A Psychoanalyst in Prison!

A Psychoanalyst in Prison!

“And the being of man not only cannot 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.”

Jacques Lacan

By Guy Delaunay, President of the Association for Research, Teaching, Training and the Practice of an Institutional Psychoanalysis (AREFPPI)

Claude David, psychoanalyst and doctor of psychology, has been in prison since 19 January 2007; the press (a certain press) has echoed claims of mental and cult manipulation on his part, with no concern for verification, still less for truth.

Not a day passes in France without a therapist, a spiritual group, a meeting place or even an ordinary citizen having to endure attempts at intimidation by activists gathered under the banner of the “fight against dérives sectaires”. That there exists no definition of the word cult in legal language is not the sort of thing to stop them. In the past, a cult “was the religion of the others”; in that sense the propositions of Martin Luther were at first branded cultish by the Catholic Church — which was the first to load this word with its negative connotation.

But today a new step has been taken: it is enough to attach the word cult to the word danger for the witch-hunt to begin again. The accusations put forward are always identical — sexual touching, abuse of weakness, psychological subjection… they recur every time a rumor is launched by the media.

What is Claude David accused of?

He is accused of having committed abuse of weakness, abuse of authority, abuse of office.

Now, he is a psychoanalyst, and the supposed, alleged, presumed “victims” are his patients or former patients. His function is therefore inseparable from the criminal proceedings brought against him.

We fear such testimonies and such words from “victims” when they arise within the double context of psychoanalysis and the accusation of being a “cult”, and we must be especially fearful, wary or very cautious in the face of complaints from a psychoanalyst’s patients.

Indeed… Where does subjection begin, where does transference end?

When an adult, a teacher or an educator, looks after young people — especially those said to be in difficulty — he will never prevent them from projecting onto him a parental image — loved or hated — with all the paths, the difficulties, sometimes the mishaps, that arise in the course of that relationship and in respect for each person.

What company director, when he motivates his employees or his sales force to win new market share, what sports-club coach when he wants his team to win a crucial match, what political leader when he seeks the consent of his voters, does not bring into play a certain type of human relationship that we find normal, founded on adhesion, on each person’s acceptance of a shared objective or goal? The psychoanalyst or psychotherapist in his consulting room relies on the same feeling in the course of the session.

In every case it is a matter of transference; but if we want to reserve that more technical term for the analytic cure, let us speak of love, of esteem. And in all these human adventures — business, politics, sport or therapy — nothing can be done without this feeling and this human bond.

Lacan showed that transference is an absolutely general phenomenon of the inter-human bond and, as such, cannot be confined to the analytic cure: “It is the subject supposed to know that motivates it,” he says precisely.

What, then, is the difference between the result expected in a business and that of a psychoanalyst’s or doctor’s practice?

In the one case, it is a matter of earning money, a sale, markets, a championship, an election — and that is tangible, negotiable, part of what is admissible in a country’s discourse, in the imaginary, the values of a society at a given moment. It can be seen, touched, displayed on balance sheets, on a podium, in the Assembly, in the media…

In the other, it is a matter of leading a subject towards the truth of his desire, always inaccessible (as the end of a psychoanalysis shows) — and that is not quantifiable in market share, cannot be displayed, still less proved. It concerns a singular, particular subject. In our time, that arouses mistrust, even rejection.

To be a psychoanalyst, to practise this profession, is to accept this subversion — and first of all for oneself, since the discourse of the analyst cannot be the discourse of the master. Jean Clavreul writes: “What is at stake is the putting in place of a certain discourse on the world which is of an entirely different structure… The structure of psychoanalytic discourse is not that of the discourse of the master to which we are accustomed.”

The “discourse of the master” is the one that knows for us, that formats us ceaselessly through the media, politics, school. And the true dissenters from this discourse, besides the poets, are the mad… These are not profitable, manageable people, consumers or voters!!

Lacan writes: “It must be said that the desire to be the master contradicts the very fact of the psychoanalyst”[1].

Before being a theory, psychoanalysis is a “praxis” aimed at the transformation of the subject. It arises after “the advent of Science”; it is a logical consequence of it — which means that it does not “identify completely with science, contrary to what Freud himself seemed to believe.” Psychoanalysis “responds to the effects of science. These effects, as we well know, completely change reality. But what is said less often is that these effects are ravaging and destructive for the subject”. The knowledge of science introduces itself into our real “because it permits the production of all those objects that invade our daily life, that create the new world we inhabit”. In this situation, “the question of ultimate truth is left in suspense”; Descartes, the first, had opened the way by referring it to a non-deceiving God [2].

In Radiophonie, Jacques Lacan takes up the question of the sciences of man. In substance, he asserts that if there is to be a “science of man”, it can only be constituted according to the specificity of its object. That object is precisely the subject, and not “man”, beyond the mirages of an objectivity Lacan never ceased denouncing — going so far as to define science as “an ideology of the suppression of the subject” [3].

The current capitalist discourse, which is one of its impoverished avatars, becomes the model for the functional relations between human beings and comes to mask this question by filling it in. Making the consumers we are believe that the latest invented gadget will satisfy us, will make us happy, attempts to close this question of the subject — a subject signed by desire, by lack-of-being, by dissatisfaction, by failure… Hence the ever greater malaise in our societies. It is not useless to recall here Freud’s sentence in Civilization and Its Discontents: “What began with the father ends with the mass.”

Freud, in premonitory fashion, reminds us of the two ends of the chain: on one side the father (let us note in passing that the leaders, the “gurus” whom the press and the courts go after, are always paternal figures). On the other, the mass — opinion polls are a striking example of the abandonment of a political project for a country. It is the opinion of the majority that becomes, too often, the measure of the reforms to be undertaken.

Lacan, in the Seminar on the Psychoses, attempts to define the paternal function: “The function of being a father is absolutely unthinkable in human experience without the category of the signifier”[4]; the paternal function is not natural, it can only be conceived in the symbolic register — that is, from a whole weave of history, of humanity, which gives it its footing and validates its existence. In other words, no one can be a father alone, even in his own family. Let us acknowledge that this function is currently criticised from every side, and this calling into question goes hand in hand with the disappearance of the subject towards which the discourse of science insidiously leads us.

Lacan reminds us that psychoanalysis “is essentially what reintroduces the Name-of-the-Father into scientific consideration”. And if psychoanalysis finds itself, at this moment of history, itself questioned about its own future, Jean-Claude Guillebaud nonetheless declares: ”[…] faced with the irresponsibility and stupidity that colonise the spirit of the age, the consulting rooms of psychoanalysts are paradoxically becoming places of resistance. In these places, it is no longer only the individual patients who come seeking a “cure”; through them, it is society itself [5].”

In putting a psychoanalyst in prison, that is what is being struck at.

That, of course, is not what the right-thinking souls will say — who in this case hold the same discourse as the gendarmes: “He committed sexual touching, he abused his authority, he practised psychological subjection”… It is curious that the charges retained all belong to the cohort of “fashionable” offences that will stir the horror of good citizens and bring condemnation in advance, without examination, without reflection.

The “victims” may well be suffering today — but what is the true origin of this suffering? Is it not to be found in their instrumentalisation by private outfits whose evident role is to be thought police…?

Certain organisations — more or less semi-official — financed by the State and approved by the Ministry of Youth and Sports, which supposedly keep watch to “defend the individual and the family”, and claim to make themselves the spokespersons of normality and right-thinking, publish “practical fact sheets” to help us recognise “the symptoms of belonging to a cult”, which are veritable calls for denunciation and witch-hunting: it is enough to change one’s dress habits, one’s interests, one’s behaviour, to practise long periods of meditation or simply of reading… to become a suspect and a danger to society! They even indicate the “citizen” steps to be taken to denounce such conduct with the aim of protecting society. Denunciation is entering our daily life!

Louis Pauwels, in an article for Le Figaro, writes: “Since 1975, anti-cult associations have established themselves, accusing their adversaries of destructuring individuals and threatening families. The most virulent is ADFI[6]. It catalyses, if it does not promote, the attacks against non-conforming spiritual groups. I learn that it draws its inspiration from a current of American psychiatry aiming at the normalisation of society through the destruction of the new religions. […] This war against cults reawakens the spirit of inquisition and resembles, in many cases, the witchcraft trials, where rumor served as proof.[7] It is now enough to accuse a marginal group of capturing the personality and of mental manipulation for it to find itself ranked among the cults and, by that very fact, to mobilise general opinion against it. This new witch-hunt benefits from State subsidies and, with rare exceptions, from the unreflecting support of the media. […][8]”

And, in this context, it is not difficult to bring fragile people to testify against their psychoanalyst — which allows them to take refuge in the normality of right-thinking and majority opinion.

One of his former students wrote, on learning of his arrest: “Claude David has that rare something: he always and ceaselessly pushes his friends and all who know him towards excellence. But human beings do not like to feel weak and lacking, and when someone underlines our lacks we have no other objective left than to see him annihilated.”

It is easier to attack the one who obliges you to move forward than to acknowledge one’s failure or simply one’s laziness…

Let us quote Jean Clavreul again: “No use accusing this or that person of being a bad shepherd. That would be to set oneself up as the good shepherd. Let us rather question this passion for making oneself a sheep”[9].

And this is the man who today is imprisoned…

For 40 years he cared for and looked after the weakest, the mentally ill, those whom today we no longer dare call mad. First a psychologist at the Saint Jacques Psychiatric Hospital of Nantes, then co-founder of a care centre, from 1965 to 1989, called the Centres Psychothérapiques de Nantes, later the Fondation PI. An experience “which rests on the intense work of a movement born immediately after the war, inaugurated by militant psychiatrists, under the name of institutional psychotherapy. These men had been touched more or less closely, during the war, by the experience of the concentration camps.

That allowed them to take a fresh and critical look at everything that can very quickly come to resemble a concentration-camp universe…

This revolutionary vision of care in institutions, rising from the theoretical base of Lacanian psychoanalysis, has a few emblematic places in France:

• The Saint Alban hospital, around François Tosquelles, a Catalan psychiatrist trained in psychoanalysis, and Lucien Bonnafé, psychiatrist and militant Marxist;

• The La Borde clinic, around Jean Oury, psychiatrist and analysand of Lacan, working regularly with Félix Guattari;

The Fondation PI, around Claude David, psychoanalyst, doctor of Psychology, co-director of the Fondation PI and author of the work — In Illo Tempore — offering a reflection on the institutional dimension.”[10]

The Fondation PI opened in 1965 as an attempt to offer a few mental patients an alternative to the psychiatric hospital, and grew into a recognised care centre in France. For nearly 25 years, innovations and creations enriched the work of care: from the workshops (in which there was real work, as Roger Gentis would observe)[11], to patients taking on responsibility, to work on culture, to teaching (a Montessori school)…

All of that came to a halt after a fierce struggle (support committees in several French cities, a hunger strike…) in which the usual elements are found: calumny, the appetite for vengeance of a few individuals, and administrative harassment. For more than 20 years, since the first agreement of 1965, the administration had paid a daily rate per patient on the basis of a “psychiatric aftercare centre” agreement. In 1987, it unilaterally decided to downgrade the institution to a “rest home”! The daily rate was cut by a third, which condemned the establishment to death. The Conseil d’État, consulted three times, ruled in the Fondation’s favour, judgments in support. The IGASS inquiry, requested by the Fondation itself, concluded that its finances were transparent and its quality of care rarely equalled in France in this type of establishment, and asked that the daily rate be maintained.

To no avail!

Roger Gentis wrote in 1989: “There is today a rumor of Nantes as there was a rumor of Orléans a few years ago… With thirty-five years of practising institutional psychiatry behind me, I can say that the quality of the care provided at the Fondation is impressive. The patients show an almost incredible freedom of speech… I am not speaking of a freedom that is granted or conceded, but of the freedom the patients take, which goes hand in hand with the responsibility with which they feel invested… It takes a great deal of intelligence, know-how and work to get there…”

Questioned by a journalist at the same time, Félix Guattari[12] replied: “The important thing is that a court of honour of the profession — informal, certainly — has already delivered its judgment concerning the Fondation PI. When people like Roger Gentis, Lucien Bonaffé, Jacques Tosquellas take a position in favour of an experiment, that is an indisputable reference…” (To these names are added: Jean Oury, Pierre Delion, François Tosquelles and so many others, but also the moral and intellectual endorsement of great witnesses of our time such as Jacques Ellul[13], or Michel Bouquet, all of whom travelled to the Fondation PI.)

Félix Guattari continues: “Around any psychiatric institution whatsoever, different or not, one could find people who have been in conflict, who are bitter, and who left furious. What can be done about it?”[14]

Let us note that if we listened, with equal indulgence, to all former members, there would no longer be a Communist Party, nor indeed any political party at all, so numerous are the disappointed of every stripe!

Fabrice Nicolino, a journalist with Politis, who came and investigated for more than a fortnight, concluded in February 1989: “Sickened, concerned above all for the survival of their work, the founders of the care centre, Marc Leclerc and Claude David foremost among them, have decided to resign from their positions. A new team, they think, concentrating less hatred and fewer rumors, might perhaps be able to continue the work begun a quarter of a century ago. Meanwhile, the cabal and the imbeciles have won the game. Sad.”[15]

Doubly sad, since 20 years later, the man they had not managed to silence, Claude David, finds himself in prison, “suspected […] of corrupting youth and accused of “non-conformism” for having dared to embody in his daily life the principles of the teaching of institutional psychotherapy.”[16]

He continued his work as a psychoanalyst, receiving in his consulting room not the neurotics “of the fashionable districts”, as the press would have people believe, but many of the sick, the psychotic, the desperate.

He “reoffended”; his speech must be stifled, his work destroyed. Already in 1987, when he had decided to publish, with the patients and caregivers of the Fondation PI, Max Laffont’s “L’Extermination Douce” (The Gentle Extermination)[17], he had received death threats.

The demolition enterprise under way is to silence a psychoanalyst and a Christian — because, as an aggravating circumstance, he belongs to a Christian community whose two axes of reference are psychoanalysis and faith.

Why this reminder of the history?

It is made indispensable because, during the periods of police custody (garde à vue) and the interrogations, the gendarmes hammered home, repeatedly and to several people: “20 years ago we couldn’t get him; now we’ve got him… (sic)”. All these words delivered without any restraint, as if the matter were settled and already judged.

For those who underwent it, it is obvious that police custody has been perverted, in the words of a lawyer. Its aim is not to reveal the truth but to shore up a ready-made opinion by obtaining confessions that all point one way. When elements appear that contradict or break with it, the answer comes back: “That doesn’t interest us; that’s not what we’re here for!”

And indeed, truth becomes univocal; a logic must be made to run, and the statements extracted must be made to coincide with the chosen thesis, which is of disarming simplicity:

1 - any unknown group — that is, any group that cannot be classified, or is merely different — is a cult or risks becoming one,

2 - every cult means danger,

3 - every cult is therefore a threat to society, so it must be fought in order to eradicate it,

4 - every follower who belongs to one is manipulated, so nothing he says can be believed; it is not he who is speaking, he is under influence, indeed he is a victim,

5 - one cannot talk with him: his words are not his own.

A fine example is provided by TF1’s report on the subject (the “7 à 8” programme of 4/02/07). One of those in charge of the investigation asserts: “Those who remain at La Balme have perhaps not yet understood… they are covering their eyes; they will certainly have to change their minds” — and the journalist concludes, with a panning shot of the prison walls in the background: “Mental manipulation still seems to work at a distance!”

It must be said that the investigators were surprised to find not victims, but people who own what they live, their choices and their way of life. To stay within their schema, their only recourse is to think that we are all manipulated, blind.

It is time to read and reread works such as, for example, Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie’s “Montaillou, village occitan, de 1294 à 1324”, in which he describes, in daily life, the manipulations deployed by the Inquisition to bring forth the “truth” and to hunt down the slightest sign of Catharism in the peasants’ way of living. Short of the use of torture (la question), we find the very mechanisms of the witch-hunt. The Church abandoned them and asked forgiveness for them; the State has taken them over on its own account.

According to Pastor Martin Niemoller, “with all the movements being labelled cults, this is a new way of putting a yellow star, in France, on religious or philosophical groups”[18]. For his part, Maurice Duval, ethnologist, analyses with dread the current excesses of this “collective fear” which makes it possible to whittle away the individual liberties of every citizen. He describes, in an interview[19], the difference in the means used, depending on the country, to heighten collective fear in order better to manage citizens. In the USA, the inhabitants are subjected to the fear of terrorism — which has grown stronger since the attacks of September 2001 —; in France, it is the supposed danger that cults are said to pose. He asserts that, politics having seized on this opportunity, nothing can stop it any longer, and we arrive at a “fascist state” with, as a consequence, a “thought police” that controls the life of every French citizen more and more.

A psychoanalyst in prison: we are all imprisoned

In our era of great cowardice, of conformism, of ready-made thought, we are all prisoners. Every day, without realising it, we surrender a little more of our freedom to move, to think, to believe, to be a subject…

In his book “L’horreur sécuritaire”[20], Jean-Marc Fédida, avocat à la Cour, shows how the security obsession has become the principal motor of public action, and its dramatic consequences for individual liberties. The treatment of spiritual minorities is one of the examples given — the creation of an illusory enemy, which has allowed the public authorities to impose repressive, liberty-depriving measures.

In the name of the precautionary principle — a “veritable legal monstrosity”, the author continues — which “allows the citizen to be sanctioned for the danger of the potential use he might make of his liberty” […] It is his intentions that must be considered with circumspection and vigilance so that they do not bring about some catastrophe.” The citizen comes to wish himself — to ensure his security — that his liberty be attacked, and the trick is done: the “gendarme” is inside each of us. More than 20 years ago, Pierre Legendre had analysed this phenomenon in a remarkable book, “L’Amour du Censeur” (The Love of the Censor). What was missing was a pretext for the public authorities to seize upon it. With the precautionary principle, here we are: we pass from the private, personal sphere to a norm of functioning taken over by the public authorities to promote a single discourse from which the subject is razed.

Faced with this insistent battering, what will remain to us as a space of freedom, or simply of breathing room? Who among us can hope to escape this formatting of thought for long? How to remain vigilant before this shrinking of the space of the subject, dwindling like the peau de chagrin?

It is for having chosen to resist this insidious hold that Claude David is incarcerated.

How, urgently, to get ourselves out of this asphyxia, this prison of the soul?

• Let us work to fight, in each of us, this tendency, this urge to “make oneself a sheep”, this fascination with adopting the beliefs of the mass, this comfort of thinking like everyone else and this guilt at thinking differently. Let us become resisters; let us fight this abdication of present-day thought, this levelling of every value, of every difference. Let us band together, so as to no longer stay silent before the small, habitual, daily compromises to which we are invited in the name of our comfort, our security, our well-being. All these slogans whose only function is to annihilate our resistance, our determination, so as to bring us back into the herd. Benjamin Franklin said: “Every time we fear for our security, we surrender a little of our liberty”. Let us never forget that action derives not only from thought but also from a fierce, tenacious will simply to assume one’s responsibilities, one’s place and one’s history.

“There is no need to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere.”

This 16th-century quotation, attributed to William of Nassau, can serve us as an incitement to reflection and to resistance. It reminds us of the one from Emmanuel Lévinas, which Claude David sent us from his prison: “The act of faith lies not in presence but in absence.”

At every turn, at every crossroads of our life, let us choose to own our acts, our history. And if the success of our endeavours does not reach the summit of our hopes, let us take them up again, let us begin again: we will thus have carried on what others began before us, and we will have cleared a little space for those who follow us.

“It will again be said that I am a pessimist. I am not pessimistic enough.

It must be said that in the present state of the world, the worst is always certain,

but (we) must not lose hope.”

Jacques Ellul, quoted by Claude David in “In Illo Tempore”

Guy Delaunay

April–May 2007

[1] Jacques Lacan, “Radiophonie”, p. 71

[2] On this subject, for further development, one may profitably read “Au-delà du complexe d’Œdipe” by Michel Lapeyre, Editions Anthropos, in particular pages 30 to 33.

[3] Lacan, Radiophonie, in Scilicet 2/3, Seuil, 1970, p. 89.

[4] Seminar Book III, The Psychoses, page 329, Seuil 1981.

[5] In “La psychanalyse peut-elle guérir ?” Collective work — September 2005

[6] Association for the Defense of the Family and the Individual (Association pour la Défense de la Famille et de l’Individu), which for 20 years has pursued Claude DAVID with its vindictiveness.

[7] Emphasis ours.

[8] Le Figaro of 24/10/96

[9] Cf. the text quoted

[10] Sabine Rostaing, psychoanalyst. Her text “Je connais un homme” (“I know a man”) can be read in full on the site www.arefppi.fr

[11] Hospital psychiatrist, institutional psychiatrist.

[12] Author of a key book of the 1970s written with Gilles Deleuze, l’Anti-Œdipe (Anti-Oedipus). Leader of the La Borde clinic with Jean Oury.

[13] Jacques Ellul, honorary president of the Faculty of Law of Bordeaux, theologian, author of numerous fundamental works on civilisation and the technological society.

[14] Quoted by Politis of 24-2-89, in an article by the journalist Fabrice Nicolino

[15] Article from the Politis journal quoted

[16] Cf. the text by Sabine Rostaing

[17] The medical thesis of Doctor Max Laffont, which deals with the fate of the 40,000 mental patients who died of hunger under the Vichy regime. No publisher had been willing to take the risk of this unveiling of the truth.

[18] Quoted by the Protestant review “Réformes” of April 07

[19] See the site www.cicns.net. To be consulted, with profit, for its very thorough analyses of the current laws and practices of this anti-cult fight, with interviews of researchers, lawyers, doctors… It also includes an interview with members of the community of the association of the Gens de Bernard (A.G.B.).

[20] L’Horreur sécuritaire, Les Trente Honteuses, Jean-Marc Fédida, Editions Privé. He writes in another passage: ”[…] a society that sees its own members as its enemies, and sees in the function of public authority the vocation to repress in acts, can only end badly. By its own logic, it can only be seized by an irrepressible political temptation.”