“I take pleasure in touching these foreign stories and those of an unbaptised people, so that the virtue of these coarse souls may lend greater lustre to ours who, seeing them so accomplished, wise, prudent and attentive in the pursuit of their affairs, shall strive not to imitate them—imitation being worth little—but to surpass them, just as our religion surpasses their superstition and our age is more refined, subtle and lively than the season that governed them.”
Amleth, Tragic History, p. 545
It was enough to turn one’s eyes away, ever so slightly, not to see…
Notes and sketch by Lucian after the session
(Notebook no. 7, nocturnal pages)
What happened today far exceeded anything I could have predicted, even taking into account Igniatius’s tendency to divert, reverse, and invert the trajectories of words, sending them back to a source he does not yet know, but whose inner burn he unmistakably feels.
He rose up against my notes—but with a violence that was not hostile. It was the violence of unveiling, the kind one feels when someone touches, without fully intending to, a wound one believed healed, or perhaps a wound one did not even know one carried.
His anger was a wounded anger, but the wound itself bore something profoundly adult, almost protective: as if, in defending the child he once was, Igniatius were also defending a part of himself that has never been invested by anyone.
This absence—the absence of the parents he never knew—became today a resonant void around which everything began to turn.
Listening to him, I realised that my hypotheses, cautious as they were, had reached a point where his memory no longer knew what belonged to reality and what belonged to necessity. He nearly shouted that he had never had father nor mother, that the cries, quarrels, and moans I had imagined had no biographical foundation; and yet, at the very moment he rejected them, he embodied them with such a true, vibrating pain that I felt—physically—the reality of a lack that precedes all reality.
For this lack, in him, is primary.
It is anterior to scenes, anterior to words.
There is no “before” for him: only an inaugural void, a gaping space in which the world had to assemble itself in urgency. What I had interpreted as an imaginary translation of a parental dispute was perhaps, more precisely, the very mechanism through which an origin without figures structures itself.
The child who has no parents is not exempt from primal scenes. On the contrary: lacking any real support, he invents them—or rather, they impose themselves upon him through the noise of the world. He cannot attribute them to anyone, so he must hear them in the wind, in the thunder, in the circus tents shaken by storms.
Thus absence becomes presence—but a displaced, refracted presence, dissolved into nature. What the child sees, hears, breathes is the world’s desperate attempt to constitute for him the father and mother he never had.
And here the donkey appears.
The donkey became, in this psychic operation, the absolute third: neither father nor mother, but a stable, warm, breathing presence in which the world could lodge itself without crushing him. While the storm let loose voices the child could not attach to any human origin, the animal was the place where fear did not disappear but was converted into warmth.
But what unsettles me—and this unrest is of the kind I do not yet dare to name—is the way Igniatius looked at me when he said:
“And you, Lucian? Who were you really thinking of when you wrote these lines?”
His question had an almost unbearable accuracy.
As if he had sensed, before I did, that my notes are never entirely objective, that they always contain a grain of subjectivity, of implication, of intimate resonance whose origin I do not yet grasp.
For a second, I felt observed—not as a therapist questioned by his patient, but as a man caught occupying the inner space of his patient. I had long kept that sensation at a distance, but today it imposed itself with a disarming clarity.
As if part of me, without willing it, were searching for something in Igniatius’s story—something that still escapes me but echoes my own relationship to the noise of the world.
When he asked me whether it was myself I was analysing when I spoke of him, I felt a jolt—slight, but decisive. Not the jolt of disclosure, but that of troubled recognition: in certain parts of his story—the storm, the receding light, the warmth of a silent refuge—there are fragments of a scene that I too have known, but never articulated, perhaps because it was transmitted only through silences, absences, gestures that never found their words.
I cannot yet clarify this link, and it would be dangerous to do so prematurely. But I note here, with necessary honesty: something in me responds to Igniatius.
And if I do not recognise this resonance, it may distort our relationship.
I am not afraid of it—not entirely, at least—because that involvement could become a compass, if I keep it at the right distance.
But I must remain vigilant.
Igniatius was right: we have both heard a noise above a bed that was too large.
And perhaps it is this similarity that makes the analysis possible.
(Notebook no. 7, nocturnal pages)
What happened today far exceeded anything I could have predicted, even taking into account Igniatius’s tendency to divert, reverse, and invert the trajectories of words, sending them back to a source he does not yet know, but whose inner burn he unmistakably feels.
He rose up against my notes—but with a violence that was not hostile. It was the violence of unveiling, the kind one feels when someone touches, without fully intending to, a wound one believed healed, or perhaps a wound one did not even know one carried.
His anger was a wounded anger, but the wound itself bore something profoundly adult, almost protective: as if, in defending the child he once was, Igniatius were also defending a part of himself that has never been invested by anyone.
This absence—the absence of the parents he never knew—became today a resonant void around which everything began to turn.
Listening to him, I realised that my hypotheses, cautious as they were, had reached a point where his memory no longer knew what belonged to reality and what belonged to necessity. He nearly shouted that he had never had father nor mother, that the cries, quarrels, and moans I had imagined had no biographical foundation; and yet, at the very moment he rejected them, he embodied them with such a true, vibrating pain that I felt—physically—the reality of a lack that precedes all reality.
For this lack, in him, is primary.
It is anterior to scenes, anterior to words.
There is no “before” for him: only an inaugural void, a gaping space in which the world had to assemble itself in urgency. What I had interpreted as an imaginary translation of a parental dispute was perhaps, more precisely, the very mechanism through which an origin without figures structures itself.
The child who has no parents is not exempt from primal scenes. On the contrary: lacking any real support, he invents them—or rather, they impose themselves upon him through the noise of the world. He cannot attribute them to anyone, so he must hear them in the wind, in the thunder, in the circus tents shaken by storms.
Thus absence becomes presence—but a displaced, refracted presence, dissolved into nature. What the child sees, hears, breathes is the world’s desperate attempt to constitute for him the father and mother he never had.
And here the donkey appears.
The donkey became, in this psychic operation, the absolute third: neither father nor mother, but a stable, warm, breathing presence in which the world could lodge itself without crushing him. While the storm let loose voices the child could not attach to any human origin, the animal was the place where fear did not disappear but was converted into warmth.
But what unsettles me—and this unrest is of the kind I do not yet dare to name—is the way Igniatius looked at me when he said:
“And you, Lucian? Who were you really thinking of when you wrote these lines?”
His question had an almost unbearable accuracy.
As if he had sensed, before I did, that my notes are never entirely objective, that they always contain a grain of subjectivity, of implication, of intimate resonance whose origin I do not yet grasp.
For a second, I felt observed—not as a therapist questioned by his patient, but as a man caught occupying the inner space of his patient. I had long kept that sensation at a distance, but today it imposed itself with a disarming clarity.
As if part of me, without willing it, were searching for something in Igniatius’s story—something that still escapes me but echoes my own relationship to the noise of the world.
When he asked me whether it was myself I was analysing when I spoke of him, I felt a jolt—slight, but decisive. Not the jolt of disclosure, but that of troubled recognition: in certain parts of his story—the storm, the receding light, the warmth of a silent refuge—there are fragments of a scene that I too have known, but never articulated, perhaps because it was transmitted only through silences, absences, gestures that never found their words.
I cannot yet clarify this link, and it would be dangerous to do so prematurely. But I note here, with necessary honesty: something in me responds to Igniatius.
And if I do not recognise this resonance, it may distort our relationship.
I am not afraid of it—not entirely, at least—because that involvement could become a compass, if I keep it at the right distance.
But I must remain vigilant.
Igniatius was right: we have both heard a noise above a bed that was too large.
And perhaps it is this similarity that makes the analysis possible.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire
Vos commentaires sont les bienvenus