Comments on the Notion of "Emprise" and the "Me"

Comments on the Notion of “Emprise” and the “Me”

By André Tarassi (August 2010)

Sarah Chiche, a student of psychology and psychopathology, has written L’emprise, a novel that surfs the anti-cult literary wave (in the author’s own words, “at the very moment when the implementing decree regulating the profession of psychotherapist has just been published in the official journal, I wanted to take up the question of dérives sectaires”).

In L’emprise one finds the classic figure of a psychotherapist, Victor Grandier, a manipulator who abuses the weakness of one of his patients in order to extract her fortune from her. A great commonplace of the anti-cult rhetoric, which nevertheless remains a safe bet for stimulating certain leanings in readers (“(the victim) lets herself be emptied of her bank account and then of her me without putting up the slightest resistance”, or again “the diabolical therapy of Victor Grandier, who deprives her of sleep, makes her fast, works on her by suggestion, to the point even of inducing false memories in her”).

The interview with the author

The interview with the writer by the site “Discordance” deserves a comment: although this is clearly not an essay but indeed a fiction, the site’s editor introduces the dialogue by declaring that the tale has “an at times quasi-unreal aspect”. Did he mean that some rumours in it are more credible than others? Since the novel’s vocation is not to make a scientific analysis of a phenomenon, it is by nature “quasi-unreal”, and not merely “at times”, since it takes up here, without distance or subtlety, the commonplaces of an anti-cult campaign that has always been distinguished by its absence of methodology (see the sociologist Olivier Bobineau’s critique on this subject), by the manipulation of figures to justify the existence of a scourge, and by the customary exaggerations of the current president of the MIVILUDES, Mr Fenech.

The writer plays on the MIVILUDES’s incantatory threat, “nobody is safe, anybody can get taken by a cult”, with literary devices such as: “Apart from Victor Grandier, the diabolical therapist, no other character has a name, for they are all interchangeable objects in his hands”.

Sarah Chiche is nevertheless capable of elementary realisations for a psychologist, when she replies for example: “one may wonder (whether the therapist) is really as ugly as all that, or whether it is not she who hallucinates him as a majestic old man, then as an ogre, then as the devil in person. Nothing is strictly speaking contained in the object looked at, but everything is a function of the one who looks”, but this does not affect her Manichaean portrait of the standard “guru” according to the crude criteria of the MIVILUDES, which never take into account the possibility (or indeed the responsibility) of the patients’ “interpretations/projections”. In any event, perhaps the author ought to have finished her studies before writing the book, or enquired with the CICNS to hear another side of the story?

The author admits, moreover, at the end of the interview, speaking of her future book: “I want something else, even if it means confronting more difficulties”. We agree with her in recognising that this “move” was a little “easy”, all the more so when one declares: “when someone says to you: ‘X, who told the story of her rape, sold 50,000 copies’, you have only one desire: to retort that you are not a pack of washing powder, and to go elsewhere.”

The theme of the “disappearance of the me” What prompted me to comment on the publication of this book, among the dozens of others published each year, is this sentence of the author’s which leapt out at me: “‘The victim’ lets herself be emptied of her me without putting up the slightest resistance”. It sums up, in effect, the phobia of the modern individual on which the whole force of the anti-cult action rests. For how could one explain or defend therapeutic methods or spiritualist precepts according to which the “me” ought to be abandoned or reformed in a world where desire and individualism are kings?

The author says it well: the least one could do would be to “put up a resistance”. Our whole civilisation is founded on resistance, even to what is ineluctable: resisting natural catastrophes, even if it means demanding compensation from the government when they occur, resisting death to the point of making it a taboo, resisting every personal calling-into-question to the point of looking elsewhere for culprits for one’s own errors, as we see endorsed by the anti-cult associations and the MIVILUDES: someone who has spent decades in a “cult”, instead of being questioned about his propensity to remain in “hell” for so long, will be encouraged to file a complaint.

But the question of the “me” is subtler still, and I am aware that no explanation will ever really convince anyone of the fundamental error of discourses like the one contained in this interview with Sarah Chiche, for this existential interrogation cannot be approached through the prism of this collective phobia. One would in any case have to begin by defining what “emptied of one’s me” means. Most people, having no real conception of who they are or of what they are, are afraid of being emptied of something very abstract. Some would say “emptied of my capacity to think for myself”. But who knows how to think for himself? Does an apostate who has left a “spiritual minority” and is then coached by an ADFI “think for himself”? Is he closer to himself? In view of the formatted discourses of some of them, we may strongly doubt it. Another way of putting it would be to be “turned into a vegetable”, which would represent the extreme of “no longer being able to think”. But are we not entering here into fantasy? Who has ever experienced such a state (apart from after taking certain medications)? Is it not a little easy to believe that someone could have the capacity to strip you of your capacity to think? Is it not the easiest, the most popular excuse for justifying an error (or a regret) committed in full possession of one’s faculties?

But above all: what if the religious experience perceived/described as a genuine submission to a divine or profane authority were something entirely other than what is made of it in this kind of station-bookstall novel? There is just as much positive literature, and has been for a long time, evoking certain little-known realities of the human soul, which are perhaps worth as much as the testimonies of superficial and ephemeral satisfactions of the puppets of consumer society that most of us have become. And even if a value judgement could lead us to compare these two experiences differently, ought we not to tolerate them both? What scientific study has demonstrated that the “consumer me” is superior to the “religious me”, for example? What observation can we make in our disenchanted society that would demonstrate that this “fearful and aggressive me” must be protected at all costs? Is it not legitimate to imagine, indeed to hope, that without this sickly, suicidal, depressed, compulsive me, controlled by medications and formatted by television, another “self” could see the light of day?

So I want to say to all the right-thinking people of French-style anti-cultism: deepen the human question today, if that is really what concerns you in your combat, for what is missing is at the very least a serious culture, and in any case a genuine lucidity about the “me” of the modern world which, according to them, ought to be protected from the reach of “cults” holding a vision of the world different from their own. Which does not mean that a genuine manipulator, when proven, must not be condemned, but that the attempts, even clumsy ones, to envisage a dusted-off identity and a less conditioned society deserve to be respected a priori rather than defamed on the basis of the most outrageous amalgams.

André Tarassi was born in 1961, he is the founder of the CICNS. An independent researcher, he has studied the New Spiritualities for 25 years. He studied journalism and television in the United States. He has published, under another name, several works on the spiritual path.