A CHRONICLE OF SHAME - CHAPTER 8 - HOWLING WITHOUT END

 

The Petit Séminaire de Québec, a Monday morning in January 1968. I wasn't yet 17. I entered through the main door of the college, diagonally opposite the cathedral; we were there, precisely, in the land of New France. The porter said nothing to me, just greeted me, he must have recognized me. He had seen me recently, coming in late one very cold evening, carrying a letter to one of the school's priests. No problem this Monday morning, he let me through and I went to the senior common room. I put my clothes in my locker and went to my French class, a lesson with the good Father G, who had already expelled me from class because my hair was too long! But that morning, I wasn't in the mood to rebel, or even to think about my imminent suicide, which I was constantly brooding over and discussing with myself in silence. I had a black notebook in which I wrote down whatever came into my head during class, in a coded script, so that no one could ever understand the real meaning of what I scribbled down. “Am I going to kill myself?” was what came up over and over again, exactly as it was, deciphered correctly. A 16-year-old young man repeatedly wrote, through lines in which he detailed his despair, “Will I commit suicide?” with elegance, ” am I going to kill myself? as if, despite everything, a classical form were required for the expression of his suffering, a form that was not the creeping, often coarse fascism of Quebec City - a fascism that persists, moreover, in this city that has an easy tendency to scandalize, to denounce abundantly, to believe that it is necessary to freeze time and cling as best one can to what must last. 

When I was 16, I had a hard time imagining what was causing me so much pain, while my father often yelled at those homosexuals who should all be whipped to death, and the little neighbor upstairs only talked about sex, a predator greedy for the hidden vices of others, for the simple pleasure of denouncing them and causing opprobrium, I couldn't bring myself to talk about what was really bothering me, to anyone, especially not to my parents—and on that point, I knew perfectly well, despite my confusion, that talking would put my parents in danger, especially my father. So that morning, I went into class, sat down at my desk, and waited for a reply to a handwritten letter, six pages of tight writing that I had sent to the school's psychologist-priest. I was suffering from such loneliness and distress that I needed help, urgently. I had absolutely no idea where to go, who to turn to, and writing to Father N seemed to me to be the only possible alternative, especially since I had no money, and it was out of the question, radically out of the question, that I should go through my parents, who must have known nothing about me and who in any case, thinking of my mother, would have refused to pay. I was certain that I would get a reply, that I would be called, finally, and recognized, and loved; that I would be able to escape, to talk, to be helped and rescued; that I would survive. It wasn't long before there was a knock on the classroom door. A student went to answer it, received an envelope, came to my desk, and placed the letter in front of me. I opened it immediately and read: “I may not be the psychologist you are hoping for. Come and see me tomorrow evening, Tuesday, at my office. Call to confirm. ” I was swept away by an almost suffocating explosion of joy; for a brief moment, I was absolutely happy. The order of things that I had endured without understanding was about to be reversed. Freedom was close at hand. The country would be new. I remember the look on my classmates' faces, on the French teacher who was searching for God in the work of André Gide: I am saved, sir, I am saved, friends! And that was the case, indeed, I was going to be saved, by a priest, a true man of God.

I went to my first appointment with the certainty that I would be cured in a short time and that I would be like everyone else, without that embarrassment which, since the schoolyard of my early childhood, had isolated me from others and made me feel ashamed to the point of modifying my DNA. I went to this first appointment with the conviction that from now on I would be liked by others without effort, and desired above all as a friend, without panic flooding over me and dishonor overwhelming me. I was finally going to have friends other than the few who just about tolerated me in their circle. What if I could have another chance? What if I could find a way to change my life, radically, easily, through the simple power of a priest who was a psychologist and healer of distress? I was suffering extremely at that time, with almost no specific word to describe what was hurting so much without the body really suffering, except for the cadaverous thinness and the dull gaze, and spasms that tore at my chest that I mistook for heart attacks. In class, I was dizzy enough and often enough to undergo a few thorough medical examinations, which, incidentally, produced no results. Nothing. “He's a nervous one, a bit of a lunatic,” the family doctor had said, laughing. That was it, nothing serious, everything was being taken care of, and my mother could sleep peacefully, the family was safe and sound. To Father N, however, I had written that I was in pain, that it was intolerable, minute after minute, that I was alone, without emergency help, that I was hurt and that I was ashamed of myself, that I was constantly living in the torment of an unbearable family intimacy that was driving me crazy.

Father N was smiling, warm and welcoming from the first meeting, which lasted a few hours in the evening, after his day at work, after my day at school. I had justified my absence from home by saying I had work to do at the library, and that was to be my convenient excuse for several years. He was frank with me right from the start: “I'm not sure I can help you”, but he was already doing it, he had already done it, simply by summoning me, by talking to me affectionately, as if I were one of his best, one of those whose acquaintance and company he desired. It was extraordinary. I didn't dirty him. Even sitting in one of his armchairs, I didn't sully anything. I didn't demean him by the simple fact of being there. He didn't even hide from my presence in his office. I asked him, “How long will it take to become normal?” He said six months, certainly without believing it.

“But why did you choose me to help you? There are psychiatrists, people more competent than me, there are your parents...”

The essential questions, from the very first meeting.

“My parents, no, never, and if you have to contact them, I'll leave right away, I need your help, but it must remain absolutely secret, and I'll make you swear on it...”

He laughed heartily, but promised.

“However, if I knew your parents, I might understand more quickly than if I listen to you for weeks on end...”

“Maybe. But it was out of the question, totally.”

“I'll ask you again, why me? I hardly know you... You're an ordinary student, I haven't noticed you much...”

I replied that he had often smiled at me. I also told him, and I remember this very well too, that I thought he was handsome. He laughed at the compliment and asked me if I reminded him of my father. “Absolutely not! ” I had no sexual desire for Father N, nor would I ever have any. But I found him healthy, clean and respectful, and above all, above all, I believed in his affection for me, for a long time. He had somewhat disillusioned me on that point that evening, although he had specified: “I believe that you choose me because I could be the father you wish to have. ” This surrogate father received me, listened to me, set up future appointments for me; he took charge of me and set about helping me, healing me, and that was all that mattered for a suicidal, isolated 16-year-old with no one to count on and no lasting bond of trust. Father N had just given me back the right to exist, the right to life.

I saw Father N for years, every week, except in the summer - and even then, I didn't hesitate to go and visit him if I needed to, and not once, not once did he refuse to see me, not once. We did a lot of work together. I made him cry when I confessed to him that I wished my father would die, through no fault of my own, but that he would die, this father who terrorized me, made me sick and disgusted me. I also told him about the episode at the chalet, my father in his red swimming trunks, the sexual desire, the ensuing terror. He remained silent for a long time. “Perhaps you had an immense need for this father, and this need took on this erotic form...” I was so ignorant about sex that he made me read, among other things, a book, I remember, La formation du lien sexuel (The Formation of the Sexual Bond), which I devoured, explored with him, like a revelation, a lifting of the silence on these things that are nevertheless fundamental, essential to understand in order to have a taste for being alive. I don't believe he ever suspected the sexual crime that lurked in the depths of my history, and which was radically repressed - my father was still alive. But it was with him that I learned about men and women, Oedipus and castration, desire and deprivation, the right to life and freedom. One day, when I was a university student at the time, I told him that I was “ceasing the fight against homosexuality, that it was me, my identity, my nature, and that I accepted the consequences of this choice”. He replied that people were stronger than we thought, including our loved ones, and that they generally accepted who we were more easily than we did. I have never forgotten that either. Father N behaved like a father, then like a big brother who had no desire for me, but who loved me; and because he loved me, he did what any good father or big brother should do, accept without disgust, accept in spite of everything, in spite of the possible disappointment.

I had reached my early twenties, better, much better in my skin, and I now had friends, many friends, whom I loved. I wanted to leave home as soon as possible, rent my first apartment, have a boyfriend, be in love. I ended up finding myself the apartment of my dreams, a brand new place in a building with a lift, progress, modernity, and I literally ran to the Petit Séminaire to announce my final liberation to Father N. It was summer, it was hot, we both went out for a beer on Rue du Trésor. “Invite me to your place, I'd love to see where you live.” What, did I hear right, Father N, my surrogate “father”, invited to a place where I was going to have homosexual sexual practices, to a place of sexual intimacy? I fantasized very clearly, on the spot and in his presence, that he might try to make some kind of approach, express an absolutely forbidden sexual desire. Withdrawal, panic, coldness, a sense of doom... I was never going to see Father N again. By hiding from him what was, in spite of myself, driving me to distance myself from him, I missed the chance to address the fundamental problem that was ruining my life. He never found out. He never tried to get back in touch with me. He behaved like a good person, a true professional. He didn't force anything; it was the right thing to do, even though I missed him a lot.

I owe everything to the man who remained for me “Father N”, certainly enough self-esteem to enable me to live, fortunately enough, for a good ten years afterwards. That's a lot. I never received as much for free from anyone as I did from him. I certainly think I was a much better teacher when it came to my turn to teach and sometimes have to help. Father N once told me that he doubted grace “if not in the people we meet. ” I was lucky, I had this grace, and as I write my story, I know that this immense favor has been essential in my life.

I was far from suspecting, at the age of 22, when I broke away from Father N, that the evil would resurface again ten years later, worse than ever, and that I would, with a few interruptions, be in therapy all my life, until my early sixties. It doesn't change how much I owe him.

There had been ten years, just ten years of calm. But I knew, more and more, because there were worrying signs - a first night of complete insomnia, violent migraines, frequent depressive episodes, even suicidal fantasies - that I would have to go back to the path of consultations, of helping relationships, as they were called at the time. What attracted me, when I discovered what a group insurance contract was, was the coverage for mental health care. That's all I checked, year after year, when I received the updated contract at the start of the school year at the end of August.

And then I saw, in La Presse, an ad published by the psychiatry department of the Royal Victoria Hospital that was looking for volunteers to test a new anti-anxiety drug. I naturally imagined a miracle drug, a definitive victory for contemporary pharmacology research, the promise of an immediate and effortless cure, and the disappearance of the old mental illness... I filled in and posted the coupon. It was at the same time, in the exact same month, that I had set about writing my story with a view to turning it into a family saga, perhaps. After waiting for several months, I received a call to arrange a meeting with the psychiatrist in charge of the program, who questioned me at length. “Do you have any recurring dreams? ” I told him, just like that, spontaneously, that as a child I often dreamt that I had put on roller skates and was walking through the streets of Quebec City. I always ended up losing control of the skates and invariably fell into a crack, a huge crevice in the street. I would slide into the void, a deep, endless void. He replied that medication could do nothing for me, that I needed to undergo psychoanalysis, which was the best thing. “Read Marie Cardinal's Les mots pour le dire. It's the same path you have to take. ” I protested, a little, about the cost of psychoanalysis, “the cost of a house.” He took a piece of paper, wrote down the name of Marie Cardinal: “this is your prescription.”

Then there was the psychiatrist, with his padded office, his baroque chairs, a few shelves of books with Freud's works prominently displayed, a psychiatrist I saw once a week, fifty minutes per session, the listening always interrupted by the telephone, by the secretary, by the nurse who taught patients deep relaxation. For him, as for other medical specialists I saw later, homosexuality was necessarily an anomaly, if not a pathology underlying a narcissistic personality. That was the diagnosis I heard, invariably, so that he constantly made comments to me as a man to a man presumed to be potentially heterosexual, if at least one of the two, the patient, managed to resolve his Oedipus complex, to recognize the fear he had of his mother's desire. “You don't know the depth of the panic fear that can be caused by the fear of sexual relations with a woman,” he once told me. Penis possession, he also said, ‘is dangerous because it gives the power to realize bad plans,’ for example, to sleep with one's mother and fear the father's revenge. It was during the years I was in therapy with him that I became very ill, certain that I had plunged into full-blown schizophrenia, at best that I was a borderline personality, really, really borderline... He replied that this was, once again, the expression of a caricatural narcissism that took pleasure in telling me that I was very ill, exceptionally ill, when the reality was that I was ordinarily ill. And yet, as the years went by, far from recovering, I became more and more terrified, disorganized, and the dreams I told him about certainly involved incest, but with my father or my brother, which was surprising, especially since they completely ignored the seductive mother. He had his doubts, expressed them, deliberately emphasized how submissive I was to him, “obsequious, very, very nice, to the point that I could have you at my beck and call. ” Behind that, he said, there was a strong resistance, a fear that was justified: “when you think you might lose out in an exchange, you fear and avoid any exchange; the exchange itself. ”Despite everything, I always remained convinced that the Doctor was protecting my father and that he was taking care of my mother, “whom I absolutely wanted to please.” It had become a dead end, especially since, while he listened to dreams, the Doctor did not hear the unconscious.

Several years after it was prescribed for me, I read Les mots pour le dire by Marie Cardinal. It was a Sunday, and I read all evening and all night long, sometimes laughing, but mostly fascinated by this story and by this universal book, which became the most important and meaningful book of my entire life.

All those who have read Les mots pour le dire will remember, I am sure, the psychoanalysis session in which Marie Cardinal recovers a deeply repressed memory from her early childhood, when she was crouching down to pee in the grass, watching herself do it and finding the experience exciting. Her father was behind her; he was filming her, raping her, raping that moment of sexual intimacy. During the session, she recalled this aggression, and was suddenly freed from a hallucination, a tube that had been grafted onto her eye, a hallucination that terrified her and which originated in her father's very gaze, prolonged by the eye of the camera that penetrated her.

I envied, and still envy, the exceptional success of her analysis.

The doctor who had prescribed Marie Cardinal's book for me was right: I too had to undergo psychoanalysis.

So there was, as I have said, the emergency call to Julien Bigras, and then, immediately, the relay to François Peraldi, for four years and two months, at the rate of four sessions a week. I still feel nostalgic for him, for him, but also for his beautiful house on rue Jeanne-Mance, for the time spent waiting in his living room, where I would smoke one or two cigarettes while I waited for him to come and get me, without saying a word, just nodding towards the small room where the couch was. I loved that wait, those 10 or 15 minutes before the session, when I would really get into the personal relationship I would have with him afterwards. That wait was actually the first concrete expression of the pleasure I had in being with him, in his home, in his private space. I never looked at who was going to confide in him before me, who was following me: over time, it didn't matter. Only my relationship with him mattered, as if I had been his only patient. This selfishness, I know now, is essential to psychoanalysis, otherwise, you say nothing, you meet no one, and above all, you certainly do not meet yourself. When I recently reread my notes taken over the years, often written immediately after the sessions, I was surprised to see how coherent they were, a real analysis in progress, a clear story, and I realized that Peraldi knew what was going on in my head, that he was telling me things clearly, and that if I misunderstood, it was because there was resistance, reinforced by the daily anxiety that remained stubborn. These sessions, where suddenly something crucial was communicated, remained exceptional. Most of the time, I remained silent rather than repeat the same symptoms, but I remember an evening session, in winter, when I looked out the French window overlooking the courtyard for a long time, at the swing covered with snow, and the view of downtown Montreal in the distance, blurred by the snow falling slowly: I felt good, it was gentle, and I deliberately etched this image into my memory, to remember it for the rest of my life.

During the last months of his life, he persisted in continuing to see me four times a week, defying his approaching death, I imagine, to which, that, I am certain, he gave no other meaning than death itself - although he made me understand that it could sometimes be desired, eroticized, embodied, as was clearly the case in some of my dreams. Peraldi was a humanist in the strongest sense of the word, and on the left, I understood him—and heard him! —a few times. So he wanted to do what he could while he lived, certainly believing until the last moment that he could help me live better, without unnecessary suffering, while amplifying, in the very process of “healing” (a word, I believe, that he did not like very much), the liberation of the terrified desire that I had for others and the timid desire that I had to be a man of justice and goodness. It was also with him that I understood the disaster that is the perversion of pleasure in the learning of oneself. He would tell me that something terrible had happened to me, an expression that has remained in constant use between him and me. Something terrible, yes, because it perverts life, joy, pleasure, desire and sexuality, love and social commitment, and it structures phobias that paralyze freedom and mimic wisdom in all its morbidity. Peraldi, I believe, did not distinguish between psychoanalysis and revolution, both personal and social; I still had a lot to learn from him on that score, starting with courage, responsibility, and a taste for a job well done.

Towards the end, I could see him visibly losing weight, despite the beard he had grown and the large poncho that covered him from shoulders to feet. He nevertheless retained his acuity, his listening skills, his frankness and even the warmth of his welcome. But I was worried, of course, and it was through a dream that I told him what I guessed about his state of health, a dream in which I had seen a photo of me as a teenager, with a beard, printed in a newspaper, presented in “a small article framed in black”. It was January 1993. “It's about me, this article. This article announces my death.” I understood immediately. I was a complete idiot for having revealed so innocently the tragic end that was coming. I asked him what was wrong with him: he replied that it was ‘glandular’, and that was it, because everything had been said, there was no escape.

I met with Mr. Péraldi for the last time at midday on a Friday in February, the only time slot that had never varied since the start of the analysis. “I won't see you next week, I'm going to take some time off.” On the table to the left of the sofa, where I sometimes placed the cash with which I paid for the sessions, there were my notebooks, which I had lent to him at his request. The following week, he called me back to tell me that he was taking a second week off. At the beginning of March, on the 8th I believe, he telephoned to tell me that we had to stop the analysis, but that maybe in May or June... I said to him: “This is a disaster for you and for me”. He replied: “Come and see me in the next few days, you know where I live, of course.” I still regret not having done so. I loved him. And he was offering me the chance to make a gesture of freedom with him, in defiance of all prohibitions - and of my banal shyness. I missed out on something important, sacrificing my freedom and the affection I had for him to my fear, still very much alive despite everything, of any intimacy with paternal representations, and with the human species by filiation.

On a Tuesday morning, March 23, 1993, I received a phone call from a man informing me that François Peraldi had died the previous Sunday at the end of the day. “He made a list of people to call, your name was on the list. There will be no funeral. ” That was all. I went to work as usual and was in class that afternoon. Experiencing this bereavement alone was all the more painful because I was unable to express any gratitude to his loved ones. I had never said thank you to him.

“Would you say that you are discovering the world?" Peraldi once asked me - a day of great anguish, when I would look at people in the metro with a sharp, scrutinizing gaze, as if I were excluding myself from a strange spectacle, as if life did not concern me, as if I were escaping the destiny of living beings. Introducing myself to the world, opening up to others, is surely one of the most tangible experiences I have gained from psychoanalysis. In the short term, this escape from narcissistic withdrawal had been terrifying. “You felt anxiety because you came out of the psychic cocoon that ‘enemizes’ the others that you gradually discover, a little frightened. The unconscious is afraid. It is afraid of change. It does not correctly assess the unknown.” Peraldi had told me about the exaggerated importance I gave myself, about my habit of putting myself at the center of everything, which the psychiatrist had strongly criticized me for, saying that “it was the normal importance that a small child gives himself in front of his father, something that was not adequately explained to you. If the identification with the father was passionate and sexual, the importance that the small child will accord himself will be considerable. ” The real question therefore became: “When did your father say no to you?” Placing my brother's role in my story, he had said to me: “Your brother gave you one, a penis, but it is literally understood. He gives it and he takes it away, which provokes desire and expectation, and establishes idealized love, perceived as saving. He could have taught you, but in the end he refused. "He told me several times that there was a link between my inability to see myself in a mirror, my inability to see myself in a photo, and my inability to see myself in a signature. It's not depersonalization, but rather a fantasy of invisibility, if not autism. ” And when you sign, for example, a credit card statement, “the simple fact that there is a duplicate signature splits you, divides you, and brings out the Other, the one who has experienced what has been encapsulated, and identifies it; this Other is afraid, feels guilty, and trembles. It is normal that you have associated this with schizophrenia. "Furthermore, and still following the same logic, ”the simple fact of becoming a couple divides you: the other becomes the Other, and you dissociate yourself from them. It is stronger than you. It is a very ancient reaction to a very real aggression. The other, the partner, frightens you, like a mirror, a photo, a signature. So he has to get away, you have to make him disappear. ”

When Peraldi telephoned me in March 1993, he told me that whatever happened to him, my psychoanalysis was very advanced. I had my doubts. (He was right, however.) But I didn't want to continue with another analyst. From then on, I wanted to change my approach. Shortly after Peraldi's death, I consulted an excellent psychiatrist, who knew Peraldi, about what to do next. She recommended Thomas Lebeau, a social worker, psychotherapist, “one of the best specialists in the problems of child sexual abuse in Quebec.” I met him for the first time in October 1993. With the exception of a few absences, the most significant being from 1999 to 2002, I went to see him and his sexologist wife, with whom he worked in tandem, until the day before my sixtieth birthday.

From the first meeting with Thomas, I unpacked the procession of daily horrors that I was still suffering from, and recounted in detail what my brother had told me about the things he did to me, the nights when he came to suck me, and force my hand, and penetrate my mouth, while I “slept”, six-year-old little brother, shaken by spasms, moaning when it was too much, but otherwise silent, petrified object entirely at his mercy. It came out of me like a long vomit, with always this urgency to detach myself, and above all to remember, finally, to see the monster, to name it, to face it, and to put an end to madness once and for all.

“Do you know what it's like, Richard, for a child's body to suffer this violence? Well, it's like plugging a 100-watt light bulb into a 220-volt socket. A child's body is not designed to survive such powerful sensations. The result is called post-traumatic stress disorder.”

What a huge relief not to be labeled as a personality responsible for everything, when psychiatry considers that there is only truth in the DSM. “You are a victim, Richard”; it is not about feeling sorry for yourself, but about realizing that what happened to you is not your fault, is not your choice, and was never consented to. You are experiencing the same symptoms as soldiers returning from war.” Thomas lived and received his clients in Rawdon, in a magnificent house built in the middle of a huge property, probably a former livestock farm. I expressed my reluctance to take the road once a week and travel to his home in Rawdon for a one-hour appointment, when it would take me two hours to make the round trip. “Well, it will already be therapy, and it will help you overcome your phobia of the car.” I made that journey for almost 20 years, never an accident, but snowstorms, thick fog, a few mechanical breakdowns, and even a flood!

With Thomas, I was going to address the very experience of sexual abuse, in every possible way, questionnaires, diagrams, a lot of writing, and because I strongly affirmed the need to remember the crime (while Thomas doubted this necessity), he quickly offered me to participate in a group therapy where he would also participate, as a therapist and facilitator of one of the groups, and where I could perhaps, by hearing the stories of others, remember the decisive details of my own story.

During the first year of group therapy, we were only among “adults sexually abused in childhood” - that's how it was said, to refer to the wounded and troubled adults that we all were, companions for whom I still have immense affection and unwavering solidarity. One evening, Thomas, who was one of the two psychologists to supervise us, and who accompanied us in our collective healing process, affirmed at some risk: “It is probable, in any case studies and experience tend to show it, that sexual abuse does more damage to little boys than to little girls, because it breaks the sexual identity of the little boy. Because his body reacted, and it showed, it will instill in him a shame specifically related to doubt about his sexual identity, a shame that will be added to that of the sexual abuse itself. ” In our group of about ten people, there were six girls, but four boys, one of whom was in the process of sex reassignment. He began to cry with all his body, he cried for the entire two and a half hours of the group session, and when he managed to utter a word, a sentence, it was to violently denounce his father, her father whose cancer he was glad was killing him, eating away at him where, he said, he had raped his little boy and made him the broken man he was. I don't know what happened to her afterwards. I hope she is now a woman who enjoys being attractive, in harmony with herself; I hope she is in love, that she is being fucked with pleasure and happiness, in new genitals untouched by her father; I hope she has fully embraced the sexual identity that she had the courage to assume, knowing that the woman she wanted to become was correcting her father's incestuous desire and the assaults he had committed.

I discovered, during the two years of group therapy, that the symptoms that humiliated me so much, revealed in front of a group of adults who had all been sexually abused at some point in their childhood or adolescence, were part of common revelations, that I could recognize myself in the emotional disorders experienced by other people, men and women, and that I was not a madman, condemned to terror and loneliness, holed up in my corner.

However, there was a sense of modesty about talking openly about sex, and as there was no question of hurting anyone, few participants described the attacks they had suffered. I often called for it, though. I told what I knew, about my father, my brother especially, a few snippets of memories that have always stayed with me, and what my brother revealed to me, of course. A young woman in the group also humorously recounted her father's dog-catching: “Backwards, you know what that is? ” I didn't know. She then launched into a colorful description, so long and insistent that a participant had to ask her to stop to prevent her from hurting herself even more. An exceptional case, a young man of French origin who had not had enough of the Atlantic Ocean to escape the horror and isolate himself from his family, had been abused by his mother. He was a remarkable artist, but he too was very suffering and twisted like the others.

I once said that I rarely had sex anymore, but that if I did, I always stimulated myself using incestuous fantasies, the ones that came to me spontaneously and that I imagined as being truly lived and felt, there, in my bed, substituting my father or my brother for the real person who simply wanted to make love without any fuss. To my great surprise, this was also the experience of the majority of the group participants, perhaps even all of them. A young woman, a single mother, confided to me, one-on-one, that I had relieved her of an enormous burden of guilt by talking about it: she thought she was singularly immoral and perverse because she too had a wide range of actions that she remembered her abuser, her grandfather, repeating over and over again to make him come and to make what was happening in bed feel exciting. I went back to that immediately in a private session with Thomas, who told me that we were dealing with a particularly clear aftereffect of sexual abuse, which for a long time had been the theoretical certainty of the seducer child, who makes everything up.

I was on the eve of retiring when I last saw Thomas. I have not heard from him since. I imagine that he and his wife were finally able to destroy the endless file they had on me, the follow-up carried out week after week, systematically.

- What do you do with it?

- After five years, we use it to light the fireplace!

This story, told so closely and always noted with precision, went up in smoke. But I remember. I remember the episodes of severe depression that Thomas had to mop up. I remember the detailed explanations of dissociation and memory suppression. I remember the concept of depersonalization as a means of withdrawing from others and isolating myself in my own bubble. I remember the family system that always supports sexual abuse. I still remember being clearly told that a person who has often been abused as a child will fear being abused throughout their life. A small child who survives incestuous desire, which he has experienced far too early in his life, is doomed, for the rest of his days, never again to conceive of desire, neither his own nor, above all, that of others, which he always presumes to be unspeakable. I understood, as best I could, but I understood that I had repressed an extremely strong rage, and that it was also this that made me so guilty and so unsociable. I realized that it was inevitable that I would experience considerable sexual confusion. I finally realized, often, that the lamentable complaints I could make were psychosomatic: fear had made its mark, as irremediably as in a fabulous fossil.

I told my partner that this chapter, initially titled “Therapies,” would ultimately be titled “Howling without end.” He pointed out to me that it could just as easily be called “Paying without end”. It made me laugh heartily, but looking at things as they have been for so long, this title wouldn't be so impertinent: and one of the most significant consequences of sexual abuse in childhood is having to pay endlessly, as soon as one is old enough to no longer endure the suffering, and having to pay considerable sums to give oneself the right to speak – to recover one's composure to some extent.

It is no coincidence that the century of Freud is also that of the number, of sonar and of the Hubble telescope, and that we explore the universe as if it were the unconscious space of our little world, which retains from its distant origins only dreams of abyssal falls, fantastic and sometimes abominable imaginary formations. What can a nebula that is only movement, energy, heat, black hole, the very expression of absolute pleasure, both life drive and death drive, do with consciousness and morality? I know that when I look at these incredible sketches of our universe, I am in fact looking, fascinated, at an image of what I know exists, the unconscious, almost always unattainable, long indecipherable, simultaneously repressing the unspeakable and the execrable, the origin and the end, pleasure and death. I am well aware that it is my gaze that gives them meaning and risks seeing a significant word in them, whereas for the unconscious of the world, there is no smuggler, at least not yet. 

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