Trompe-la-mort

Abstract

BackgroundUncertainty is consubstantial with psychoanalytic practice, which is based on an openness to the unknown. The fundamental rule institutes the experience on which the treatment is based, and is, at the same time, the most appropriate methodological answer to the logics of infantile sexuality and the motor of its subjective appropriation. ObjectivesTo this fertile uncertainty, the author opposes an uncertainty based on vital dependancy that, on account of passionate bonding, tends to freeze the analytic process and threatens to destroy the cure. Therefore, it is a question of problematizing the regime of uncertainty proper to limit-experiences. This experience of “death struggle against death” is engaged when an apparently hopeless hold is exerted on a human being and dispossesses him/her “of an impersonal right to life” (N. Zaltzman, 1998). What resources does psychoanalytic practice have in such a context? MethodThe author draws on both his clinical practice as a psychoanalyst and his work as a supervisor of teams confronted with situations of extreme precarity. Anthropological and artistic fields are also called upon to explore the logic of the limit-experience. The author examines the concept of the anarchist drive theorized by Nathalie Zaltzman: he proposes a critical re-examination while underlining its great value on the clinical level. In the wake of this questioning, the author questions psychoanalysis with regard to the environmental crisis, conceived of a limit-experience to come. ResultsWhat resources does psychoanalysis possess in its struggles with limit-experiences? Clinical work in the anarchist regime secures the constitution of a singular resistance in the heart of the death zones. Its vocation is to psychically arm subjects with a capacity to enjoy existence in spite of everything, without sinking into psychosis, apathy, or alienation. Marked by a limit-experience (the Covid-19 crisis, for example), a psychoanalysis worked-through by the anarchist drive can, in return, undertake the work of re-examining of its foundations and of displacing its founding paradigms. ConclusionThis text questions the clinical and theoretical paradigm shifts required by a specific regime of uncertainty, that of the limit-experience. The clinical questioning is coupled with an anthropological questioning, against the background of the environmental crisis. This text constitutes a first approach and tries to lay down some milestones in the heart of a considerable construction site.