during the process. And I will try to indicate how in “playing” (Winnicottian playing), we see the threads (in both sense of the word) starting to reweave/retie in the Imaginary, and not necessarily in the form of a story, but something different.

The first letter that imposed itself during our first sessions was capital A. And I will tell you where it arrived! But it’s interesting to see and verify once again what Maud Mannoni would say: that during the first session, you face a chess board full of pieces, and every move remains to be played for the subject to appear (que le sujet puisse se dessiner).

During this first session, he starts by doing maths, additions without results, or results that repeat themselves or don’t correspond to the addition: “Ten plus twelve is twelve”. Then, he draws podiums on which we’re all standing; and on each podium, he draws characters that are either smiling or sad, depending on the place they occupy on the podium. There’s the drawing of the house, the drawing of the tree: an apple tree, followed by the drawing of an imaginary tree: the tree is a house. The tree is a house, and there’s a rope to climb in, and there’s a light. An arrow points to the entrance. That’s the drawing of the imaginary tree “A”, but for the first. Then, the stick figure drawing, a person, the “vampire man” (bonhomme vampire)  - that’s how Raphael names him. A final drawing, and that’s where the A appears. It’s a tornado! There’s an A that throws something, and the tornado destroys the town. Two soldiers. The A is mean; the A gives his power, destroys the whole city, and they all run away. They survive. You see? So that’s the first letter.

In a surge of anxiety, Raphael stands up and starts walking in circles in the room, moving his hands in a stereotypical manner. Here are indeed the pieces from the chess board: a vampire man, a destructive and threatening capital A, and a shelter with a rope for access.  So of course, one can’t help but wonder if the child will be able to reach the rope, to follow the thread in order to reemerge.

During these first sessions, Raphael sings very repetitive motifs when he is sitting - like those you can hear in video games. Or he roams around the room with this stereotypical hand motion. There’s movement, or sound, or both. Something is needed to plug any possibility of collapsing. Video games at home seem to serve the same function: plugging a hole. Much like the stories Raphael tells which seem to force him to move to avoid falling, and allow him, as he’ll say in the second session: “I’m gonna draw to make the monsters come out.” And once again, a vampire, pigs….

And from this session onwards, a small scenario takes place. He grabs a pair of scissors: “I like scissors because they’re like humans.” “The scissor” (as he pronounces it) becomes a character that cuts all the other characters Raphael draws. A lot of heads fall, and finally “the scissor” meets another “scissor”. “I think the scissor isn’t mean; he’s another master.” Thus, henceforth, that’s the way it will always go, the same repetition always: a new character who is mean, then the mean guy finds a way of accomodating, of integrating the group, but another mean guy comes on the scene. He asks me to draw a man. Scissor and Man become the protagonists of a series of episodes during which they must face the mean guys and have to stop them in their path of destruction. I won’t say they have to accept rules, but they must indeed stop the blood-bath. At the end of the session, Raphael announces: “I am the King of Scissors, everything ends well like he ends well. Everything is ended well, but there’s still some mean ones.” - which reminds me of an intial conversation I had with the family, a conversation lead by Dr Tyszler: Raphael had told us a tale he had invented and at then end, he’d been able to say: “But, we need a moral to the story!”

As I was saying, a scenario is put in place, which repeats itself almost exactly at every session. Raphael resumes the story of what he calls “Man and Scissor” (Bonhomme et Ciseau). He always makes a slightly monstruous noise with his mouth; he draws a mean man, a character, and he attributes details to all his characters. I am not allowed to watch while he’s drawing. The Man, therefore the character I have to embody, must help the others - among whom Scissor - to find a way of helping the new characters to integrate the group. Then the story always ends without really finishing: the mean one integrates the group, but a new mean one arrives on the scene. Over the course of these repetitions, we can read this story in different ways. Dr Tyswler had once said to me: “Everything’s fine. A hole is possible. The story is always “decompleted” (décomplétée), since there’s always someone else arriving.

Be that as it may, things were sort of becoming circular in terms of transference…. This story of “decompleteness” wasn’t quite right because deep inside myself, I could feel all this as a form of arrest around somethign repeating tiself - this is typical of trauma - like an image that constantly repeats itself, unchanging.

In the meantime, however, there is still some movement. So I am “the Man” (le bonhomme), and once in a while he calls this man the “the Hero Man”: “the Man gets knocked around a lot, I can tell you, but he’s also called upon to defend the others.”

During one session, Raphael announces: “It’s going to end (perhaps he could feel my anxiety), it’s going to end with the end of the mean guy, and the Man as a hero, but it’s going to take some more time.” Children always call it as it is!

We thus remain ensnarled in an ednless story with a moral unmoored from an ethical element.

So here’s the technical point: I introduce envelopes in our game to send mail to the charactrs, or in which to put them away. It’s a way for me to endow this limitless imagiantion with some kind of edge/border by limiting the space and, little by little, Raphael appropriates the enveloppes until he finally renames them, and creates one for the “meanies”, one for Man, an enveloppe for the wounded, etc… He’s starting to categorise; not everything is the same. Then, it’s the zombies’ turn; there’s a series of zombies. He asks: “But zombies in real life, like in your life, are you a little bit araid of zombies? I think zombies exists, Mommy said so! Zombies eat your brains.”

Thus, behind this compact imaginary, we’re finally in the presence of a small crack, which allows a question to emerge.

So I ask Dr Tyszler if he would gather the family, and we go back to discussing the events behind the asylum application. Dr Tyszler asks the parents to name what happened: the work of nomination.

The mother says: “But Raphael doesn’t know about this.” And at the same moment, Raphael folds himself in half, as if in some kind of physical pain and says: “Why did he talk about this? It was a secret!”

After this meeting, Raphael ahs a session with me, and he can talk about his mental images of his family in danger: “In my head, I see people burning!” It’s thus after this maneuver that the second letter arrives (after the capital A of the first session). Raphael looks around (I share my office with a speech therapist), and he looks at a small poster with letters of the alphabet, and says: “R. R like Russia”. And he starts scribbling and breaks his pen, because it’s too much for him, too much violence for him to leave a trace, a trace with his name. Moreover, with this R that corresponds to the R of Russia.

And then, another window opens within the story - perhaps we could talk about the window of fantasy, if we thinnk about the grammatical construction Lacan proposes from Freud’s seminal text A child is beaten, and in his seminary of the Formations of the Unconscious, and which accompanies the three periods of the Oedipal Complex.

Raphael makes this affirmation during a session: “I’m scared for the children who were hit by the police in Russia. On TV, they said there was a zombie attack in Russia.” A construction superimposes itself onto the story of trauma. And at the same time, he pursues the story of Man and the Scissor, and introduces for the first time a feminine character into his story: a flower (une fleur).

He looks at me and tells me: “Words make my head explode) (les mots me font exploser la tête.) And then, he creates and enveloppe, “that’s the enveloppe for the firends with superpower.” See how interesting it is with children? We can pass from tragedy to poetry in a single session.

During the following session, Raphael tells me about a dream - for the first time: “I dreamed I was beating my friends with mean robotos and with the handkerchief, I beat the mean robot.”

Thus, he changes positions: he talks about his fears at night, his nightmares. It’s very hard for him to fall asleep. And he creates a playdoh monster, the monster - the story’s tragedy - will be exiled in a box taped shut.

And then, sure enough, love arrives. The boy tells me about his love for a girl at school. And from this second turning point onward, the story changes: a few elements of his own story start appearing. He tells me: “I forgot the city in Russia.”

I write down my first and last name, and Raphael writes down his. The family name becomes readable, even if your letters are still missing.

The family has just announced that their asylum application has been granted. Raphael says he doesn’t want to know. Dr Tyszler asks if he can read the official documents in front of the child, and have them also be translated into Russian. Raphael can’t stand it; but he submits. And suddenly at the end, he says: “I want to be like my grandfather! I want to create something!” He then mentions his pain about his friend who is in Russia, with whom he grew up, the trip from Russia to France, the two whole days on the bus, the trip of/to exile.

In the following sessions, Raphael alternates between moments when he talks about himself with moments when he starts the stories he invents during our sessions: he made me face my limits as a neurotic that I couldn’t stand the thought of meanness winning. I then stop my story. During one of our final sessions, Raphael says: “There’s black in my brain. When you’re scared inside your own head, it goes black.”

And the third letter arrives. When Raphael wants to draw the monster he had in his head, he gets annoyed, and within the drawing an “M” appears. The letter finally replaces the image.

Thus, to conclude and remain on this question of letters where each one has a different status, Raphael can write his family name - the name is there but some letters are still missing. There’s something there, in the work of nomination and identification. What’s interesting in these missing letters is that I think we can make the link with what you often say about the Name of the Father as a shelter. In the article I mentioned earlier, Martine Menez says the same thing: “Because, what does the child of ex - exile, expulsion - meet if not a particularly tragic version of the father’s impotence/powerlessness.” Supported by a parent a bit more traumatic than another because he has met a hole in language, the hole of the Symbolic, within his very existence; because he is openly marked by lack, openly a victim of the Real, leaving his child particularly helpless, which is not without reminding him of his initial position - Hilflosigkeit - the distress of the infans, given over to the omnipotence of another on whom his survival depends.

I want to add that, aside from these questions of fathers in distress, we should also be interested in another affect - not anxiety this time but shame. Not “shame” in the sense of a product of “unveiling” before the other’s gaze, but shame in the sense that Primo Levi describes in The Truce (La Trega): “It was the shame (…), the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.”

Perhaps we should look for a tragic shame that can be linked to a mythological dimension, this dimension of the myth as Lacan defines it t-être faudrait-il chercher une honte tragique qui peut être reliée à une dimension mythologique, cette dimension du mythe comme le définit Lacan dans “The individual myth of the neurotic” (“Le mythe individuel du névrosé”), understood as something that cannot be transmitted in the definition of truth; since the definition of truth can only lean on itself, that, insofar as the word/speech (la parole) progresses that it constitutes truth.

With a child like Raphael, it seems to me that this is the point at which we can return to the myth. Meaning the moment at which we were able to reweave (retisser) the stories while at the same time leaving them aside, by which I mean forgetting about them: a few letters have fallen, we can retie/reweave/revive (renouer). And thus we can work with the myth, since the myth - unlike the tale - doesn’t require a story. The myth “dresses up” in the myth (le mythe s’habille du récit). But it can live without it. That’s why you can read a fragment of myth and be struck by a tragic feeling (le tragique) in a single sentence. You don’t need to know the whole myth of the Minotaur to be struck by the sense of tragedy when the Minotaur is killed, at the very moment when Ariane is abandoned or at other moments. Which goes to show, as Melman reminds us Le Métier de Zeus how ultimately “these are laws of language” (ce sont des lois de langage). We can dress/cloak (habiller) the myth with various types of stories/storytelling - and that’s precisely what the Greeks did and why the tradition of myths could be saved by the Christians.

This, then is the proposition: to conceive this shame, this form of shame which isn’t shame, not the shame of post-Freudian neuroses. To also think of this work on myths precisely as a genuine psychoanalytic tool/labor (travail), since it enables us to work beyond the story - under the condition that the child be somewhere inside the story.

JJ TYSZLER : I think we can thank Ilaria. I had offered that we offer both clinical and “doctrinal” stakes - which is exactly what Ilaria has done. It’s not a simple task to also provide you with technical elements.  None of this simply just emerges out of nowhere, as if by miracle! It’s the product of technique: the technicality of transference, of the work of transference. It seemed crucial to me that you understand this question in subjects of exile. I wanted you to hear how incarnated this is, for you to grasp the kind of encounter it constitutes.

So Ilaria made the effort of giving you elements of this technicality. We were worried about this Russian family seeking asylum. We thought it was unlikely that their application be accepted. And it took quite some time, perhaps a year or a year and a half, I don’t remember exactly. But the French authorities finally recognised the situation and first accepted the father, then the maternal grandmother for this child.

We should ask why the child refused to hear, to accept the French state’s approval. Because when the asylum application is accepted, it is under the condition that the family never return to Russia. Memory - do you see the issue now with memory? This means that at the very moment when the child finds out that the request has been accepted, he knows he will have to mourn his whole Russian imaginary, all his little Russian friends.

We deal with clinical cases where we need to measure how much the natural shelter provided by paternal function is no longer guaranteed. This doesn’t mean it has been repressed, that it is perversely denied, that it is foreclosed. W need to find a word. I sued the word “shelterless” (sans abri) because the fathers are dead, have been tortured, humiliated, forgotten. We can be guided by Lacan and his work on “the Names of the father”.

The child finds his location (localisation) in the link/relationship between the object fo fantasy and poetry. That will absolutely do as a shelter. It is they who courageously come forth/progress.

Participant : Hello. I would like to ask a question about the myth. You say that in a myth, there’s no need to know the story of the Minotaur, the rest of the story. Can we not say that the myth associates itself to the surging a letter from the unconscious, meaning something - since there is no story, no meaning. The Minotaur is there; we don’t know the story. There’s no meaning; we’re not trying to find the meaning of something. Thus the story that has no meaning, no beginning and no end. All we have is the Minotaur. So I would say, isn’t it just a formation of the unconscious appearing?

Ilaria PIRONE: Therefore a symbolic status, a symbolic value. Myths are constellations of symbols that you can group together, link together in various ways.

Participant : Isn’t that more the realm of the letter (le domaine de la lettre)?

Ilaria PIRONE : Perhaps. That’s Dr Tyszler’s theory, indeed - the “literality” (litéralité) of myths: myths retold to the letter (les mythes redits à la lettre).

JJ TYSZLER: Briefly… Perhaps we should turn to Levi-Strauss and return a bit on the structuralist question. Without fully engaging with Levi-Strauss, it seems to me that we can refer back to the issue of “mythemes” - meaning to the possibility of reducing the story to a unit, to elements we can use, recompose in different ways. There are elementary structures. With the tale, you can’t do that. You can’t understand Perrault’s Little Thumb if you don’t know the whole story. There isn’t a single moment in the story that can suffice in and of itself; not a moment that you can extract and simply use as is. That’s the difference, to my mind. Tales require a beginning, a development and an end  -the famous Aristotelian structure. But myths can uncloak themselves of all that; or cloak themselves with all that. But if you want to be a purist, Ulysses isn’t even a myth.

Pierre-Yves GAUDARD: Just a quick remark about myths which might clarify the difference between a myth and a story. In Les Mythologiques, Claude Levi-Strauss really insists on the fact that the myth is not constituted by a version of the myth but by all its versions. And thus we could say that all the stories are constitutive of the myth, and that these stories can change. Ultimately, then, what is characteristic of the myth is that it affords us a way of thinking the unthinkable.

Jean-Jacques TYSZLER: There. that’s the Real. What’s funny is that this very question was posed to me during a recent trip to Brazil. I was telling my Brazilian colleagues about the Mythos workshop. Like many French colleagues, they work on fables, tales and legends. So they asked me about the difference between those and the myth. I assured them there indeed was a difference. But instead of an explanation, I told them I would return to Paris and ask the children themselves about it. And children - young children - indeed told me about these differences. This means that 6, 7 or 8 year-old are capable of saying that there’s a point of truth in a myth. They say: “A myth may not be exact but it’s true” - which, in their mind, has nothing to do with a tale. The two are very distinct for them.

So in a way, you need to get used to the way that young children differentiate between imaginary narratives, and what ultimately relates to the unconscious and the literal structures that acts as truth (qui font vérité).

It’s incredible that we, and children forget about this as we/they grow up/old. I don’t know why that is. But for children, it’s so very clear. I have collected their answers over the years, and if I were to publish something about it some day, I would simply write the children’s answers. And that’s what seemed the most amazing to me, perhaps because we, ourselves, labor at differentiating between the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real - as Lacan warns us about this difficulty. When Lacan says you can’t get anywhere by using the Real as your starting point; it doesn’t interest you. As soon as we say there’s a pitfall/trap (une embûche), a difficulty, a punch in the face, everyone shuts up. It doesn’t interest anyone. What is interesting is for the Imaginary to continue. And we experience this everyday.

Ilaria PIRONE : Perhaps I could make another point, because a lot of people use this question of the myth in their analytic practice. It’s very difficult. But that’s exactly the point: I think that what is slightly different in this read is that we don’t focus on the weight of identity. At no moment can Ulysses’s Odyssey serve as a point of identification for these children who experience odysseys. Those children who live actual odysseys never, ever identify with Ulysses rather than Telemachus. So therefore, what is at stake in our work isn’t the point of weaving (le point de tissage) but the point of knotting (le point de nouage). Technically speaking, that point deserves to be underlined.

Participant: Good evening, and thank you for this talk. I want to ask a question about this “shelterless” children, about these children who don’t have the Paternal metaphor as a shelter. For them, can we say that the structure is pending/ on hold (en attente)?  Because there, you were talking about a child who was taking a slightly psychotic turn. Clearly, he isn’t actually psychotic, but when we talk about a child unsheltered by the paternal function, I’m not sure if my question is very clear… I wonder if there isn’t some kind of pause/hold/wait (une attente), something that is suspended as such ?

Ilaria PIRONE: Indeed, the metaphor of suspension is the one that best describes them. These are suspended children, children in waiting (enfants en attente). About this child - and this is why I chose to narrate this specific encounter - because we deprive them of the story of infantile sexuality and therefore, if we deprive them of that story, quid of structure? Meaning, what’s their place within fantasy? Thus we should indeed return to this question: what place do they occupy? Precisely in order to enable them to no longer be, to not be suspended/in waiting, to take a position. Structure is a destiny (la structure est un destin). We are wondering about this child: “But perhaps for this child, after the fact, that might be an answer…” That might be a very contemporary answer. There was no question of psychosis for him. rather, that of the father struck by a tragic shame and therefore, by another form of forclusion - meaning not the forclusion of the Name of the Father but another form of silence - perhaps more than forclusion.

Jean-Jacque TYSZLER: What is fascinating, and which goes in the direction of your question and of what Ilaria is trying to narrate - meaning this particular clinique, is that we aren’t quite there yet entirely because it would oblige us to almost revisit the whole spectrum of clinical categories. Meaning neurosis, psychosis and perversion - fine, but ultimately, quid? With these children, since a lot of threads are indeed suspended/in waiting (en attente), we follow/we thread (on file au bord) along the edge of something, and we take another route. Taken thread by thread, we think these are psychotic traits, but not at all! And what is fantastic, what is deeply heuristic to my mind, is that it’s a work in progress. We can’t yet name elements of general doctrine but it’s clear that the same classical categories you use are truly, up to a certain point, put to the test.

For a long time I’ve thought that it’s necessary to distinguish several forms of  forclusion of the Name of the Father. We must talk of forclusionS, plural - not just one. It’s high time we established the logical forms of forclusions. Not just the classical ones named a long time ago by Lacan in his now famous seminary Les Psychoses. Curiously, these children present clinical tableaux which we could imagine to be psychotic. They indeed have stereotypical elements, like a rambling/unstitched discourse (un discours décousu). So we wait, and we see that over the course of our work, thread by thread, very few ever become psychotic. In the past 4 or 5 years with these children of exile (les enfants de l’exil), we’ve hardly ever encountered an autistic or psychotic child. Barely a single one. Nor have we had severely traumatised children. So what’s going on? You see, that’s exactly what so interesting from the heuristic point of view of clinical categories, from the point of view of the use we make of the Names of the Father, and from the point of view of the plural use of forclusionS, which we really ought to establish, despite how difficult it may be.