Читать книгу In Defense of Secrets - Anne Dufourmantelle - Страница 9

Origins

To become a psychoanalyst is to cross over to the secret’s side. It is to choose the shadows, the clandestine voyage, a certain silence—to be a migrant forever. In its Latin etymology, the secret is a separation, a setting aside. From the Latin: segrada / secretus, “set apart,” “reserved.” From Sanskrit (kris) and then Greek (crisis), the secret’s necessity is born out of the originary separation between gods and men. The secret, the oath, and the sacred are all three related to the ineffable; they are unfailingly linked in the memory of language. Human communities are structured by these borders separating the divine and the secular, the living and the dead, the solar and the nocturnal, speech and silence, the intimate friend and the others. The secret abolishes them.

From the confessional, the psychoanalytic session has retained the elements of avowal and pardon, but not of the confession of a sin in the eyes of a god. To “say everything” to an analyst is not a measure for attaining an illusory transparency to oneself, nor to what the age deems important to confess to oneself, or simply to confess. It is an invitation to a risky wager: to imagine what could break one out of prefabricated scenarios, scenarios that are products of a past that is still present, in order to invent new ones, more living and more open. Like two instruments in an orchestra listening to each other work through an unknown score. There where anxiety reigned, there where the symptom ordered the quotidian, there where obediences came to tether the future to the past—might deliverance be possible? The room of secrets leaves a place for what will never be divulged or deciphered: mystery.

In the quest that commits a subject to interrogate their past, there are not necessarily accompanying revelations but displacements that can lift the weight of curses and the logic that perpetuates their violence. Sometimes when secrets are disarmed, their toxicity returns in force. Like us, they’re in becoming. Their process of transformation never stops, even in the frozen time of trauma. For even in the most naked anxiety dwells a possible metamorphosis.

To respect the intimate space of the other is to make an alliance with the night without wanting to put an end to it, to imagine that light isn’t the opposite of the dark but its most secret ally, and to recognize in the secret—acts, thoughts, emotions—the opposite of a threat, the very condition of relation. Like dreams, intimacy is the source of an intelligence of which we are more receiver than issuer, more decoder than creator.

“I’m going to tell you something you can’t tell anyone …”: This confidence is an invitation into the most intimate zone of a being. But this chosenness is also a separation. In a sense, the secret always makes three: the guardian, the witness, and the excluded. This essential ternarity can always combust, through jealousy or the conquest of power. But even before all confidence, there is that hidden word which passes between the self and the self. The echo inside us of an interior voice, the intimate confession of dreams, does its work of germination to the point of creating what we call the secret garden. Starting in childhood, this immense reserve is the source of creation, freedom, and joy. But for these same reasons, it has been sequestered.

What’s more, our era has taken a dislike to it. The thing to do now is to turn away from these moments of intimacy with the self: Silence is replaced by noise, almost continuous chatter, the omnipresence of screens that capture our gaze; almost all our sensorium is mobilized. From the registers of prayer to the secular ones of the interior voice, from contemplation to the inner scenographies of the fantasy, from the nonchalant daydream to boredom, from the writing of letters to the drawn-out time of waiting, these ways of the secret give onto a horizon of unlimited immanence.