Is passion, a concept difficult to define, disturbing affect by its double emotional and representative dimension, “a normal pathological state”? It concerns any relation to an “object” that wants to occupy a considerable place in existence. Can a therapist be passionate or be crossed by passion? Whether it is cultural, artistic, sporting, passion can provoke, we know it well, a passionate outburst. How can one accept its necessity while being wary of its destructive side (mystical passion, delusional passion) where the subject ends up getting lost? Etymology may provide a partial response to the polysemy of the word that has created confusion. Passion comes from the Latin “passio” which refers to the fact of suffering, experiencing. The Greek root “pathos” gave pathology whose original meaning is the study of passions and then that of diseases, and also non-medical terms (pathetic…). The semantic confusion has been based on this for centuries. Passion remains difficult to pin down. What maintains my desire, my passion in this solitary work? I need to remain in the unceasing research, in the questioning. Here are the basics inscribed in me: reading, working meetings that bring pleasure to think while maintaining openness to the unconscious by better grasping the counter-transference, belonging to a society to share the same passion of human knowledge and the same desire to heal. Passions remain pervasive and some take up more space than the object of passion. This is one of the many paradoxes. An other: the passion, this “dark complacency to vertigo” (Paul Ricoeur), allows to alienate oneself in the bond to better find oneself, to recreate oneself. We cannot, escape knowledge about ourselves. Beyond its excess, constitutes a real psychic work of elaboration and symbolization. Let us keep alive this passion for psychic care and work. To do this, let us remain confident in our theoretic-clinical commitments as well as in the changes we deem necessary to help those who come to tell us about their suffering. Who are they? Interest in their own mental health is initially acquired for neurotic patients; it is legitimate and useful. With patients working on a psychotic register, this is not the case and we are faced with an obstacle cited by Marcel Sassolas, which is “the distrust developed by these people towards their own psychic activity”. The only real objective of psychiatric care remains the safeguarding and restoration of their psychic activity, knowing full well that being present is a source of danger. What maintains our desire for care and psychic work with the attention we pay to it? The way we work with the richness of the commitments it unders understands – psychoanalysis for me – allows us to understand the human in an exceptional and exciting way. Here are two of my tools. First empathy. It is a dialectic between understanding and feeling that manifests, occurs, in an unseeded manner at the level of the preconscious of one (therapist) or the other (patient). My other tool is this therapeutic device that is co-work (shared associative movement). Daniel Widlöcher's co-thought… The latter has taken up the Freudian concept of “induction of thought”. This allows him to link empathy, through “the transfer of thought”, to the associative and representational co-thinking of the therapist and the patient. What is this co-work? In psychoanalytic relaxation, for example, we know that a particular word, a phrase, a phoneme can have, for the relaxer, an emotional impact that is inscribed in his thought (reverie) and in his body (sensation). Passion allows creative psychic care by producing from living. It strengthens our need for new projects that boost our motivation and confidence. It maintains our desire to be at the heart of psychic work and that of transmitting that strength. Creativity is not the ability to create a work, it is the ability to creatively live a meaningful life (Winnicott). It is vitality in the service of self-building. Stay alive and passionate, even late in practice, not because of knowledge, experience, but because of the uninterrupted work in self-discovery. To conclude? I consider that a living therapeutic process, that is, subjective appropriation, implies a passionate character in the therapist who offers a place for what is to be deposited there. We are often in paradoxical situations. To better understand its scope, I rely on the Oxford Dictionary's definition: a paradox is an assertion that seems absurd, though maybe truly well-founded. It's all in the maybe. Isn’t the psyche that heals the psyche the passion of dialogue with our unconscious?
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Jul 1, 2021
Bruce B Smith + 1
Open Access