Letter to My Brothers Said to Be “Under Influence”

Letter to my brothers who are said to be “under influence”

By Guy Delaunay, President of L’AREFPPI

See also his video testimony

“A normal subject is essentially someone who puts himself in the position of not taking seriously the greater part of his inner discourse.” – Jacques Lacan (Seminar Book III – The Psychoses)

“One must never be of one’s time: one remains stuck there”[1].

Since January 2007 and the imprisonment of Claude David, events have moved fast. Our small community, at once spiritual and therapeutic, which finds its footing in two associations — the Gens de Bernard on the one hand and the AREFPPI[2] on the other — has been confronted with three phenomena that interpenetrate and feed one another:

• a cult rumor, orchestrated by so-called “anti-cult” associations,

• the action of the media, which propagate these rumors without any verification or investigation. Any “victim” who complains is necessarily right, and what they say is not subjected to examination,

• the present workings of the Justice system, which too often feeds on the first two. See, as an example, a judgment handed down by a civil court of first instance which relies, in its conclusions in a civil case, on newspaper articles about a criminal case!!

1 – Why a cult?

First, etymology: secte comes from the Latin secare: to cut. According to the Littré it is “the whole body of persons who profess one same doctrine.” In its most generic sense it therefore concerns every group or religion, without that idea of danger which, in our era, has been fastened onto it.

So we are in a “cult”, and like all those who, one day or another, have the surprise of seeing their existence overturned, we no longer have a voice — or, more exactly, our word no longer has any value. But why?

Why, on this 17th of January, our apartments stormed at 7 in the morning by 40 gendarmes (armed, helmeted, booted, carrying submachine guns…), did we suddenly wake up inside a cult?

From the moment rumor says that we belong to a community saddled with this stigmatizing label, we are suspects. If you assert that you chose this way of life in complete freedom, in full knowledge of the facts… you are told in reply that you are not credible, that you are influenced. Either you acknowledge belonging to a cult and you are a “victim”, to be pitied and helped, or you deny that your belonging to the community is of a cult nature, and you are influenced, indeed an “accomplice”. There is no third way. The demonstration allows no appeal.

In both cases, what you believe is denied, what built you is taken from you, and you are dispossessed of your history, of your choices. Either you accept it, taking the censorship and the manipulation upon yourself, and you are entitled to respect because you are a “victim”; or you resist, and you must expect suspicion because you are an “accomplice.”

There has been no report, whether in the press or on television, based on a serious investigation — thereby repeating the method of blacklisting used against all minorities. It is much easier to point the finger at us. There is less risk. And one realizes that the gendarmerie investigation and the interrogations are not aimed at bringing out the truth but at demonstrating the premises already adopted: first there is a cult, therefore a danger, and logically “victims”; if those taken in for questioning refuse this category, they may find themselves saddled with the label of “accomplices.”

In this regard, Elizabeth Roudinesco recalled in a recent programme on France Culture that it is very delicate, very serious, to legislate on the basis of “victims” as the public authorities are currently doing.[3]

Why has this fear of cults been kept up for some thirty years in France? One may even speak of a psychosis, amply relayed by the media.

The public authorities, who were the initiators of this psychosis, have put in place an arsenal for fighting cults that is unique among democratic countries. And this legal arsenal is justified by the assertion that cults, that dérives sectaires, supposedly constitute a social scourge. Where is the evidence of such a scourge? Scientists — jurists as much as ethnologists, sociologists or other researchers — are never called upon by the public authorities to carry out a serious inquiry into this alleged scourge; they are artfully kept out of the debate, which is already surprising; worse, when they dare to work on this subject, they risk blacklisting.[4]

Let us set this “French exception” beside a study carried out by Jean-Claude Guillebaud in his latest essay[5], “Comment je suis redevenu chrétien” — which will help us understand what is at stake. He writes: “Outside France, people accept the idea of a more or less unbroken continuum which, starting from the biblical, leads step by step to democratic modernity. Nietzsche himself says nothing else when he defines democracy — which he execrates — as ‘a Christianity become nature’.” On the preceding page, he quotes Marc Bloch, who speaks of a double filiation which we French have difficulty admitting, and which “in reality makes France as much the eldest daughter of the Church as the heir of the Revolution”. He adds that “we ought to be sensitive to the memory of the coronation at Reims and to that of the Fête de la Fédération. Yet we retain only the second inheritance. Wrongly.”

Why have we become so unlettered, we people of the West and above all of France, as to forget that the principles at the heart of the various Declarations of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were forged in the crucible of the values of Judeo-Christianity? René Girard writes: “Humanism and humanitarianism develop first on Christian soil.”[6] The current consensus aims to purge this idea — attributed exclusively to the Enlightenment — of its Judeo-Christian origin, and to make it an achievement of laïcité, the new French religion.[7]

The idea of the person, of the person’s autonomy — this notion of the subject that we proclaim loud and strong — is totally foreign to Buddhist philosophies, to the faith of Islam, as well as to the various wisdoms of the peoples of Africa. It is an “invention” of Greek philosophy, taken up and developed by Judeo-Christian thought.

The idea of equality, which we have inscribed on the pediments of our town halls — by whom was it imposed, in what texts or other gospels is it defined? How did it impose itself, with difficulty, despite the opposition even — at certain moments — of the ecclesial institution? Let us remember, for example, the famous Valladolid Controversy of 1550, where the question was posed whether the Indians of America had a soul — hence whether they were our equals.

Let us mention further the universality according to which there exist values that are identical for all men on earth; and finally hope, which makes it possible to escape the circular and repetitive time of the Greeks, and on which our notion of progress would feed. Jean-Claude Guillebaud adds: “Jewish messianism, Christian hope, the progress of the Enlightenment: I cannot help seeing there a filiation that defines the whole of Western history.” [8]

By what sleight of hand have we wanted to believe, for more than two hundred years, that all these ideas of progress were wrested by force from the obscurantism of the Church and the Ancien Régime? It is true that the Church — as an institution — has often forgotten that it was the custodian of these values which surpass it, and has confined itself to a timid defence of its temporal gains.

Note the difference in attitude between the way we conceive our relation to Islam and our relation to our own Judeo-Christian culture. After 11 September 2001, the media took great care not to attack Islam as a religion, taking issue only with a certain reading of it. Very well — but why do we not show the same consideration for our own religion? Why this contempt for our own texts?

The risk remains high, as we currently perceive, that these values we have just mentioned — the person, equality, universality, hope… — will disintegrate, since their genesis is masked, if not refused. What inheritance can be built on a refusal of the origin?

Why insist on all these points?

Recently a head of state opposed any mention, in the Constitution of Europe, of the Judeo-Christian roots of its history. Let us therefore hypothesize that this repression of our national history returns in the real, precisely through these laws of exception that concern spiritual or therapeutic minorities — for, as Jacques Lacan writes, “what is foreclosed from the symbolic returns in the real.” And that holds for an individual as for a nation.

Let us return to the history of our small community.

In January 2007, the media wrote or insinuated: the inhabitants of the community are under influence. The programme “7 à 8” on TF1 at the end of January 2007 was, in this regard, unambiguous — did not the gendarmerie captain in charge of the investigation declare: “At the château (as the residence where the members of the community live is called), they still haven’t understood; they are going to have to get on with it”; and the journalist concluded, over a long tracking shot of the walls of the remand prison where Claude David was incarcerated: “even at a distance, they are still under influence”![9] La Dépêche du Midi went further in an article of 24 January, under the catchy front-page headline: “At the château, without the chief, they are destabilized”, and in the body of the article: ”… the people of the community are lost, as if annihilated. They no longer have any repères [reference points]”!

Are they not, without meaning to, making a serious confusion between influence and reference point? For, despite all these pressures and this noxious context, a first victory has been won. Ten months later, in November, the people who make up this community — pardon, this “cult” — against all predictions, are continuing their work and their common life.

They are under influence: let us take up this first argument, thrown in our face like an opprobrium, without forgetting that it hides an implication never clearly stated: they are not free!

2 – What does it mean to be under influence?

The dictionaries give this word a simple definition: “Influence is the action that one thing exerts on another.” Formerly: “A sort of material outflow which the old physics supposed to come from the sky and the stars and to act on men and things.”

As for the synonyms supplied by the encyclopedias or “the web”, we are spoiled for choice: leadership, charisma, conversion, credit, persuasion, ascendancy, authority, domination, impact, inspiration, power, prestige…

Every field of human activity is concerned: politics, religion, science, psychology, literature, the economy, fashion, but also the family, the action of NGOs or associations, sporting or media events… and again lobbying, management, even the Internet (people currently speak of “e-influence”…)

Facile amalgams? Or juxtapositions that enlighten us about the current confusion?

Let us illustrate this with a few quotations or witticisms:

“The paradox of the human condition is that one can only become oneself under the influence of others.” Boris Cyrulnik (Les nourritures affectives)

“Writers who have influence are only men who express perfectly what others think, and who awaken in people’s minds ideas or feelings that were tending to blossom.” Joseph Joubert (Pensées)

“In literature there is only one absolutely foolish sentiment: the fear of being influenced.” Jean Paulhan

“Economists possess, as a general rule, only the sketchiest historical culture, and are driven by unbelievable prejudices, yet wield enormous influence with the ‘decision-makers’.” Jacques Le Goff (revue le Monde de l’Education – May 2000)

“Influence-peddling is the daily bread of power.” Jacques ATTALI (Verbatim III)

And to finish, by way of a wink…

“Imbecile. Member of a great and powerful tribe, whose influence in human affairs has always been preeminent.” Gustave Le Bon (Les Opinions et les Croyances).

If we accept the light shed by the quotations above, no one escapes this phenomenon; we might even say that without influence we would have no existence. A famous experiment, attributed to Frederick II (Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire), consisted in placing in a room infants who were merely fed and cleaned with as little human contact as possible, in order to study what they might become without the influence of parents or a family. What do you think became of them? They all died.

The institution — whatever it may be: family, school, care centre… — is necessary for constituting oneself, and at the same time relative; we must subvert it in order to build ourselves and assume our existence. This is the path we had to institute with all the young psychotics who came to the care centre, the Fondation PI[10] — founded by Claude David — in reference to Institutional Psychotherapy. The young psychotics arrived stripped of responsibility, dispossessed even of their illness, that is to say of themselves. They arrived brought by their family, by nurses or other social workers, deposited there, often, like a burden to be treated. The carer’s work, already at the first contact, consisted in giving back to the other — however mad, however ill he was — the idea, the feeling, that he too was responsible for his condition, and therefore for his future. Blaming genetics, the parents or society is not enough… It was an ethical position indispensable for “caring”. To maintain that the other, however weak, however diminished he presented himself or was reported to us, could become an actor in his own life again. An ethical position, because we had to uphold it first despite him, for him, sometimes against his family or even against the medical institution. A possible space had to be left open so that this reappropriation, by himself, of his madness might one day arise in his existence — on the express condition of approaching him without a programme made in advance and without a programmed outcome. Inscribing in practice this saying: “a madman, however mad he may be, is never mad enough not to know that he is”!

Once in one’s life one must have heard one of them — treated and condemned by “scientific” psychiatry — confide: “one day, I said to myself that perhaps it was true that I could heal, and that there could be a future…”. I still remember his hesitation and his wonder in pronouncing those last words.

Had he been influenced? Do we leave one influence only to consent to another? For example, that of our parents for that of school, work or friends? Can that stop — should it stop?

How are we to answer these questions?

The word repère [reference point], used by the media against our community, gives us the beginning of an answer.

According to the Littré, it is a “term of arts and crafts. A mark made on different pieces of an assembly in order to fit them together more easily. Likewise one says: point de repère, a point that serves to find one’s way again. A mark on a wall, on a stake, on a piece of ground, etc., which indicates and serves to recover an alignment, a level.”

The synonyms are familiar, unsurprising, but nonetheless evocative: “clue, milestone, mark, point, reference, trace”.

All these words indicate a possibility of guiding oneself, of finding oneself again…. We see that we are in a different relation to what we are questioning — in a passage: a re-père.

3 – A passage…

After that 17th of January, the enforced absence of the founder of our community obliged each of us to deepen the reason for his presence, his choices, his commitment. Were we there solely out of fidelity to a man, for the influence or the charisma he had, or for another reason?

In a recent conversation with the prior of a monastery near Toulouse, I heard him explain that a double encounter presides over the creation of an abbey: an abbot and a rule. A text and a man!

At the origin of our work there is indeed a man, Claude David, who wagers — in that embryo of a family therapeutic workshop which would become the Fondation PI — that the madman is our brother, that madness is inscribed in every man, according to Jacques Lacan’s remarkable formula: “And not only can the being of man not be understood without madness, but it would not be the being of man if it did not carry madness within itself as the limit of its freedom.”

So: a man, but also a text — or rather a corpus of texts — originating in two fundamental but separate approaches: faith and psychoanalysis. The same question runs through both: the question of the Father. On the side of religion, let us name him: God — but the G-d of Sinai, the unpronounceable, the unrepresentable, the absent G-d; and on the side of psychoanalysis: the Name-of-the-Father, the Great Other.[11]

For both, an empty place, “where there are only texts” (after Pierre Legendre). This empty place, the locus of the truth that can only be “half-said”, is the condition for speech and the creation of the subject to come about.

The originality of our work and of our encounter — ours, the Gens de Bernard — is to hold these two references together, though they constantly escape us.

At the beginning of our work, these references were not established as a ready-made body of doctrines; it was the encounter with the madman that brought us onto these paths. If the psychotic suffers “from a collapse of transcendence”, in the very strong words of François Tosquelles (it is not the absence of belief, of content, but the very impossibility of the act of believing — a-belief), he summons us, if we do not wish to shirk, to answer for our conviction: “Who are you, you who speak to me?” Impossible here to take refuge behind a social status or a diploma; and for people of our time, which is what we are — people whose convictions are somewhat shaky — we had to relearn how to believe and how to hold convictions. We could only care — including for the share of madness in ourselves — by advancing along these byways. To care is to meet the other in his suffering, to help him return towards a project of humanity.

What, then, did we have to say, to transmit, to this psychotic who questioned us — and who did so, without knowing it, by his mere presence?

Jean-Claude Guillebaud takes up this term in a recent interview: ”… What is transmitting? I do not like the expression ‘transmitting values’. First because that vocabulary is borrowed from economics, from the thinking of number […] I have reread a large part of a formidable book by Pierre Legendre: ‘L’inestimable objet de la transmission’. What is to be transmitted to our children? Something at once much simpler and much more intimidating than values. It is a matter of transmitting to them a project of humanity. A project — not dogmas, prohibitions, disciplinary recommendations.”

With the psychotics, the mentally ill, it is this path of humanity that we had to rediscover, with difficulty and much time, in order to walk with them. A path of humanity initiated by Claude David in his understanding of the psychotic fact and his deciphering of the texts.

We have all noticed, among the current media inanities, the expression that has become the title of a programme: “C’est mon choix” [It’s my choice]. It seems to start from the idea that the individual, alone, can choose himself and choose his life. We have given credit to the mad idea that every individual is self-constructed and no longer needs an inheritance — that is, no longer needs genealogy or transmission. Here again we can hear a consequence of the repression of our history which, making us forget the origin of the terms, leads us into ever graver confusions.

It is at the precise moment when man believes he is “self-constructing” that he becomes the plaything of influences — of all the influences that will cross his path and in which he will let himself be caught, since no solid reference point, no compass, will come to show him a direction.

So, do those who leave a group or an association in which they invested a great deal think they are freeing themselves from all influence? Are they going to recover a “freedom” that the community had supposedly confiscated from them? To leave, to quit a community in order to build one’s future on other bases, to make other choices — nothing more legitimate. But to accomplish it in refusal is to doom this new foundation to failure; it is to reject the very reference points that ground this departure. How can one build one’s history on resentment, since, on the contrary, all construction presupposes transmission, genealogy?

In the programme already cited, Elizabeth Roudinesco[12] tells us, taking up an expression of Jacques Derrida: “One’s heritage must be chosen, constructed — neither accepting everything nor making a clean sweep… one must be neither faithful nor unfaithful, neither renounce everything nor take it wholesale.” Thereby underlining that this “heritage” precedes us and shapes us in our relation to ourselves, to others and to the world.

But let us go further: this question concerns every man in his relation to his history, to the image each person forms of himself.

A remark by the prior already mentioned had surprised me, when he told us: “The first of the monastic virtues is forgiveness.” I was expecting obedience, or humility. But forgiveness — why? Certainly, in the accomplishment of daily tasks there can always be some failings; but I sensed that the question was much more radical. It arises in relation to God, or to the Great Other, and that relation carries us towards the question of guilt.

If in religion the word guilt refers to sin, in psychoanalysis guilt inclines one to consider oneself responsible for an event or a reprehensible act; for Freud it is even an obstacle to the proper functioning of the cure.

The prior’s remark, in its brevity, seemed to me to surpass these commentaries infinitely. What is in question is acceptance. Forgiveness is not only what one can give, but also what one can accept from the o(O)ther,[13] or from one’s Creator — no longer to be in an absolute, narcissistic image — capable or culpable — in relation to the o(O)ther. To accept being forgiven, to leave that cosy cloak of guilt, amounts to saying that we must admit all our acts: those we are proud of, those we may rightly honour ourselves for, we think — but also those we would like to disown, those that horrify us, because the latter have made us as much as the former. To accept them, to recognize them as ours, in order to leave guilt behind. It also means ceasing to carry the guilt of the other, no longer taking upon oneself the burden of the fault, leaving incest behind — like the child so well described by Freud who takes upon himself the fault, the lack, of his parents by feeling guilty for being beaten. Ceasing to be the imaginary phallus that would fantasmatically fulfil one’s parents, or the Other — which can only engender guilt, since it is impossible to embody it. To stop willing oneself guilty is to accept castration, for nothing and no one ever answers to that original lack.

A pastor defined forgiveness as: “accepting the other’s part and recognizing one’s own”, and with a play on words he added: “le pardon is donner la part” [forgiveness is giving the part]. In this exit from guilt, the forgiveness given to the other finds its true meaning. Freedom comes at this price, and it is possibly at this precise moment that we can choose and construct our heritage and open ourselves towards the act of faith.

The journey we all have to accomplish is this passage from an influence — from every influence, wherever it comes from — to a reference that is assumed, chosen, shared.

Behind all this remains the last implication to be examined: “They are not free, since they are under influence.”

But what is freedom?

First and always, etymology. The Littré: “1- The condition of the man who belongs to no master. 2- Said in opposition to captivity. 3- Said in opposition to enclosure in an establishment, in a convent, etc. 4- Natural liberty. 5- Political liberty, freedom to trade, to move about… 6- Liberty as a divinity…” The definitions continue like this for 5 pages!

Already one sees the confusion, the difficulty of interpretation, the questions. Are we speaking of an inner feeling? Of an outer reality? Of a natural, subjective, political liberty; of the freedoms to move about, to trade?…

From Plato to Hegel, by way of Aristotle, Spinoza, Pascal, Kant… a great many authors and philosophers have written on the subject.

Let us pause on the subversion brought by psychoanalysis — already begun by Spinoza, who wrote around 1650: “Men believe themselves free for the sole reason that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.”[14]

In several seminars and lectures, as well as in the Écrits, Jacques Lacan returns to this theme; for him the notion of freedom is not, as such, the business of psychoanalysis.

Let us note a few developments:

“Free men, the true ones, are precisely the mad.”[15]

“And not only can the being of man not be understood without madness, but it would not be the being of man if it did not carry madness within itself as the limit of its freedom.”

“A certain field seems indispensable to the mental respiration of modern man: the one in which his independence is asserted in relation not only to any master, but also to any god — the field of his irreducible autonomy as an individual, as an individual existence. That is indeed something which deserves in every respect to be compared to a delusional discourse. It is one.”

Let us end these quotations with a last passage from Seminar III, The Psychoses:

“Psychoanalysis never places itself on the plane of the discourse of freedom, even though that discourse is always present, constant within each of us […] and always, imperceptibly or not, delusional. Psychoanalysis aims elsewhere: at the effect of discourse within the subject.”

“Last time I tried to show you that the ego, whatever we may think of its function […], always carries as its correlate a discourse which, for its part, has nothing to do with reality. […] I have designated it as the discourse of freedom, essential to modern man insofar as he is structured by a certain conception of his own autonomy. I have pointed out to you its fundamental character — partial and partisan, incapable of being made explicit, fragmentary, differentiated and profoundly delusional.”[16]

Following Freud, Lacan discovers that man is subjected to the discourse of the unconscious, which determines him; he can perceive and exist only in the aftermath of its effects. He receives his determinations from outside, from the field of signifiers, from the Great Other: “no one can be the cause of himself,” he asserts. The discourse of freedom has nothing to do with reality; freedom is reduced to a forced choice.

It becomes the possibility of consenting to an opening to being and to others, through the untying of the “bonds of servitude” — above all those which, as for everyone, bind us to those we love. Undoing bonds to make relations possible. The infinitely delicate task of psychoanalysis.[17]

Conclude?

Let us simply set down a marker, continuing with Jacques Lacan: “The only thing one can be guilty of, at least from the analytic perspective, is having given ground on one’s desire. […] Let us go further. He has often given ground on his desire for a good motive, even for the best. […] For if things must be done for the good, in practice one has very much to ask oneself: for whose good? From there on, things do not go by themselves.”[18]

For Lacan, guilt is first articulated to desire and thus to the structure of the subject; the Oedipal story then appears contingent, indeed an alibi for the neurotic. To be guilty is to want to be capable[19]; it is to refuse to call one’s personal history into question; to heap reproaches on oneself, or on the other, is to know — to believe one knows, for oneself and for the other; of what powers of “persuasion”, of what manoeuvres, can we be the experts, so as not to shed this “second” skin?

To leave this guilt behind is also to cease accusing the Other — and the one who is often put in that place is the father, insofar as he embodies that function.

Are we to believe that he is there to guarantee us, to protect us from what happens to us, from the choices we have made? Like the “believer” who accuses God of the evils that occur on earth.

At this point we rejoin the founding question of psychoanalysis, that of the Truth which can only be “half-said”; it is a matter of becoming what one is, according to Freud’s imperative: “wo es war soll ich werden”. Psychoanalysis is a liberation — that of the personal speech of a subject who can thus tend towards an exit from this guilt of which we are all prisoners. Does not the freedom of a subject — fragile, never acquired — reside in this gap?

Lacan reminds us, in The Individual Myth of the Neurotic, of the obligatory point of passage of this operation: ”[…] analytic theory as a whole is underpinned by the fundamental conflict which, through the intermediary of rivalry with the father, binds the subject to an essential symbolic value — but always, as you will see, in relation to a certain concrete degradation, perhaps linked to special circumstances, of the figure of the father.”

He adds that “experience itself is stretched between this image of the father, always degraded”, and an image which “nonetheless assumes, almost clandestinely, in the symbolic relation with the subject, the position of that personage much effaced by the decline of our history: that of the master — the moral master, the master who initiates the one still in ignorance into the dimension of fundamental human relations, and who opens for him what one may call access to consciousness, indeed to wisdom, in taking possession of the human condition.”

Is not the decline of this paternal figure in the logic of what took concrete form in the French Revolution? The father, with all his lacks, his waywardness, is that necessary door for access to the symbolic which marks the human condition; at the same time, because of this degradation linked to “special circumstances”, is he not the one who can — sometimes unconsciously, indeed with complete “impunity”[20] — be put on trial precisely insofar as he holds, as best he can, that function?

A function of cutting, moreover — an opening towards the Other. He is the stranger, the absent one…

“Pater semper incertus, mater certissima”: the father, that “uncertain one”, can hold his function, as Jacques Lacan reminds us, only by virtue of a consensus, a social construction that is coming undone before our eyes today. Who is your father? Whose son or daughter are you? To this question there answers a saying of the mother, a word between persons, a family history or myth, a relation of love. The current substitution of proof in reality — through DNA testing in particular — is the destruction of this entry into the register of the symbolic, the register from which the father holds his place in the succession of genealogies.

And many new fathers, at a loss before their child, find themselves alone, cut off from their own filiation, and no longer manage to situate themselves except as a “pal”, or in a doubling of the mother’s position… What then disappears is that creative articulation, for a child, between the two positions: father and mother — an articulation that reintroduces history and makes it possible to build the future.

An articulation that invites lack, an elsewhere, into the life of the human child, and that opens at once onto doubt and onto transmission: a passage towards the possible act of faith, the opposite of today’s all-security mindset.

Guy Delaunay 27 November 2007

[1] Quoted by Maurice Clavel in Délivrance (Face à face Maurice Clavel et Philippe Sollers). Ed Seuil (Points)

[2] The association of the Gens de Bernard: a Christian community so defined in reference to Bernard of Clairvaux, reformer of monasticism in the 12th century. A.R.E.F.P.P.I.: Association pour la Recherche, l’Enseignement, la Formation et la Pratique d’une Psychanalyse Institutionnelle [Association for the Research, Teaching, Training and Practice of an Institutional Psychoanalysis]. For further information see the site: www.arefppi.fr

[3] Programme: “A voix nue” on France Culture. November 07

[4] See on this subject the work of the CICNS (Centre d’Informations et de Conseils sur les Nouvelles Spiritualités): www.cicns.net — in particular the video on the work of the ethnologist Maurice Duval and the report on the colloquium “Cults, social scourge or scapegoat?” of 30 September 2007.

[5] Editions Albin Michel – Sept 2007. (In particular the pages on “the sources of Modernity”, p. 60 ff.)

[6] René Girard, “Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair”, Grasset, 1999. Quoted by Jean-Claude Guillebaud.

[7] Cf. in this regard the work of Jean Baubérot (historian and sociologist), of which the CICNS gives ample echo on its site.

[8] Op. cit. p. 87. For a full development, see Jean-Claude Guillebaud’s book.

[9] Claude David was released on 9 June 2007, after more than 4 months of imprisonment.

[10] Opened in 1965 as a therapeutic and family workshop linked to a department of the Saint Jacques psychiatric hospital in Nantes, it would become the Fondation PI, an original care centre, which pursued its activities until 1989. It closed following an incessant struggle against the administration, which — fifteen years after its first agreement — denied it the possibility of continuing its care work by downgrading it to a rest home!

[11] In reference to the work of Jacques Lacan, the Other with a capital O is the “reservoir of signifiers”; it designates a symbolic place — language, the unconscious, or again God — which determines the subject in his relation to desire. The Name-of-the-Father is at the point of articulation; it is: “the signifier which, in the Other as locus of the signifier, is the signifier of the Other and the locus of the law.” In the unconscious discourse of a subject, it is the Other that is at stake; it is from the Other that he speaks and desires — the desire of the subject is the desire of the Other. The Other in the subject is not the stranger or strangeness. It constitutes that from which psychic life is ordered — that is, a place where a discourse insists which is articulated, even if it is not always articulable for the subject. (After the Dictionnaire de la Psychanalyse and quotations from Jacques Lacan.)

[12] In the programme “A Voix Nues” already cited – November 07. France Culture

[13] In the sense defined above.

[14] Spinoza. The Ethics – 1650

[15] Wednesday lecture, at Henri Ey’s. 1969

[16] Seminar Book III – The Psychoses. Editions du Seuil. Pp. 150-152-165

[17] After Marie Balmary – Le Sacrifice Interdit. L de P – Collection biblio-essais.

[18] Jacques Lacan. The Seminar Book VII – The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Editions du Seuil – p. 368.

[19] Or incapable, which is the reverse and obverse of the same medal.

[20] A term used by Jacques Lacan to define the hero: “he is the one who can be betrayed with impunity”. Cf. The Seminar Book VII – p. 370.