The Work of the Other (article)

I have always perceived myself as “in-between”: between two countries (Switzerland through my mother and Belgium through my father) and between two names (Ellen as my “true” name and Elizabeth as my official name, because Ellen was not accepted by the Belgian register of births). No wonder that when I decided to train as a psychologist, it was with the idea to explore a border space, the influence of culture on psychic processes, and thereby to question the universal validity of Western theories.

The subject of my master’s thesis in psychology was “The Influence of Culture on the Oedipus Complex.” The Oedipus complex is a key notion in psychoanalysis. It concerns the interlacing

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between love and prohibition, identification and rivalry, and typically involves intricate relationships between child, mother, and father. Some authors defend its universality, while others argue for its cultural relativity. I was particularly interested in Edmond and Marie Cecile Ortigues’ idea that the Oedipus complex is universal because the child everywhere is taken with the mother’s love and encounters the father’s law prohibiting too intimate relationships with the mother. However, the Ortigues’ clinical experience with children in Senegal led these two psychoanalysts to describe a typical Senegalese-African resolution of the Oedipus complex (Edmond and Marie Cecile Ortigues, Oedipe Africain, 1966).

In order to explore further the cultural relativity of Western ideas, I decided to base my doctoral thesis on fieldwork in a matrilineal society in Central Africa. In matrilineal societies, children “belong” to the mother’s lineage, and they are under the authority of maternal uncles (their mother’s brothers). I was very young at that time, 21, and I had two very young children. As a family, we settled down in a little remote village for two years. I now realize that this was a perilous experience, but my children were an excellent way to connect with the women’s world.

For my thesis, I approached the father figure through rituals associated with the lifecycle, from birth to funeral. I also considered beliefs and reactions concerning sickness and death. The research revealed the respective roles of the three figures associated with two main lines of identification: One, the “official,” concerned the collective dimension of identity and involved maternal uncles and ancestors; it was perceived as both structuring and threatening. The second was associated with protection and individuation; it developed through relationships with fathers and fathers’ fathers. The Ortigues’ description fit the first side of this process but missed the second, more latent, line of identification.

I later realized that the ambiguous character of authority exercised along the mother’s line echoes some aspects of my personal relationship with a “powerful mother” after the death of my father in my early infancy. This led me to reflect on the situation of children who are the object of the exclusive desire of women and on the fate of fathers in our Western world.

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When I began to teach courses on psychopathology at the Université Nationale du Zaïre, I encouraged my students to explore beliefs and practices related to madness in their native cultures. I also conducted a series of studies on therapeutic spirit possession groups offering cure and initiation to women whose illnesses were attributed to spirits. Here again, I focused on rituals and beliefs, but this time I collected personal histories that improved my understanding of the concrete significance of ritual initiation in women’s lives. I discovered the extent to which these rituals supported a process of individuation for the initiated women.

These studies led me to emphasize the heterogeneity of cultural codes and representations, and made me sensitive to the necessity to go beyond what appears valued at the manifest and formal levels of a culture.

In Ivory Coast, I went with a colleague, Elizabeth Uchoa, to a little village where she was conducting research. When we arrived, villagers were performing rituals for a healer’s funeral. We were seated on little benches under a canopy when a tall “possessed” woman entered the scene and looked at us with a gaze that I will never forget; it froze me to the heart. Soon, village women came to sit on both sides of us, telling us not to be afraid. I perceived this encounter as a direct confrontation with an Otherness left out of my anthropological description of rituals. Before, I had been fascinated by their beauty and symbolic value and had not paid sufficient attention to moments when something deeply infringing or foreign to the ritual surfaced and troubled the ceremonies. My research pushed me to go beyond coherent narratives in order to explore what can only be told in a fragmented way.

Societies differ in their reaction to Otherness: either pushing it aside or laying out a space where it can surface and remind people of unknown territories surrounding the common world. If we consider the treatment given to persons with psychotic disorders or to homeless people, Western societies would rather belong to the first category.

All of the preceding played a role in my choice to work with people diagnosed as schizophrenics when I came to Montreal and, later, in my decision to begin psychoanalytic training and practice:

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a desire to approach what is enigmatic or unknown on its own terms, rather than reducing it to what we think we know about it.

In Montreal, where I was attached to the research center of a large university psychiatric hospital, I was not impressed by the “objectifying” character of most research done with psychotic patients. I worked at developing research perspectives more sensitive to their subjective world, to their own perception of the drift of their world, and to aspects of their relationships to the world that seemed to have a protective value for them. I also decided to conduct parallel studies with psychotic people from different cultures, particularly India.

I was particularly interested in what helps these persons to tame an always frightening experience and to find some avenue of “recovery.” Study revealed the protective value associated with the construction of an intimate space of withdrawal, a kind of social and psychic skin. In several cases, forms of spirituality or religion played a significant role in that process. Interactions with clinicians revealed that although they observed these findings, they did not pay attention to them because that was contrary to what they had learned to do.

Comparative studies on schizophrenia’s course and outcome indicate a better prognosis in India than in Western countries. Among other factors, I decided to explore the potential value of the availability in the culture of a model of ascetic radical withdrawal best embodied in the sadhus, ascetics met on pilgrimage roads and ashrams. I wanted to explore the degree of flexibility of that “language” (radical withdrawal) and the extent to which it may be appropriated by psychotic people.

When I first began psychoanalytic training, my objective was mainly to acquire additional tools allowing me to deepen my reading of paradoxes and contradictions permeating personal experiences. I did not suspect that this was to become the central part of my life.

My interest in Otherness developed through my work with spirit possession groups and with ascetics. It sensitized me to moments in the clinical work that seem permeated by a feeling of the uncanny invading the transference/countertransference space. I re-

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member moments when the light in the room seemed to change and the shadows on the wall took on frightening images. Associations led to hidden memories involving death and abandonment by the mother. I also paid special attention to cultural elements surfacing in the session, like words, fragments of poems or memories, even changes in pitch and tone, opening a space where the meaning could be spoken.

Considering my journey through countries and disciplines, I am struck by the intimate relationship between elements of my own history and aspects of my research findings. This was the case in my doctoral thesis, but I might also mention, from my work with psychotic people, the discovery of the importance for me of preserving withdrawn spaces. I understand it as a particular sensitivity opening me to aspects that might escape others’ gaze—a kind of transference to the research field, with its revealing character.

At the interface between anthropology and psychoanalysis, I am also particularly interested in what Freud has described as the work of culture, a process of transformation of sexual and death drives that takes place at the levels of humanity in general and each human being. Sacred texts and elements of the sadhus’ initiation suggest that the radical detachment associated with Hindu asceticism is animated by references to death, austerities and eroticism in a way that seems paradoxical for Western minds.

How can we understand, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the influence of culture on the elaboration of basic human psychic drives? How can we approach the interweaving between universal and culturally relative phenomena without imposing our Western categories on ethnographic data but also without enclosing cultures in their own peculiarities?

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