Exile
Our unit is organising its 3rd scientific day
around the theme of exile - specifically on the question of clinical approaches
to exile and asylum seeking, addressed but not limited to
professionals of the MGEN and their colleagues, partners of the CADAS as well
as those who teach in the relevant disciplines.
Our previous focus was
the work of narration among asylum seeking families, the tension between
accuracy and truth as well as the legal and administrative notion of
“credibility”.
Now we’ll turn our
attention to the polemical question of trauma: between the traumas
experienced and the mourning they cause, how do we create a space for the words
of the child and the child’s family to be uttered?
The clinical
recognition of trauma is necessary - yet its contemporary extension into a post-traumatic
syndrome is another story. Could we
offer a view best summarised by the expression
“not entirely traumatic”? How, by which method, through which mediation and
orientation?
Through the
contributions of field professionals, we also wish to address the question of
shared secrecy, particularly in regards to the child.
After a morning of
clinical presentations, we’ll spend the afternoon discussing and debating
issues with our partners from the CADA.
The workload is
sometimes heavy, yes. But our unit is committed and determined to carry this
activity within the usual rules of an institution of “public service” while
also finding support in the “fraternity principle” recently statued upon in the
Constitutional Council of France. The day’s conclusion will be presented by the
representatives of the A.R.S and the MGEN board of directors.
Registrations :
afischer@mgen.fr ; mbarbier@mgen.fr ; jtyszler@mgen.fr
Here’s why:
I read the press
online.
When I saw the
headlines of Libération yesterday (July 6th, 2017), I was so struck that
I had to buy the paper version to insure those words would stay engraved in my
memory. That’s what I’ve been doing for a while now: when newspapers talk about
“it”, asylum, refugees, the displaced…. I feel the need to touch those
words with my hands.
We can no longer
pretend not to see, not to know.
If you want to get to
the northern districts of Paris, you take the metro or drive. But this is no
longer a simple trajectory or daily mechanical routine. Some days, you feel
like you traversing the biblical Limbo, where lost souls are waiting, where
mean and women are begging…. But what’s been new for 2 or 3 years is the
presence of children, children with mothers, babies in makeshift prams… hot days,
cold days - it doesn’t matter. They’re there for hours on end, for days, right
next to their parents. And we pass right by them. That’s our daily trajectory.
A coin? A glance? A
piece of fruit? A pen and a notebook?
We can no longer stick
to our habits. Human beings, rendered bare by life and standing right in front
of us are shaking our habits. These images, juxtaposed to those bombarded to us
by the media, the more tragic images of
war or of crossing oceans, are penetrating our eyes. We cannot get “used to”
them. Taking the metro or stopping at a red light before entering the highway
in the North of Paris is no longer a daily task. It’s a reminder of our duty to
humanity.
Duty.
That’s why
a unit of care like ours cannot limit itself to just seeing, noticing,
watching.
For a political act to
be possible, at least one person has to commence an action. That’s Arendt’s
definition of freedom.
There’s at least one
who begins, and the others will follow. And then, this single action can become
a collective decision, an action of many. The children of exile, of migrations
- they are children. Children deprived of rights, including the right to play
as defined by the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child.
We propose to create a
space where those children can take some time from their extraordinary,
uncommon days to simply be children, and not the “children of migrants”.
A place where they can
settle down for a while and draw or play - in the presence of a therapist, an
educator, a professional trained in her/his capacity to be present, in the
child’s game as Winnicott and others have taught us.
It’s a question of
presence, a presence that allows the child to settle and even, why not, to
exist, to dream, to draw and play, to have an active position in the face of
everything he/she is asked to endure.
Thus, this is a simple place that we imagine, a place that could be
associated to a place for the adults that accompany these children.
Ilaria Pirone
