Addendum: SOURCES AND RELIABILITY OF THE NARRATIVE

Throughout the writing of this book, I was careful never to take advantage of those who would read me, who must be able to believe me: that is the essential anxiety I feel as I prepare to publish my story. I imagine it’s always stressful to know one will be read, at least a little; it is far more so when one has laid bare an entire story of sex, violence, shame, and multiple oddities that could, at first glance, inspire pity—when what one needs most is solidarity.

 

What I have told in this book is true. Hence the essential question of the method I followed, and of the quality and accuracy of the sources I used.

 

I carried out a source critique, as one learns to do in historical studies, though I did not have the multiplicity of sources historians now enjoy. I read through all my notes, selecting excerpts without manipulating or altering them—while fully aware that the quotations I reused came from my own personal annotations, that I could compare them with no other independent source, and that there was therefore a possibility of errors, small but real. The fact remains that after each psychoanalysis session, I recorded the essential points of what had been said, trying to capture word for word what François Peraldi had proposed in order to construct the credible narrative of a life and restore its original meaning. I did not omit anything that might embarrass me or harm my “reputation”; I did not hide any of the unflattering truths that may have surfaced more than once.

 

I never wanted to write this deeply personal account as a simplistic, black-and-white settling of scores—that would be bad history—and one that placed me alone in the camp of the righteous. It’s never that simple. I sought to write the story of a structure—family, generational, economic, and social—as one does in global history. Of course, an autobiography is written step by step, meticulously, with an insatiable curiosity for detail, but it never isolates anyone from the real society, as it was or as it still remains. Truth is complex. To reach it, one must follow the rules—and in an autobiographical narrative, as in psychoanalysis, the story that is at once the most precise and the most global is the one most likely to get there.

 

Yes, there is anger running through my account—but aimed at justice without revenge. I have tried to fight that fight fairly, both for others and for myself. Rigor does not exclude indignation, provided there is never any methodological drift. Drift means judging, condemning, arranging everything in terms of good and evil, and above all, falsifying. I believe I avoided making my sources—my sources—say what they do not say. Historiography explains how history is written and situates history in a sequence; in the particular case of what this book recounts, there was, however, very little historiography that could have taught me a better method to follow.

 

History does not moralize, does not preach. Neither does psychoanalysis. But when conducted rigorously, with the will to know and the passion for truth, history and psychoanalysis are, both of them, fundamental instruments of freedom.