Incertitudes et crises épistémiques en périnatalité : Bébé Sapiens ou Bébé Demens ?

Abstract

ContextIf scientific growth crises are occurring in all fields of knowledge, the field of perinatal care seems particularly exposed because of the central problem of the transmission of life between generations. The heuristic position of the baby makes it an indicator of the times. Ours is a fruitful period, open to multidisciplinary exchanges; we have an unprecedented capacity for interdisciplinary arguments for understanding the construction of the baby subject. However, there is a risk of an impoverished debate, even the extinction of this diversity, as different factions withdraw into rigid “biologizing” or “educational” positions. GoalsThis complexity requires a transversal meta-epistemological reflection on the different methods and on their implicits: their blind spots, of which we give a few examples. Consider the disruptions related to the recent surge of pseudo-organizations, pseudo-expertise, forged with great financial resources but erasing, in a way, collective progress in improving practices? What about arbitrary divisions of the newborn, which are based neither on the fine physiology of this unique moment for both mother and baby, nor on the group capacity – customary collective scansions – that the socius never fails to provide? How can we measure the presence of deregulated destructiveness in these unregulated proposals, made glaring by the major environmental crisis that we are going through? MethodWithin various scientific fields, the trend is towards an impoverishment of the diversity of approaches that forged the discipline. Observing an irrational sidelining of psychoanalysis in the field of perinatal care, the author hypothesizes a hatred of psychoanalysis: a cyclical – rather than structural – phenomenon oscillating between moments of a “hatred of the meta position” and its obverse, a “fascination with the meta position.” ResultsThe (envious) attack would come from a false perception of psychoanalysis as overbearing, a corpus convinced of its singular, supreme hold on the truth. Will the notion of the narcissism of small differences shed light on the irrationality at work? The author then argues that the “meta-logical level” is nevertheless essential to the survival of each complex thought system. An examination of the excessively rapid evolution of attempts by physical science to model our representation of mental life, from thermodynamics, cybernetics, and (more recently) quantum physics, is offered as a “panorama” from which we can observe recent qualitative leaps of unprecedented scale. FindingsThe challenge of a societal metabolization of these fractures is significant; and the efforts of the philosophy of science in search of paradigms for an interdisciplinary dialogue is commendable. It is urgent to renew our points of view and to allow for conceptual changes. The author suggests turning to comparative anthropology as a way to provoke this ontological change.