In 1987, Bruno Bettelheim published “A Good Enough Parent”, inviting parents to give up the ideal of the perfect parent in order to remain genuinely available to their child. I propose to transpose this renunciation to the cultural professions: understanding why cultural rights so deeply unsettle the professionals who discover them, distinguishing respecting from pleasing, and telling apart what belongs to the setting, which can be corrected, from what belongs to people’s projections. The article ends with concrete methodological proposals for preparing for destabilisation, which will always arise where we least expect it.
Bruno Bettelheim’s renunciation
Bruno Bettelheim published “A Good Enough Parent” in 1987 (Alfred A. Knopf), translated into French the following year as « Pour être des parents acceptables » (Robert Laffont). Parents, he writes, should not strive to manufacture the child they would like to have, but help the child become what they are in potential. And to achieve this, they must give up the ideal of the perfect parent. Parents who measure themselves against perfection turn every difficulty into a personal fault, become anxious, and this anxiety makes them less available to the real child in front of them.
The title takes up a notion coined by Donald Winnicott, the “good enough mother”. Winnicott had forged this concept to defend ordinary parents against two threats he saw growing: experts who, by intruding into families, disqualify parents’ intuition, and those who idealise the parental function to the point of making it unattainable. The good enough mother fails regularly, and these failures, in bearable doses, are precisely what allows the child to encounter the world as it is and to grow. The parent’s imperfection is thus part of the parental function itself.
Professions exposed to projections
The cultural professions, when they involve training, mediation or artistic intervention, are professions of the relationship. Mireille Cifali, psychoanalyst and professor of educational sciences, includes them in what she calls the “professions of the human” in « Le lien éducatif : contre-jour psychanalytique » (PUF, 1994, untranslated). She shows there that the professional bond, in teaching, education and care, is shot through with transference: people deposit on the practitioner expectations and affects, from love to anger, that come from their own history. And the practitioner responds with their own history. This return movement, made of our emotions, our attachments and our professional fears, is what psychoanalysis calls countertransference. I will use this word throughout the article, because it gives a precise name to states every professional knows without always naming them: the urge to convince, the guilt felt before someone’s discontent, the need to be liked by the group. Cifali argues that practitioners should build a “knowledge from within”, that is, a knowledge that does not deny this complexity but learns to work with it.
The field of cultural rights exposes us to these movements more than others. When a training course or a support process concerns respect for each person’s cultural identity, every person present is concerned in their very identity and in the legitimacy of their professional practice. I described in the article You are in a position of domination. Now what ? the social position that facilitators occupy de facto; projection is its symmetrical side, the position that people make us occupy, out of their own history. Being the support of other people’s projections is part of the structural data of these professions. The methodological question then becomes what to do with it.
The vertigo of lost meaning
We need to look closely at what people deposit on the person leading a training course on cultural rights, because this deposit has a particular colour. Training for the cultural professions has long been, in France, training in cultural democratisation: making works whose value was established elsewhere, by the legitimate institutions, accessible to the greatest number. Cultural rights, because they start from the dignity of each person, lead to cultural democracy, where each person is recognised as a subject of culture and not as a recipient; I developed this distinction in the article Democratisation or cultural democracy : what these two words do to theatre. For someone trained in the first paradigm, encountering cultural rights often produces a sensation of lost meaning that can be abyssal. Everything one has done for years with the best intentions retrospectively appears as an apparatus of domination, and one discovers in passing that the very vocabulary of the profession took part in this domination: Anne Aubry, of Réseau Culture 21, points out that speaking of “access to culture” unwittingly separates those who would be beings of culture from those who would not yet be.
This vertigo often expresses itself as an accusation of relativism. If all cultural practices are equal, nothing would be worth anything any more, and the profession would lose its raison d’être. Anne Aubry answered this objection precisely at the Cerisy symposium on the transformations of cultural policies, which I recounted in the article Transformations of cultural policies : a week at the Cerisy symposium. There is no question of relativising or flattening everything: asymmetries of knowledge exist and are normal, between the person who teaches and the person who learns, for instance. Domination begins when these positions freeze, “when you are always the one who does not know”. Each person holds knowledge of different kinds, and the work consists in discovering it, naming it, making sure each person can become aware of their own place of expertise. We call on the plumber for their knowledge of plumbing, without asking them to be an expert in oil painting; in the same way, each person, including among audiences, holds an expertise that asks to be found and recognised. Cultural rights do not level knowledge, they organise its mutual enrichment. Nobody is superior in everything, and nobody is ignorant in everything.
If such a simple idea is so destabilising, it is because we are steeped in a system of hierarchical judgement. The French Ministry of Culture was built on a logic of legitimising practices, with its summits and its margins, and this logic runs through our most ordinary gestures: rankings, prize lists, competitions. I have created festivals myself, and each time I have encountered the violence and the suffering of those who lose. This may pass in the big professional festivals, where adults knowingly choose to play the game of a hierarchising corporatism. But when the project pursues a social or educational aim, producing suffering through ranking contradicts exactly what we are seeking. I experienced it again recently as a member of the jury of a short film competition for young people, recounted in the article Filme Tout Court : Account of a First Collective Experience in Villetaneuse: the last prize in the ranking was experienced there as a humiliation, and we proposed for the next edition thematic prizes, which recognise each film for a quality of its own. As for those who lose, we make them invisible, because they would disturb us too much, just as we look away from the tents set up on our pavements, because the people who live in them reflect back to us the image of what we do not want to see. Cultural rights disturb because they ask us to look at what ranking manufactures.
Respecting without pleasing
Cultural rights, as formulated in the Fribourg Declaration (2007), guarantee each person the possibility of living their cultural identity in dignity, of accessing cultural resources and of taking part in cultural life. Nowhere do they guarantee that each person will come out of every situation satisfied. Yet the confusion between the two is frequent: we measure the success of a training course or a mediation by the unanimous satisfaction of the participants, and the slightest discontent is experienced as a failure of the setting or as a fault of the person leading it.
Yet democracy does not require unanimity. It requires that we can agree on what unites and also agree on what differentiates, which is not the same thing as a consensus. A disagreement expressed, argued, maintained until the end of a working day can be the sign that the space genuinely allowed expression, whereas general approval can cover silences. To my mind, respect for the other includes leaving them the right to remain in disagreement, and even to leave angry.
Wanting to please everyone belongs to another register, that of seduction. Mireille Cifali devotes a chapter of her book to what she calls the “obligatory seduction” of the educational bond: the practitioner needs to be invested by people for something to happen, and this necessity can slide towards seeking approval for its own sake. Whoever seduces obtains agreement by short-circuiting the other’s freedom, and thereby contradicts the very respect they believe they are serving. Wanting to seduce is in fact one of the most common forms of countertransference: the energy of facilitation drains into this game, and one deposes oneself, without noticing, from one’s own role. A professional who seeks to win back a discontented person at all costs is first of all seeking reassurance.
A participant leaves the room
To give substance to this distinction, I propose a situation recomposed from several that I have experienced or observed, deliberately made anonymous and generic. During a training day on cultural rights, a collective exchange concerns the legitimacy of cultural practices that unfold outside institutions. A participant, who holds a management position in a cultural institution, hears in these words a challenge to his work. He says so, with vivacity. The person leading the session receives his words, without contradicting or judging him. The participant nevertheless leaves the room before the end and does not come back.
Faced with such a situation, two questions arise, and the order in which we ask them matters. The first concerns the setting:
- Had the framework been set out explicitly, saying that disagreement was expected, legitimate, welcome?
- Had each person had a real space to express themselves, including about the course of the day itself?
- Did what was said clearly distinguish between criticism of an institutional logic and criticism of the people who work in it?
If one of these conditions was missing, the setting has a share in this departure, and this share can be corrected.
The second question concerns what does not belong to us. This participant is perhaps encountering, in this room, his own relationship to his position, an earlier fragility, a history whose content nobody but him knows. The person leading the session is then the support of this encounter, not its cause. Bettelheim asked parents to seek to understand the child’s behaviour and their own, in the same movement. Transposed to our situation, this requires understanding the person’s reaction, and also understanding our own reaction to his departure, the guilt, the urge to convince, sometimes the anger, which constitute our countertransference and call for the same examination.
Preparing for what cannot be foreseen
There remains one point that the two previous questions do not settle: destabilisation itself, at the moment it occurs. The most difficult thing, when leading a session, lies in this: we are convinced we are right. And we are not right in the absolute, because in these matters there is no true and false outside context. What is right depends on the system of interactions in which we find ourselves. Bruno Latour described the social in this way, not as a stable backdrop where positions would be fixed once and for all, but as networks of associations between people and things, endlessly undoing and remaking themselves (“Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory”, Oxford University Press, 2005). In such a world, our gaze is situated, including when we lead, and the conviction of being right is a datum of our position, not a proof.
Recognising this situated gaze does not abolish roles, however. In the situation, one person leads and others take part, and this division is legitimate: the people present have indeed come to receive something, and claiming otherwise would be demagogy. But a role is not a power. A role circulates. The person taking part today leads elsewhere, in other contexts, and could lead here.
And destabilisation, when it comes, will always come as a surprise. Not at the moment we expected it, not from the person we expected it from, not in the form we expected. Donald Schön built his whole theory of the “reflective practitioner” on this datum (“The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action”, Basic Books, 1983): experienced professionals rely less on learned formulas than on an improvisation built up in practice, and surprise is precisely the starting point of what he calls reflection-in-action. The seasoned professional is not the one who is never surprised; it is the one who knows how to make something of their surprise. We can therefore be fully in our energy and our transmission, without fear, while knowing that the unforeseen will occur. Here, to finish, are the guiding marks that I apply to myself and that I share here:
- Announce the roles at the opening. Say that the leading role is held today by oneself, but that other people present hold it elsewhere, in their own contexts. This announcement deflates the dimension of power-taking: the rules of the game are shared, one person carries them, another could carry them.
- Give the right to refuse in advance, and repeat it. When I work with children who are obliged to be there, I tell them they have the right not to want to be there, and the right to say so. Whoever says so then does not destabilise me, since I accept them as they are. But true destabilisation comes precisely from the places we had not anticipated, from what we had not thought of authorising. That is where we must work to welcome what arises, and work on our countertransference at the very moment it activates.
- Do not justify yourself. When we enter into a reasoning of justification, we sink precisely because we are justifying ourselves. Owning and naming the differences is enough, and makes justification unnecessary.
- Recognise transference when a reaction exceeds its cause. It happened to me, in a training course where I was one of several contributors, to be surprised by a person’s aggressiveness towards what I was proposing. I understood that she was not reacting only to me. She was reacting to everything she had received since the beginning of the course, and I was playing the role of the last straw: the explosion was larger than anything I could have caused. Such a moment requires remembering that the emotions the person is living through are not all related to what came from us; something in us triggered her transference, without being its source. And it requires watching one’s own countertransference. Wanting to seduce this person, to win her back, is giving in to it: the energy of facilitation then drains into this game, one deposes oneself from one’s role, while the majority of the group, who have nobody to seduce, follow their own path without being destabilised. Holding the framework for everyone, while listening to this person without handing her the bulk of one’s energy, also lets her criticism continue its path within her, for nothing says she will remain entrenched.
- Document what is happening to us while it is happening to us. At the Cerisy symposium already mentioned, the creative photographic workshop I had proposed to the people present did not unfold as planned. They got involved differently from what I had imagined, spent much more time making their photographs, and the discussions ran longer. The workshop was appropriated, and there was room for it to be. I then documented in front of everyone what was happening to us, while it was happening to us. This is a method in its own right. Cultural rights destabilise, and a person who feels in danger freezes, closes up, resists; one needs to feel reassured in order to receive. Saying that one is oneself destabilised, that the course of events is changing along the way, like Schön’s reflective practitioner, creates precisely this reassuring framework. It becomes normal that things happen to us, including to the person leading, and there is nothing dangerous about it. This method does not guarantee mastery, and we may still be surprised. It guarantees that we will be able to go on being together.
Bettelheim made clear that the good enough parent remains a demanding parent, who has only replaced the ideal of perfection with real attention to the child who is there. The good enough professional keeps the same demand. They correct their setting whenever examination requires it, they prepare to be surprised, and they leave people the freedom of their reactions, including those they dislike. Doing one’s best then becomes a working position that can be held over time, and not an excuse one would give oneself after the fact.
