Presence and Drama

How do we inhabit the drama that fractures us? Between salvific denial and transformative presence, I bear witness here to my path of identity reconstruction after the unthinkable.

The psychic economy of drama: between denial and somatization

The dramas that occur in our lives, without positing any hierarchy between them, are profoundly destabilizing events. Faced with them, we may feel the urgent necessity, especially in the early stages, to remain in denial in order to continue living, so as not to be suffocated by the magnitude of what is happening to us. This distancing is not simply a defense mechanism: it sometimes constitutes the very condition of our immediate psychic survival.

But we know very well, and psychoanalysis has amply demonstrated, that our unconscious remembers everything. What we sweep under the rug always resurfaces, most often in somatic form, if there has been no working through of this pain. As Françoise Dolto wrote, “everything that is not put into words is imprinted in the body”. Faced with buried dramas, we may not understand why, years later, we contract serious illnesses, for example. These manifestations occur precisely because we have not worked on elaborating the trauma we suffered.

Drama disfigures us, transforms us radically. When the dramas that occur are of extreme violence, it may become necessary to fabricate our absence from the drama, that is, to develop our capacity to temporarily set it aside in order to invest in other dimensions of existence.

The dialectic of absence and presence: my experience of impossible mourning

Three years ago, my eldest son committed suicide. This was, and remains, a terrible drama, an almost unthinkable limit. I have often been told that it was “the worst thing that could happen.” I don’t know. I don’t want to, and I cannot establish a hierarchy in human suffering. Without denying this drama, I initially fabricated my absence, or rather moments of absence from the drama. I created moments of great intensity: relentless work, intense relationships with other people, projects that allowed me, caught up in other issues, to temporarily absent myself from the pain in order to continue weaving life.

This strategy was not denial, but a fundamental ethical decision: I had decided to live (and my son had left us a letter encouraging us not to stop living). I didn’t want this drama to become my sole existence. Some, unable to bear such pain, also decide to stop living, and this is respectable. Every suicide is respectable, as Albert Camus so rightly wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942): “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” This was not my choice.

In parallel, for a year, I met many people who had lived through similar experiences, and I read extensively, notably “The Enigma of Mourning” (2006) by psychoanalyst Laurie Laufer, which is perhaps the book that accompanied me most, from which here is a first excerpt:

The traumatic event would then become a stopped time, a fixed time, a pure instant that exceeds time. The event of death would thus constitute an “always-present”: it does not cease not to cease. Neither time nor the body allows the traumatic hemorrhage to coagulate. The one who is traversed by death finds himself neutralized in an infinitive time, impersonal, incorporeal.
The question is then to know what form can take that which will put time back into this always-present, body back into this incorporeal.

Then, I went to see a psychoanalyst I knew well. He himself, while I was in analysis with him many years before, had lost one of his daughters to suicide as well. This tragic coincidence was perhaps not one: who better than another bereaved person could accompany me in this crossing?

Presence to drama as work of identity transformation

I worked, elaborated in these sessions, and I continue. It is there that I refounded my presence to the drama. I worked to transform myself through this presence, to understand that this drama was not something external to me, but that it had profoundly transformed me. Paul Ricœur, in Oneself as Another (1990), speaks of narrative identity: we are the stories we tell ourselves. My story had been brutally rewritten, and I had to learn to function with this new identity, to understand myself as a person irreversibly changed.

In “The Enigma of Mourning” (2006), Laurie Laufer arrives at this form of conclusion that greatly enlightened me, demolishing the simplistic and false theories of the stages of grief work:

To “do” mourning, would it not then be to situate oneself in this conflictual dialectic, to even rediscover what constitutes the internal struggle? It is in this that mourning would set desire back in motion, in the sense that desire is the very place of psychic conflict. It would then no longer be a matter of seeking appeasement in the work of mourning, but on the contrary what creates enigma, struggle, stumbling, fracture. The conflict of memory and the enigma of psychic life passes through this formula: what am I for the other? Now the crossing of mourning amounts to sketching the contours of an answer: what I was for the other is no more, and I am no longer the object of his lack. I no longer lack for the other. I am therefore myself lacking, fallible, unfinished.

The experience of mourning is therefore what allows the crisis, the moment of emergence of a subjectivation.

Today, it’s not that I think about my departed son all the time, even though, I must admit, it’s almost all the time still. But this thought is no longer the center of my life. I am no longer my son’s tomb. I have become myself again, but a different self from before, a self that is no longer the same, that no longer has the same identity because it lacks a child. This transformation changes what I do, what I think, what I write – including this article. My departed son is not the main subject of my life, but the drama of his disappearance is now integrated into my existence. I have chosen to put my presence into it.

Vladimir Jankélévitch, in Death (1977), distinguishes death in the third person (he dies), in the second person (you die) and in the first person (I die). A child’s suicide blurs these categories: it is a “you” so intimate that it carries away part of our “I.” Identity reconstruction after such an earthquake requires relearning who we are with this constitutive lack.

The crucial role of the third party in elaborating drama

This presence to drama, I could not integrate it alone. I was accompanied by this psychoanalyst. Each drama is different, and again, there is no hierarchy between dramas. It is not only psychoanalysts who allow us to elaborate from the dramas that have transformed us; it can be friends, support groups, spiritual or artistic practices. But it seems to me that in the case of major dramas, the reinvestment of presence to oneself necessarily passes through a third party.

This third party will allow us to legitimize ourselves in our new identity. Alone, I don’t see how one could accomplish this work. We don’t understand what is happening to us. We think we are the same person, simply very sad, carrying this drama in our life like an external burden. I believe we need the echo of someone else to be able, little by little, to integrate that we have become someone else. As Donald Winnicott writes, “it is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality”. Analytical work allows this serious “play” with our new identity. And indeed, upon leaving each session, I felt physically, like a new energy set in motion within myself.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas spoke of the face of the other as what constitutes us in ethical terms. In the work of elaborating drama, it is the gaze of the third party, analyst or other companion, that allows us to recognize our own transformed face, to accept it, and finally to inhabit it fully. Without this benevolent and structuring external gaze, we remain prisoners of a phantom identity, stuck between who we were and who we have become.

This work of presence to drama is never finished. It now constitutes the fabric of my existence, not as an obsession, but as a basso continuo that accompanies the melody of my life, if I may make some barroom poetry. I have learned and will always learn to improvise on this new musical canvas, neither completely the same, nor completely other.