Hello André. Thank you very much for answering my questions. To begin, I would like to ask you about your training course.
I am initially an academic. I have a training in philosophy. I did a law degree, a philosophy degree, and I did a part of the license of psychology for personal interest. I continued in philosophy and I did a DEA (master) in philosophy of law with Luc Ferry and another of phenomenology with Alain Badiou. Then I did a doctoral thesis at Paris I on J.P. Sartre, on his philosophy of history. Otherwise, I am an aggregator of philosophy and a graduate of the international college of philosophy. I have written 22 books, some of which are for the general public (at Bayard) and other more technical phenomenology. I have also been published in journals of phenomenological psychiatry turned towards psychology, and in particular towards what we called the “dasein analysis”.
What motivated you to work with the world of psychology?
So it was at random from a meeting during a radio broadcast with the Dr Bocher who runs a service of psychiatry at the St-Jacques hospital in Nantes. She had offered me to create a working group of philosophy for patients. So for several years, I led a philosophy working group for psychotic patients. Then another for patients who were more “slightly” sick, or in any case who did not suffer from serious psychoses but who were in short stays, often for depressive episodes or addictive behaviors. At the same time, I did philosophical conferences where, precisely, some psychiatrists were interested in phenomenology as a school that was particularly enlightening from their point of view, compared to their psychiatric practice. And over the years, I’ve been invited as a speaker at the Nantes hospital and then three times at the French congress of psychiatry where I propose a philosophical and complementary approach of the problems usually managed by psychiatrists, concerning pathologies. For example, they are very interested in the issue of standards, how Foucault defines madness as relating to power relations and also defines the practice of psychiatry as the establishment of norms (norms of analysis for example). He also had a deeper questioning about the meaning of the diseases. According to him, it was not about to categorize the patients on the basis of the diseases but to consider that after all, even the disorder itself was a way of projecting oneself into existence, and of giving it a meaning. So, it was a slightly diverted way to do a criticism, in particular, for example, of the famous DSM.
We were particularly interested in your intervention on the inclusive school which took place in last November at Pouliguen. How do you explain this interest by the psychology of development for your work and for a philosophical approach in general ?
So it started again by chance since it was within the framework of the French congress of psychiatry, during a meeting with psychologists who were part of departemental structures concerning the inclusion of sick children in school. They asked me to intervene in their annual congress at Pouliguen. It is within this framework that I proposed an intervention that focused on the challenges and limits of inclusion. For example, through the next question : Respect a person outside the established standards, does that consider him as being at any price be included in a system? (but in this case you have to be sure that the system is legitimate) or is it to consider him as such from his own need and his own speech? As Michel Foucault said, “the story of madness is a long silence ”. Indeed, the people we seek to include with all the goodwill in the world, we actually require them to be included in a pre-established system, under the guise of goodwill and good practices. During this congress, we met an Italian psychiatrist who explained that from of antipsychiatry, the approach to inclusion was completely different. Whereas in France, we are between two extremes: on the one hand, denying the difference in favor of inclusion at any cost, and in this case, it is a power relationship that is established and of which we must be certain that it is legitimate. Or on an other hand, we consider that we should not include but in this case we are in a form of indifference, and that is the issue.
If I return the question, what does it bring to you to do this kind of intervention? What do you remember of that ?
It’s huge because for a very long time I have written on Foucault, Sartre, Ricoeur, Levinas, Deleuze, Dagonier or Devereux for example, but it was a “bookish”, a theoretical approach. It’s exactly something other than confronting himself what Sartre calls the “human reality” of suffering, and see that patients, for example, theorize more than you would think. They have a step back on their own disease. We tend to ignore it completely, to think that they are characters in the books, and there they are no longer characters. They are people.
Do you have an anecdote to tell us about these experiences?
Ah yes, there are many. I remember a patient who said that every once in a while was not « spinning well » in his head. He was quite funny, touching, and at times he took himself for a Saint character. He « blessed » the caregivers. But what amazed me was that he had an astonishing knowledge of the translations of St Augustin and of the latin texts of Spinoza. In short, things that come under a preparation for aggregation, and he had specific technical knowledge ! The problem is that he knew tons of things in a lot of areas, but it didn’t necessarily help him get better, because he didn’t know how to use those tools to make sense of what he saw. There was another too, treated for acute paranoia. You had to especially pay attention to certain things and it happened, during a working group, not to give him the speak first. That’s why he stood up very aggressively, slamming the door.
Regarding the caregivers themselves, I was surprised by their concern, I mean… their solicitude. They have one daily practical knowledge of how each individual has to be treated. It means that it’s not just a pathology with medicines. Everyone has their own story. This is why the therapies which consist in considering that we have to treat the disorder independently of the story forget something important which is simply the subject. It is necessary to rehabilitate the subject’s story so that the subject himself gives a meaning to his suffering, so that he as far as possible, have a project of reintegration into society.
Words / Expressions I have learned :
Training course : parcours de formation
To run : diriger
Standards : les normes
A slightly diverted way to : une façon détournée de
Within the framework of : dans le cadre de
To seek : s’efforcer
Under the guise of : sous couvert de
At any cost : à tout prix
To have a step back : avoir du recul
An astonishing knowledge : une connaissance étonnante
Pinçonnet Louis