An impossible conversation

Nearly fifteen years ago, while walking off-season along a long empty beach in Cancún, Mexico, I ran into a friend and colleague who was also spending his holidays in that country. It was an entirely fortuitous encounter, a chance meeting that surprised and delighted us both: although we had been very good friends, we had not seen each other in years. He was living — as he had done all his life — in a country which for five years had been under a regime of state terror, subjected to an extremely violent and repressive system of total control of the means of communication, arbitrary arrests, torture and disappearances.

We began to walk together along that deserted beach, taking stock of our respective lives and wonders. At one point I asked him:

“— In what way do you feel the presence in your life of political violence, of the death squads?” Casting a quick glance over his right shoulder, then over his left, my friend gave me a look mingling surprise and reproach, and said to me in a low voice:

“— It would be better if we did not talk about that now.”

Surprised by his manner, I said to him:

“— Come on, look around you, look where we are!”

Annoyed, he answered: “Later, not now.”

To me it was clear that the context in which this conversation was taking place was in no way dangerous — there were no witnesses, we were far from any ear, and our meeting was moreover happening in a democratic country. It was equally clear to me that my friend’s answers were the evidence of a “portable reality” (a felicitous term coined by the family therapist Donald A. Bloch). A reality that contradicted everything I held to be certain, and in which the sensitive subjects I had raised were perceived by him as too dangerous to be discussed.

Two returns to democracy

A few years later, at a professional congress held in Argentina a few months after the election of the first civilian government to follow ten years of military dictatorship, I gave a plenary lecture that included excerpts from a recorded interview with a family some of whose members had disappeared (1).

During the question-and-answer period that followed the presentation, the comments focused overwhelmingly on what seems to have been a collective reaction to my material. That reaction first took the form of extreme alarm (“This is dangerous! The police will arrive at any moment!”). This initial response was followed by the discovery that things were different, an awakening of the experience of freedom, and a deep jubilation mingled with sadness.

It had been, according to the collective voice, a liberating and corrective experience.

Several years after that episode, in 1990, I had the privilege of delivering the opening address of a family therapy congress in Chile, a congress that coincided with the country’s return to democracy.

In the course of that address I used harsh words to speak of the previous repressive military regime (I referred to them, I believe, as “gorillas armed with machine guns”). During the break that followed the opening ceremony, two members of the audience came to find me and, after kindly praising my address, complained that I had used those epithets: it was important, they said, that I should address all the members of the audience, including those who had supported the earlier military regime. “The leaders of the previous regime are human beings too”, they maintained, “and we are at this moment in a period of ‘national reconciliation’.”

The words that repressive regimes proscribe

Repressive political regimes — and, to a lesser degree, all political regimes — make preferential use of certain official terms and certain codes in order to reinforce their ideology. At the same time, these regimes discourage, or purely and simply proscribe, the public use of certain expressions.

Repressive governments carry out this process by punishing those who use the forbidden expressions or themes, and by making selective use of those same words and those same themes, but steeped in threatening semantic contexts. Those who hold power also actively employ a series of official formulas which not only recall the proscription mentioned above, but establish a version of the facts approved by the authorities.

Thus, in the documents and decrees of an autocratic government, the official use of the term “social cost”, which refers to the negative impact of a policy on people’s well-being, does not merely create a context of justification for that measure: it also serves as a reminder that the government will not accept alternative descriptions. For example, freezing wages and raising the price of the household shopping basket by fifty per cent will have a “social cost” that the government judges acceptable, without regard for the suffering these acts inflict on the majority of the population. An alternative description, which would acknowledge that thousands of children risk dying of malnutrition as a result of these measures, would not be recognised as valid, and would moreover expose whoever advanced it to serious risks.

The expression “the final solution to the Jewish question”, of sinister Nazi origin, belongs to this class of terminology. People who live in repressive political environments learn not to discuss certain concepts and not to utter certain words in public. In many cases this proscription extends to their private life: these people choose not to use such words even at home. This repression of politically sensitive words and themes has complex consequences.

It excludes from the domain of discourse — and, by extension, from the domain of personal perception — the concepts or the facts that these words name, thereby generating blind spots which, while in fact restricting life, may also serve to make it more bearable (2). The post-war argument of the “good Germans” who said they “did not know” about the torture or the genocide, even though they and their families may have lived for years at a very short distance from a concentration camp, is a clear example of the process by which facts that cannot be described are bound to disappear from our conceptual field.

It is worth stressing that, even in countries with highly repressive governments, there is always an “underground” set of “keepers of the forbidden words” — those who, defying the proscription in the company of their safest friends, in the intimacy of their own home or in the secrecy of their own soul, keep alive both the words and the concepts to which they refer. These courageous people are nevertheless the exception. Adopting a personal policy of avoiding the forbidden words, with the corresponding production of blind spots that erase the concepts underlying those words, is the rule for those who live in repressive political circumstances — including many mental health professionals who must carry out their daily work under those political conditions.

What shifts towards emblems

In the same way, in countries with repressive governments, part of what is held to be “subversive” is kept alive by the displacement of forbidden words towards other emblems or symbols of defiance of authority.

Under the Argentine military regime, for example, the audience — mostly young and middle-class — who had come to the recital of a popular singer greeted her with applause and enthusiastic shouts when she struck up the Spanish version of the French ballad “Je te chante, liberté”. At the same period, in Chile, a song became an icon of protest and defiance because it contained a line evoking lights that were going out in the month of September, an apparent allusion to Pinochet’s coup against Allende, which had occurred in that month.

And in Brazil, a famous singer gave a series of recitals in the course of which he confined himself to playing several of his songs on the guitar without singing them, because their lyrics — which spoke of poverty and oppression — had been proscribed by the military government, while his audience, full of fervour, sang the words in chorus in his place. All these examples are moving because they show the suppleness of the collective mind, and pathetic because they give the measure of how far tyrants will go to suppress the words they deem dangerous.

Emerging from proscribed words

At this moment in history, even if certain nations remain under totalitarian regimes and others move from one form of authoritarianism to another, there are still grounds for optimism. Repressive and politically oppressive governments are being replaced in many places by more open and more democratic leaders. This is what is happening in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and other Latin American countries.

Thus countless citizens, among them many professionals in the field of mental health, are emerging or have emerged from a long period of their lives infested with proscribed words and forbidden concepts, ready to open themselves to concepts and meanings that had been eliminated from their construction of reality after years spent living and working under the state terrorism of a repressive government.

A semantic exorcism

During a workshop that I led at the Chilean family therapy congress I referred to above, and with the advantage of not having been exposed to the political and cultural experiences of the participants from the host country, I conducted an experiential exercise that the participants found extremely illuminating and that was, without a doubt, highly revealing for me. I began the workshop as I began this essay: by telling the story of my encounter on the beach and of my presentation at that congress in Argentina. I went on by exchanging with the participants about the words and themes that cannot be expressed, and about the words and themes that constitute, in counterpoint, the “official story”.

After this introduction, I invited the participants — some seventy Latin American therapists, some still living under repressive governments, others in the process of emerging from them — to take part in an experience. I described it as an exorcism intended to widen their semantic territory and extend their freedom. I then asked them to name words that were or had been forbidden in their country of origin.

I began to write on the board a list with the words spoken by the few who were willing to open fire. But, as the list grew longer, the words began to surge forth, hurled at full voice from the four corners of the room, in an atmosphere of growing excitement, recognition and hilarity, interrupted by moments of sombre contemplation. I thus put together a list of forbidden words that included, among many others: torture, desaparecido (disappeared person), repression, intellectual, barbudo (bearded man), leftist, milico (a slang and contemptuous term for a soldier) and terricos (the contribution of a Peruvian therapist, who described it as a derivative of “terrorists”, in reference to the Shining Path guerrillas in his country). I then drew up a second list of terms, corresponding to the “official story”, such as social cost, national reconciliation and national unity.

Once the two lists were complete, I invited the workshop participants to form discussion groups of four or five people, with the task of conversing among themselves while actively using the words of the first list. This activity was described as a kind of festival aimed at freeing those words from proscription. The task was carried out with evident joy and enthusiasm, in groups full of laughter, emphatic gestures and impassioned tones.

Twenty minutes later, I managed to recover the participants’ attention. I asked them to comment on their experience of the exercise. Without exception, they expressed an almost militant enthusiasm. Some said that using those words had been for them like saying “dirty words”, and that they had taken great pleasure in uttering them. And the lists on the board grew richer with new words.

After the great majority of the groups had delivered their personal comments and everyone had had the opportunity to share their observations, I brought the session to an end, congratulating the participants on their active participation in the experience and urging them to hold high the banner of the struggle for freedom of thought and speech. In the following days, during the rest of the congress of which this session was part, many workshop participants stopped me in a corridor or in other informal places to express their gratitude and to tell me of the feeling of liberation they had experienced.

An exercise in deutero-learning

Concerning this experience, it is important to bear in mind that it was not I who supplied the words: both lists were built from the terminology brought by the participants. It should also be noted that neither the experience as a whole nor the words on the lists were specific to the use of the participants’ countries of origin. On the contrary, people from different countries proposed words for the list of the “proscribed story” as well as for that of the “official story”.

Having characterised this experience as an open-ended task for the participants, as part of a process that never comes to an end, it is clear that I conceived of it as an experience of “deutero-learning”, that is, of “learning to learn”. The experience aimed at making the participants more sensitive not only to the ways in which repressive political environments had restricted their semantic resources, but also at showing how the process of the gradual recovery of their language and, indeed, of their thought processes could be accomplished.

The effect of this experience on the experimenter deserves to be noted: it proved not only extremely enriching for me, but also more powerful than I had anticipated. It interested me enough for me to repeat it, with small variations, in groups of professionals in several countries that were emerging from dictatorship.

And the friend on the beach?

But what became of the friend I met on the beach, the colleague who made me reflect on the persistent effects of the suppression of words and thoughts, and on the need to recover our vocabulary?

Since that encounter, now fifteen years ago, many thoughts and unanswered questions have arisen in me.

In what way were this scotomisation, these semantic blind spots, reflected in my colleague’s clinical practice? Does this severe restriction, perhaps an essential element of survival for many in a repressive and violent society, not undermine one of the categorical imperatives of our profession — that of enriching the number and the quality of our patients’ options?

The experience, the workshop I described above, was conceived as an antidote, as the example of a type of activity that can be developed in order to neutralise the effects of that linguistic and conceptual emptying which results from dictatorships.

It can be a step towards restoring — in the world of therapists and also in the lives of their patients — the legitimacy of vital concepts and practices whose banishment might otherwise become the dark legacy of repressive regimes. If psychotherapy is a practice that aims at enriching the language and the thought processes of our patients in order to help them extend the number and the quality of their options in life, then it is crucial that those of us who exercise this practice should preach by example.