Mental Health and society
Boris Cyrulnik & Al. – Picture: Carnival of Dunkerque 2017 –
- Pathogen, the couple?
- Chronic of invisible violence
- Moral harassment
- …
different authors for different analysis of our society
Philippe Brenot: The concept of a couple is a result of the transition from traditional society to modern society, which took place in the West around the 1970s, allowing the formation of the unit-couple, autonomous of the large family that organized previous generations (at the same time as male / female equality, as individualism or “this irrepressible injunction to be oneself”, as access to property, as the clear separation between fertility and sexuality).
The number of divorces was multiplied by 4 in 50 years (1960-2013) to reach 44% in 2011 (adultery being the first cause: 30 to 43%).
The necessary conditions for a couple are the same degree of psychological maturity and erotic maturity. This implies having overcome childhood conflicts and being sufficiently autonomous and constructed. Hence the importance for a therapist to be trained in sexuality and its disorders.
In a conflicting couple, the partner acts as a scapegoat. It is him who is the only receptacle of the continuous tensions. We are certainly the first generations where, in couples of different sexes, a woman and a man are facing each other without an easy or possible escape. From where the new confrontation of the different codes that are the feminine speaking and the masculine speaking like the 2 languages insues (Mars and Venus).
Paradigm shift: this closed session leads us to think of the couple as a pathogenic structure (pulsion constraints in an often hermetic setting).
In the absence of social reflection to set the standards, each couple is now led to invent the form of their couple to allow the best possible balance according to personal values, life choices, factors of the personality. A reinvention of the couple is essential to avoid that a crisis leads to separation.
Roland Coutanceau: Some people say that to insult, to utter threats, to attack one’s person is never to use words. But we can hurt terribly the psyche of someone with words.
To listen to battered women, “One shot hurts, but we recover, it’s not dramatic. What is dramatic, is through words and insults, the desire to hurt the other in the deepest of what it is, especially in public audience.
It is useful to distinguish ordinary violence from invasive, radical, physico-psychic, psychologically lethal violence, which in one sentence can annihilate, meaning that the other has nothing to say because it does not exist. This tragic relationship between 2 people seems to indicate that physical violence is perhaps only the emergent part of an otherwise more devastating psychic abuse…
… without leaving visible traces.
To speak of battered women must not make us forget that there are men who are mistreated. The phenomenon does exist and is not negligible. In Canada in 1997, out of 22,254 victims of reported violence, 12% were men (88% women). There is no possibility for a man to be considered as a beaten person, in another hand to be weak, fragile and disarmed.
Roland Coutanceau: moral harassment
This “invisible” violence must first be named.
Definition of the social law: “a set of repeated actions, the object or effect of which is the deterioration of working conditions that may affect the employee’s rights and dignity to impair his or her physical or mental health or compromise his professional future “.
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