By Anatole TENARD, Pauline BONNET & Manon FEVRIER
The behavioural act, widespread among youngsters, cannot be shrinked to an ordinary neurological production, even in the case of brain damage. Despite a relative stability of the cognitive disturbances, behavioural disorders’ intensity largely differ and inscribe in an almost infinite number of clinical frames, thus showing the subjective creation they truly are. Acting is often seen as a remedy against psychoaffective collapse, as a locum for the inexistence feelings, and as a way to contain an excitation overflow (the excitation is cast away on a specific body area to which gets bounded a self-regulated pleasure). In the lineage of self-preservation, acting would embody a double goal : ensure that the « actor » (here, the one acting) really exists, and finding a proof of this existence in others, subtly binding the entanglements of auto-erotism and object-relation. As such, acting is a mean to picture bits of its author, to keep in touch with the outside, while remaining an ersatz of relief.
In most situations, the message delivered by the behavioural act is an affective one. If one follows the models of hysteria, one can see that what becomes discharged in the body via the hysterical conversion is usually affect. In the exact same way, acting allows the subject to withdraw itself from an unbearable feeling, or at the very least from an overwhelmingly intense excitation, thus unable to be expressed by conventional psychic means. Reciprocally, in a « communicating vessels » perspective, restraining or containing the behavioural act may let loose more authentic affective movements. Behind the violence incarnated by the acting of a teenager or a demented patient, one can be tempted to forget the despair of such acting, and how it could actually simply be a clumsy attempt to retreive some kind of lost serenity. In that case, acting can be addressed as a manic defense, a struggle against depression or melancholia.
Is acting a language ?
As we explained, acting has the concrete goal of beeing a locum to an unbearable or inapprehensible affect, but can also represent the translator of a specific form of language. Roussillon defends that idea. He thinks that body and acting must not only be considered based on what is released through them but as bearers of pre-narrative messages, a language, and then a possible opening to the symbolization of the subjective experience. What comes out as a raw discharge then delivers the significant complexity dwelling deep inside. The act, as described by Rousillon, is a language modulated by the degree of psychic disorganization of the « actor » and will testify of a more or less archaic content, thus more or less readable: the language of the body and of the acting contains several aspects, some formless, others highly elaborated.
How can the institution contain and address the behavioural act ?
One thing is undoubted : when a patient’s disorganization manifests through acting, an intense disruption happens and impacts the staff (and the whole institution). How can we explain this kind of mirror effect ?
First of all, the behavioural act summons institutional answers usually more « rushed » than elaborated. Reasoning and attempts to elucidate are not always possible, mainly when we know how acting challenges the staff and mobilizes an outstretched field of counter-attitudes. This specifically happens when staff members get caught in the need to « handle » the hic & nunc, forgetting what the act truly means, what it tells of the patient and of his personal story. The act, like a tyrannical child, establishes an emergency climate and the urge to bring an immediate answer, which then removes the chance to take some distance from the conflict and to give it an elaborated sense. In front of the compelling requirement dropped by the crisis, the staff’s answer can dress in various shapes : an educative hardening (Talion’s-law-like reprisals), a dinsinvestment (not worrying about the behaviour anymore), or a frame collapse (erasure of the professionnal gap). All these counter-attitudes take the step over the desire to understand the subject, however, beeing understood is their primary need. They need to find someone able to resist acting’s destructiveness. In the end, the patients repeat with the staff what is usually an ancient repetitive chain, one can only hope to provide them with the therapeutical experience of another answer.
Words I have learned :
– Shrinked : Réduit
– Lineage : Héritage / Lignée
– Vessel : Contenant / Vase
– Reprisals : Représailles
– Erasure : Effacement