Being born in the subjectivity of another

The human being, in order to be able to come about and to emerge as himself, needs to begin his process of constitution from a position, from a place. This place is not a physical place, it is a place in the subjectivity of another. It is not true that the fact of a child having been born guarantees that he has had a beginning as a being participating in the human world. Very great is the number of people who live in the world without belonging to it, who live in it without having had a beginning as a being facing another. For the human to come about, it is necessary that the child be received and met by another human being, who gives him that place, who provides him with the beginning of himself. It is not possible to speak of someone without speaking of another.

Winnicott (1951) asserted that “there is no such thing as a baby”, meaning that there is no baby without its mother. This points to a fundamental principle for the understanding of the human being: there is no human being without the other, the human being comes about in the world. This originary event initiates the child into a process of temporalisation because, at the moment when the child is born in someone’s subjectivity, he begins to have a personal history. Obviously, personal history is preceded by conceptions grounded in traditions, in myths, but this originary moment means that the child is born into a human world by finding there a sense of temporality, derived from the encounter of his body with the corporeality of the other. Here we find an approach to the Russian concept of sobornost, which asserts that each human being is the singularisation of the whole of human history. In each person there comes about the encounter between ancestors, contemporaries and those who are yet to come.

Human coming-about requires the presence of another. The baby’s first psychic organisations, the entry into temporality, the opening of the spatial dimension, personalisation are constituted and find their realisation only through the presence of someone significant. Temporalisation is produced, initially, by the reciprocal play between the people of the environment and the child. It is a time that comes about from the rhythm of human corporeality. Human presence means breathing, the beating of the heart, the cycle of feeding. It is there that temporal sense and subjectivity appear. These are rhythms that indicate the presence of another, that bathe the child’s body in human presence. The child’s body, by means of variations of temperature, of texture, of light and of form, finds within the same gesture or within aesthetic forms the presence of self and the maternal presence (Safra, 1999).

What I mean to point out by this is that the origin of human subjectivity is played out in this register of sensory exchanges which reach the register of signifying codes, elements that indicate human presence and that give birth to the idiom of the mother-baby couple. This idiom is important not only because it is a field of codification, but also because it is an organisation that comes about over time. As the aesthetic experience of this couple continues, the baby has the opportunity to exist in sensory forms, he becomes a living being in the human world. A child who does not yet have at his disposal the equipment that would allow him to mediate his relation to the world through the symbolic field is extremely affected by the senses of temporality and by the spatial organisations that are aesthetically offered to him.

A world that exists only when shared

Hannah Arendt (1958) teaches us that the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others. The world consists in things, which owe their existence to men and which, in their turn, also condition their human authors. Thus, everything that enters the human world becomes part of the human condition. Work and its product, human artefacts, lend permanence and durability to the ephemeral character of human time. With each birth, the new beginning can make itself felt in the world, because the newcomer possesses the capacity to begin something new: to act. We enter the world by being born and we leave it by dying. The world transcends the span of our life, both in the past and in the future. It existed before our arrival and will outlive our brief presence. The birth of a human being and the death of human beings are not simple, natural events: they refer to a world towards which one comes and from which one departs, as unique individuals, singular entities, non-interchangeable and non-repeatable.

In the clinical situation, I have heard countless times patients speak of a kind of suffering in a way quite close to the formulations Arendt uses to speak of the human condition.

Without any doubt, it can be asserted that one must enter the world for the individual to feel alive and existing, but this must take place in a singular and personal way. It is not enough, for the humanisation of the baby, that the world be ready with its aesthetics, with its codes, with its myths. The child needs, through his gesture, to transform this world into himself. The world must, initially, be the child himself, so that he may appropriate the world and share it with another.

Shared reality is a construction of several, it is the field where the construction of all exists. With Arendt, we might assert that Existence is what appears to all.

Through the experience of omnipotence, the baby creates his mother, and this makes his entry into the world possible. It is a moment in which, through his gesture, he recreates in his own image and likeness the pre-existing world, transforming it through the mediation of his mother. It is also the point at which the ethnic dimension of his being is constituted for, inasmuch as the baby takes the maternal body for his own, he organises himself according to the ethnic aspects of the community into which he was born. These ethnic elements develop and grow finer throughout development, through the child’s shared life with the people of his environment, through the appropriation of the ethos reflected in the corporeality, in the emotions and in the attitudes of these significant others. The situation that does not occur before the other human being arises and vanishes like a gaze deprived of the reality of the shared world. This is the starting point from which the individual will come, throughout his history, to reach the various nuances of inhabiting the world shared with others.

With the maturation of the human baby, as the person makes his way towards the social field, there arises the necessity for the individual to be able to articulate, at one and the same time, private life and social life, in order to find, in the social field, insertions that preserve his style of being and his history. It is the moment of participation in society through work, through discourse, through the œuvre, through political action: in other words, of the creative capacity coming about in the world with others. Through creative action in the world, man collaborates in the durability of the world and in the historical process of society.

Rootedness, uprootedness and the human measure

Simone Weil (1943) has, on these questions, very lucid formulations. She teaches us that the human being has a root through his real, active and natural participation in the existence of a collectivity that keeps alive certain treasures of the past and a certain presentiment of the future. She warns us about the consequences of uprootedness, which can come about through unemployment, through the poor quality of work situations, through immigration, through the lack of instruction. For her, uprootedness is the most dangerous illness of human societies, since it multiplies itself. The uprooted, according to her, have only two possible behaviours: either they fall into an inertia of the soul, equivalent to death, or they throw themselves into an activity that perpetuates uprootedness, which can give birth to situations of intense violence.

In our times, this kind of problem is very serious. Our culture manifests itself, today, in a way that no longer reflects the human measure. Recreating the world and the social field becomes more complicated because, owing to the invasion of technique as the hegemonic factor of social organisation, the human being only rarely finds the measure of his being, the one that would allow him to establish the sense of self at each of the levels of reality necessary for the constitution and the becoming of his being.

In these times of ours, the mass media provide us with a world of information by means of aesthetic organisations. The aesthetics of the mass media rests upon the world of computing and presents us with a temporality that is ever faster and ever more remote from the time of human corporeality and subjectivity. The mass media also provide us with virtual space. It is these aesthetic perspectives that overflow into the various domains of human life. It is the world of communication. For the human being, the possibility of communicating with the other is fundamental, but so too is that of having no communication. It is important, for man, to have a visibility in the world, but also to hide from the world. The world organised by digitisation favours aesthetic organisations in which the conditions necessary for the appearance of human subjectivity are broken.

Citizenship, from this perspective, is instituted through the possibility that the human being has of inserting his singularity by means of his gesture. What is the porosity of today’s world for welcoming a gesture capable of creating the unprecedented within the field of the same? The creativity celebrated by the mass media, most of the time, seduces the human being with what is already established, with an immanence without transcendence, which leads him to the forgetting of his gesture, to the forgetting of himself and of his roots. The result of this phenomenon is the appearance of new forms of subjectivation and of violence as the expression of ethical fractures undergone and not recognised by the other. Art and culture have a very fruitful possibility of healing contemporary man, through a resisting action that opens the memory of the human ethos and of its ethics.

Four forms of suffering encountered in the clinic

Today, we witness countless forms of psychic suffering deriving from fractures of citizenship, from fractures of ethics. Each modality of ethical fracture, however, requires from the professional a specific handling of the situation of suffering he intends to care for.

In order to contribute to the discussion of this theme, I shall present the different forms of psychic suffering, liable to engender violent behaviours, that I have encountered in the clinic.

1. Humiliation

This situation derives from a process of social exclusion in which the human being is not only prevented from participating in the social field as a whole, but is fundamentally seen by the people of the dominant classes as inferior and contemptible. The result of this is a feeling of shame of oneself, which forbids the person’s gestures — those that might set in motion his becoming with others, as well as the possibility of a political action liable to transform his social situation. This subjective condition worsens when it runs across different generations for, in that case, the patient may already have lost the memory of the event that gave birth to the humiliation. It is not rare for this picture to be confused with a problem of narcissism, which constitutes a regrettable misunderstanding. In such cases, the transference established in the analytic situation reproduces the experience of humiliation, and the patient frequently makes his way through the process until a gesture that calls the work situation into question may come to be recognised as the gesture that seeks to institute dignity.

2. Uprootedness

This phenomenon occurs with ever greater intensity in the contemporary world. The most usual thing is to consider that uprootedness comes about in the ethnic register. In truth, it is something of far wider scope, for uprootedness occurs in the ethnic register, in the aesthetic register, in the ethical register.

2.1. Ethnic uprootedness occurs through the loss of the bond with the sensory and cultural elements that refer the human being back to the memory of his origin. There arises here a specific kind of solitude, which appears phenomenologically as an impossibility of belonging and of meeting one’s “fellows”. In such cases, it is fundamental that the professional should not confuse this situation with pictures deriving from the use of schizoid-type mechanisms. Here, the analyst will be, in the transference, the possible mediator of the bond with the elements that re-establish the fragmented ethnicity.

2.2. Aesthetic uprootedness occurs frequently in today’s world. It comes about because the aesthetic organisations of our time bear little relation to human bodily organisation. The body calls for rhythmic, temporal and spatial organisations akin to its own rhythms and dimensions. Excessively abstract aesthetic organisations, derived from the aesthetics of machines or of the digital world, lead to a kind of illness experienced as a sort of maddening, in which the body ceases to be the place that houses the psyche. It is frequent, in such cases, for the person to feel the need to come to organise the temporal and spatial dimensions within the psychotherapeutic consultation, in order to be able to find the experience of rest, of non-invasion, with the consequent appropriation of the body as his own.

2.3. Ethical uprootedness arises in a world that is not always governed by respect and by a responsibility towards the human. The human condition informs the child, prior to any intellectual acquisition, about the human ethos. Everything that is not aligned with this perspective is experienced by the child as a traumatic and violent situation, but one that cannot be represented, owing to the child’s immaturity. These children end up having a life perspective without hope and, frequently, in adolescence, they adopt a nihilistic ideology, and may develop antisocial behaviour. These people need the professional to suffer with them the terror of the violence they have lived through, and they long for it to be recognised that what they lived through was not ethical. Here again, it is worth stressing the importance of not confusing these cases with a simple affective depression, or with supposed personalities constituted with a low tolerance to frustration.

3. Invisibility

These patients live an experience of not being seen in the social field. It is a situation frequently accompanied by the feeling of humiliation, but in which the experience of not being seen takes precedence. In our world, people who occupy positions of low social prestige usually go unnoticed by others. The distress that follows from this situation is great: it can engender a despair and a bitterness or, in extreme cases, break out into violent behaviours as the only means of attaining some visibility. In the clinic, these are people who, having lived through an impediment to existing, seek not to occupy any space in the situation of the clinical consultation. They sometimes fear being seen by the psychotherapist and become troubled when they feel observed: the phantasy is that of enjoying something undue.

4. Oppressive technology

In our era, we live with a great technological development which, if on the one hand it has made life more comfortable for the human being, has on the other led to an organisation of the world in which inter-human relations themselves are technologically mediated. There is an abundance of diverse techniques: pedagogical, psychological, medical. The child tends, very early on, to see his life organised by specialists, so that we witness, nowadays, children whose diary is as full as that of a multinational executive. We encounter, in the contemporary clinic, people who, in reaction to a world constituted in this way, organise themselves outside the world. Here we see arising an affliction deriving from the fact that the human being encounters life situations that are anti-human. For example: we have today the presence of anti-human temporalities that govern human life, because they have no resonance with the rhythm of human corporeality. There are human relations that are no longer mediated by human codes, but by digital codes. This phenomenon brings the human being a kind of suffering that shatters his ethos into splinters. When a child finds himself faced with this kind of experience, he feels traversed by an enigma, and this enigma drives him mad. These are anti-technical subjectivities; they suffer from not feeling that they participate in the human world and, on the other hand, they cannot bear to live in a world that has forgotten the simple gesture. They often describe themselves as shadows or as spectres. In another article, I sought to characterise this kind of problem and I called them spectral. Whoever has been imprisoned in an enigmatic experience finds himself in a situation that incarcerates him in a confusional experience. These people need their relationship with the professional to return them to the simple and to what is originary in the human condition. They need fresh words that indicate to them that a saying is still possible. Very often they are confused with schizoid patients, but the spectral ones are the prophets of our time. They are the ones who keep the memory of the human and the hope of a future.