Hatred and Forgiveness

Disabilities are multiple—motor, sensory, psychical, mental—and singular. Each disabled person is a singular person experiencing his or her situation in a specific, different, unique way. Yet, whatever the disabilities, they confront us with incomparable exclusion, different from others: the disabled person opens a narcissistic identity wound in the person who is not disabled; he inflicts a threat of physical or psychical death, fear of collapse, and, beyond that, the anxiety of seeing the very borders of the human species explode. And so the disabled person is inevitably exposed to a discrimination that cannot be shared.

If I attempt to share this situation, however, it is not only because of my son’s neurological difficulties, which led to an atypical education for him and exposed me to the singularity of each disabled person. Nor is it because, as a psychoanalyst, I have treated psychical disabilities (depression, psychosis, borderline states, and other disorders). But because my frequent visits outside the Hexagon have convinced me that, compared to countries like Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Canada, the United States, and many others, France has been slow to establish a true solidarity with disabled people and to provide personalized support for each of them.¹ In fact, at the dawn of this millennium, while biology, anthropology, and astrophysics explore human frontiers and the most advanced democracies refuse discrimination against people whose bodies and minds test our notions of human identity, trying to incorporate them into every level of society, France, in this difficult, provocative, and promising moment, is still a long way from creating what one would be right to expect from the country of the rights of man.

More fundamentally still, faced with the rather cynical pragmatism of some and the religious clashes of others, I am convinced that humanism—which has always been in search of itself, from its emergence in the past to its crises or revitalizations today and in times to come—can find a chance to revitalize itself in the battle for the dignity of the disabled by constructing what is still sorely lacking: respect for a vulnerability that cannot be shared. My ambition, my utopia, consists of believing that this vulnerability reflected in the disabled person forms us deeply, or, if you prefer, unconsciously, and that as a result, it can be shared. Could this humanism be the “cultural revolution” with which to construct the democracy of proximity that the postmodern age needs?

The outsize nature of this ambition is actually built on ordinary, painful, everyday experiences. Here are three, among many others:

People Say I’m Crazy was the title of a documentary shown on TV in the United States that I saw during a recent visit. The film aims to show how a schizophrenic person can be “cured” and “integrated” into society. The hero, stuffed full of medications that make him “obese” (his complaint), might be saved by his sister, a filmmaker who comes up with the idea of filming poor John, who likes to draw and make woodcuts. Thanks to the film, his works are soon made public; he has an exhibition; he is showered with grants. The madman has become “a disabled artist.” He can leave the appalling shelter he shares with a few others of his kind, even find a certain serenity, because social services now pays for a home worthy of being called one. Now he is cured. The only thing left to do is to award the film a prize, which happens shortly thereafter.

From time to time, the artist protests against the camera that is trained on him and, to some extent, against those who are making his illness a work of art. But he ends up going along with it and participates, so to speak, in the filming. Isn’t the camera a third party that recognizes him, a bit of space between his ill-being and his family? John is not crazy enough to deprive himself of that. More than the charming, “very American” therapist who encourages him with her kind, “social workery” advice, his filmmaker sister’s loving recording promotes the artist’s “works,” which no one appears to understand but in which John seems to have enclosed his life. Then something apparently happens, but that is for another film. This movie will not reveal it.

No words or interpretations accompany his creations: dramatic representations of brains and the seething viscera of abject flora and fauna. No one seems to contemplate letting the disabled artist speak of his anxieties and desires or the exclusion in which “people” wall him up, which is nevertheless referred to in the title of the documentary, People Say I’m Crazy. Perhaps he was unable to speak? Perhaps no one thought of trying to let him speak? Perhaps he tried to speak after filming? Who knows?

Today, the patient has disappeared; he is the object of a film and, we might say, a coauthor, and it is true that this venture compelled him to produce and exhibit objects that might even, with some luck, be sold. What success! Clearly, he has been cured. What else could a good disabled person hope for in a cheerful society of all-pervasive spectacle? All the patient has to do is become a producer and/or an object of the show.

An immense sadness keeps me from applauding with both hands. Something seems to be missing from this lovely “integration” represented by the art opening and the film. Since the question of the subject is not raised, there is no sharing. I witnessed a process, perhaps even a practice, but not a personal rebirth; I saw an exhibition, and commerce, but no interaction between the disabled and the able. The disabled person was certainly helped, but it was in order to help him include the objects he made in a circuit of consumption, success measured by access to the screen. The person, the subject, is absorbed by his objects, and his psychical life seems cured, because it has quite simply disappeared.

The malaise that pervaded me on seeing this spectacle has only reinforced my engagement in the National Council on Disability,² whose motto is to “sensitize, inform, and train,” and which proposes nothing more or less than a revolution of mentalities: “changing outlooks,” shaking up hypocrisy and productivist righteousness by attentive support of the subject beneath the producer of images (which, for example, is what John became), the subject in the limited body or mind (which might awaken and develop if given personalized treatment). What is the subject? That which in a man or woman remains open to a search for meaning and sharing. Despite the limitation, and sometimes even in cases of great dependency brought on by multiple disabilities, this opening, this evolution, this sharing are possible: that is my experience; that is my conviction.

I also met Claire, Mother Courage. Since the birth of her daughter, Marie, “people” noticed a few indefinable motor difficulties, before “people” told her that Marie, age three, was autistic. Marie’s father withdrew into his work: “With a disability, nothing can be done,” he seemed to say, without saying it and sometimes saying it. It was a way of disappearing to protect himself from depression. This man’s pain had cemented the opening. Sharing had turned into flight. Claire was left to handle everything, and Mother Courage became a militant member of an organization. In response to Marie’s father, her own personal slogan was “We have to face it, as if nothing were the matter.” Salvation through the Band-Aid of denial, refusal. Claire tried to convince herself that all was not lost (that her daughter would not be lacking), if they “both” could just get something: any available help, financial aid, a place in a daycare center or a little school, a CAT scan … the list was endless. The courage, rage, and despair of community work. Mothers soldiering on with steely resolve. Claire’s struggle kept her going. She directed all her energy toward pleading her case to public authorities, which she found, rightly, to be indifferent, hostile, and arrogant. Oh, the malaise of the isolated world of disability, its outbursts and bitterness! Ceaseless demands reiterated without satisfaction, suffering in silence for being unable to share the wound, the intolerable, the unshareable! Since Marie’s birth, Claire lived in another world, an antiworld, the world of disability cut off from the world. She couldn’t bear it any longer and had come to see me for analysis. I referred her to a colleague. It so happened I met her three years later. In the course of her analysis, Claire had taken the time to lose herself in a third party: to cry and share her anguish, first with her analyst, then with her coworkers—work she had taken up again thanks to her therapy. “I deinsulated myself,” she told me. “Marie and I were no longer two people with a single body. And Marie found a job; she makes photocopies at a law office where everyone respects her as she is. She even has a boyfriend now.”

I knew, as Claire did, that nothing had really been resolved, and yet I shared her joy, wondering: will it always take psychoanalysis and the help of a kindly attorney to “deinsulate” disability? Might disability, paradoxically, become an opportunity to bring us closer to the most vulnerable, and lead us to reconsider the political link itself? To spread charity thanks to a democracy of proximity and solidarity, so often discussed but slow in coming, in which the disabled would not expect a kind of generous compassion but quite simply the respect of their rights? To do this, everyone must be convinced that they have a right to these rights: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” A true “cultural revolution” that perhaps is not impossible today.

Still, no one would deny that disability often provokes fear, when not shame. This shame was recently admitted to on television: a mother who had failed her child, who was unable to make her healthy, still felt guilty (as did the father). In the face of this sort of trouble, you want to hide. It’s easy to understand her! And yet, the pride, the unconscious desire for parental power in these maternal tears! This tragic and courageous admission touched the parents of disabled children, ultimately revealing the archaic weight of a culture from which we have trouble detaching ourselves: a culture that posits human beings as creatures capable of excellence, pleasure, and achievement in the image of an all-mighty Creator; a culture of absolute parental power; a culture that blames vulnerability when it does not exclude it; a culture of the “perfect child” who is able to repair parental malaise. Because guilt is the daughter of omnipotence, while the Man-God(issued from the marriage of the Renaissance and Thomist rationalism)responds perfectly to our narcissistic fantasies;it continues to inhabit us, unbeknownst to us, by continuing to deny the lack of being essential to the human condition.

A human, too human, reaction. Perhaps stronger in France than elsewhere, since here the Greek worship of natural beauty was joyfully wed to the goddess of Reason; since a prevailing Catholicism—or what remains of it in people’s unconscious—prefers to glorify the Resurrected without lingering on kenosis, sparing themselves Protestant melancholy in order to cohabit with absolute power, whether that of the monarch or of centralizing and in fact elitist republican Jacobinism; and, finally, since globalization, which one would think would put our hexagonal importance in perspective, has not prevented us from claiming that we are the best, worthy of the best, deserving of the best, etc.

In this context, to inscribe the disabled within the republican pact—not as a marginal group that merits compassion but as people with the same rights as others—constitutes an ambitious challenge.

We all sense a new historic period beginning: Good has lost its bearings in the globalization of the spectacular and is contrasted with Evil, or rather the axis of Evil, against which terrified humanity has been asked to mobilize. Others are seeking a new foundational myth, when not trying to reconstruct or deconstruct the divine. And yet, “fundamentally,” as we say, in the everyday experience of the excluded in their incommensurable diversity, a new humanism is being sought. I would even say that humanity has never had such a rebellious, free, and human ambition. It is not a matter of a new mythology of love. I see it rather as a challenge to nature and to the tragic: the acceptance and support of vulnerability expresses the desire of men and women to overcome the most insurmountable of fears—one that confronts us with our limitations as living beings. I am wary of the term integration of the disabled: it has a whiff of charity about it toward those without the same rights as others. I prefer interaction, which expresses a politics that has become an ethics, broadening the political pact to the frontiers of life. And it is not surprising that we find a majority of women on this new political front: would that be because after years of feminism and expanding its best ambitions, they are able to revitalize the age-old feminine capacity to care for psychical and physical life, making it a political act, a political philosophy? Do not see in this praise of female caretaking any attempt to reduce woman to the infirmary of the Good Samaritan! As an exile of the communist regime, I am convinced that if the political link is not implicitly one that allows us to care for our most singular, most unshareable vulnerabilities and creativities, it is doomed to run aground in new forms of totalitarianism. On the contrary, inscribing vulnerability at the center of the political pact (understood as taking care of others) seems to me to be the best antidote to barbarity and thus an excellent opportunity to produce, through politics, the feminine in women as well as men.

Three projects undertaken by the president of the Republic allow us to consider these preoccupations with a bit of optimism.³ “A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any”—Sartre’s words could be the motto for the national “Disability” project.⁴ Yet, as those concerned know, this project, no doubt the most difficult of the three for the reasons I have just mentioned, seems, if not broken, than at least unmonitored by the public and not yet on par with other advanced democracies.

Contrary to a widespread notion, charitable organizations are never directly or specifically interested in the disabled. “The work of charity” (which comes from Matthew 25: “For I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me … Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to me”) is addressed indistinctly to all those who need help—the poor, the sick, the leprous, the rootless, and the invalid. From the start of these works of charity, the Byzantine martyr Zotikos shocked the ancient world by caring for “crippled” lepers: he no longer left the infirm to divinity by “exposing” them, but welcomed them as a gift from God with the power to “sanctify” us. St. Augustine integrates the anomaly into the normal, and with him the infirm become lovable, helpful. However, “houses of God” in the Middle Ages excluded lepers and, sometimes, the paralyzed and the incurable. Where were the disabled? medievalists wonder today. The Franciscans did the most to help the poor and infirm, because, like St. Francis, they glorified them. Starting with the epidemics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the mystical resurgence, society begins to treat the marginal, but it is still difficult to find the disabled within these blurred categories.⁵

The only exception was the foundation of the Quinze-Vingts Hospital for the blind by Saint Louis: a royal initiative rather than that of the Church, though inspired by the Dominicans and Franciscans. Moreover, the various Catholic or Protestant communities or establishments caring for the disabled today do not necessarily claim confessional ties and offer civil support that, ostensibly, does not rely on a specific notion of disability within the faith. Personally, I feel great admiration and unswerving gratitude toward associations whose often discreet charitable motives effectively supplement the shortcomings of the state. I will note, however, that their actions are based on a generous philosophy of caring and support, rather than on “interaction,” and thus take the risk of infantilizing the disabled person.

In sum, in the spirit of the Old and New Testaments, the ecclesiastical attitude toward the “poor” interprets the mission of the Church as a “community of the suffering servant” and blends all disabled people together without taking into consideration the specificity of their sufferings and exclusions. Now these differ radically from racial, ethnic, religious, and economic exclusions, because disability confronts the able-bodied person with the limits of life, with the fear of deficiency and physical or psychic death: disability therefore awakens a catastrophic anxiety that in turn leads to defensive reactions of rejection, indifference, or arrogance, when not the will to eradicate by euthanasia. A scientific approach a century or two old and yet still in its infancy allows us to identify various forms of disability and ways to anticipate and support them for the disabled person’s improved development, but it must be surrounded, indeed preceded, by a specific philosophy of disabled life, and a fraternity suited to the singularity of disabled men and women: a philosophy and a fraternity based on a right to compensation, which theology seems to leave aside.

Indeed, whether we talk about the Lumen Gentium of November 21, 1964, the theological response to Pope John XXIII’s wish to make the Church a “Church for all and particularly the poor”; the four texts by John Paul II from 1979 to 2001 concerning his vision of mankind, the poor in the Church, and the meaning of suffering; or Jean-Marie Lustiger’s support of the activities of Jean Vanier’s L’Arche (“to recognize the disabled person as a brother equal in dignity is to understand our true condition and consequently how our society should function and live”), the believer is always called on to “suffer along.”⁶ The personalized support of those who suffer from a disability undeniably starts with empathy with the disabled person, but this modern support cannot do without the specific knowledge of the ill-being or the fight for the recognition and compensation of rights within the social pact that aims to remove this person from the compassionate margins, where we tend to isolate him, with love.

The recognition of people with disabilities as political subjects is the work of the Enlightenment. Written by Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient (1749) (Letter on the blind for the use of those who see) marks the first phase in a social awareness of disability, after its being handled by the religious orders. In the eighteenth century France was at the forefront of this domain, as it was of others. The philosophy of the Enlightenment demonstrates the capacities of the “infirm” and rehabilitates the limited person as a political subject. These positions open the way to education and to the development of educational techniques based on the disability. The French Encyclopedist was struck by his meeting with a geometry professor at Cambridge, who, though blind at birth, and never having seen the slightest object, was capable of doing very sophisticated calculations with volume. He had concluded that if a genius like this could be struck by infirmity, it was because something was not working properly in the “divine order,” which was supposed to identify “beautiful nature” with “divine reason.” This revolt against Christian rationalism led Diderot the deist to become an atheist, which resulted in his imprisonment at Vincennes.

In the following centuries, there is a clear increase in the number of people with disabilities (injured in work accidents or wounded in the two world wars). The state then takes responsibility, the disabled person requests more and more solidarity from the national community, and the law of 1975 crowns this second phase. Inspired by François Block-Lainé, Simone Veil, and Jacques Chirac, this law took an important step: asserting national responsibility, pledging resources to the condition of the disabled, and leading the way for therapies tailored to specific needs (notably with the creation of Cotorep).

Since then this law, made unreadable by numerous amendments and decrees, has fallen out of synch with the new approach to disability, which, in international texts, associates individual parameters (limitations) and social parameters (disadvantages) and does not consider disabled people “objects under treatment” but emerging subjects. That, moreover, is why certain people involved in aid to the disabled continue to refer to them as personnes en situation de handicap (people in a situation of handicap)—terminology that, far from being politically correct, has the advantage of indicating that the handicap is the result of a limitation and a social response, in other words, a “situation” created for the disabled person by society’s reception of them. In short, the law of 1975 has become obsolete. For example, the obligation to send disabled children to school was indicated so vaguely that it has always managed to be avoided. There are still tens of thousands of children who are not in school because of their disability; they could be, with support. Another example: benefit payments, access to jobs, accessible public transportation and public places; none of this is addressed.

The shortcomings are enormous, and the state has largely passed responsibility on to volunteer organizations, which assume a large number of the tasks. Yet organizations do not always follow the most useful advances; they often get caught up in competition and internal conflict. Better evaluation is necessary as well as state services taking on some of the burden. Not that we have to centralize everything, but how can such colossal work be left to individual initiative?

Of course, many institutions in France support the disabled with maximum attention and exemplary care. Yet structures of admission are often relegated to isolated executives, cut off from the social flux. To break with this phenomenon of ghettoization, the training of those capable of interacting with the disabled must be improved: from psychiatrists to instructors, special ed teachers to teacher’s aides, from home caregivers to personal attendants, all should feel valued and able to provide optimal care.

Today, we are in the third phase of the history of disability, which we are trying to establish in France, notably by relying on the “law for the equal opportunity of people with disabilities,” which has just been voted on by the two chambers of Parliament.

It’s going in the right direction. Its intentions and propositions are bringing radical innovations that may enable us to catch up, provided amendments follow and an effective national solidarity is established. Among the contributions of the new law: the extension of the general principle of nondiscrimination toward people with disabilities; the simplification of care and support by the creation of a one-stop service or a “commission on rights and integration” involving regional disability centers; “personalized compensation” or support through local agencies of technical and human aid; physical and functional “accessibility” in all places, school, work, transportation, buildings, culture, leisure, for all disabilities and not motor disabilities alone; the full responsibility of the Ministry of Education to enroll children with disabilities in schools closest to home; the recognition of various forms of psychic disabilities; priority given to work in an ordinary workplace; the creation of a national support fund (Caisse nationale de solidarité), notably by eliminating one holiday, with a part of the revenues allocated to people with disabilities and the rest to the dependent elderly.

Under the pressure of organizations, joined by the National Council on Disability (“to sensitize, inform, and train”), and after several amendments brought by deputies from both the right and the left, the text of the law has been considerably improved. And, although it still leaves a lot to be desired, so considerable are the needs and delays, it represents an advancement on which a new politics of disability can finally be built in France.

It is here that the National Council takes on all its meaning.

Charged by the president of the Republic with the mission of reflecting on disability in France, resulting in a report published as Lettre ouverte au président de la Republique sur les citoyens en situation de handicap, à l’usage de ceux qui le sont et de ceux qui ne le sont pas (Open letter to the president of the Republic on citizens with disabilities, for the use of those who are disabled and those who are not),⁷ I made several concrete proposals concerning schools, businesses, culture, accessibility, old age, and multiple disability. Among these proposals, I envisioned the need to start a true “cultural revolution” to change the way the disabled are viewed—based on real interaction between the able and the disabled—to allow for political interventions that would finally be effective. Because my inquiry convinced me that, whatever the reasons for the French delay and the shortcomings of measures taken or neglected, the core of the difficulties lies in the abyss that separates the world of disability from the world of the able. And it is urgent to create messengers between these “two merciless worlds”: one of disability, with its sufferings and its protective but also aggravating isolation; the other, a society of performance, success, competition, pleasure, and spectacle that “doesn’t want to know.” That is why the National Council was created, to sensitize, inform, and train, its goal being to work toward interaction between the able and disabled.

Difficult tasks, you would be right to assume, but ones we have tried to accomplish by

These initiatives, which do not duplicate the activities of other organizations but amplify them and address them to people without disabilities, acting in concert with these organizations, led to an assembly on disability on May 20, 2005 at UNESCO.

We called this assembly “Disability: Time for Engagement.” It encouraged a taking into account of people with disabilities by everyone and was held at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, a symbol of universal brotherhood. It was not another colloquium that gathered specialists and experts around scholarly reflections or generous denouncements. The National Council was concerned instead with rallying around the question of disability those who would normally turn away from it. We invited figures from the world of academia, business, local authorities, and central administrations.

What was the philosophy of this initiative?

To answer this, we have to go back to an earlier question: where does the French lateness in the domain of disability come from? From a Catholicism that is certainly compassionate but that infantilizes the person and moreover does not develop the basic solidarity of the Protestant experience—seeking “grace” through effort and mutual aid here on earth? From an excessively centralizing Jacobinism that neglects community ties? From a secularization that exalted the Man-God and, in battling rightly against the miserabilism and masochistic latencies of the Christian religion, nevertheless leans toward a triumphal humanism that creates humanity in the image of an all-mighty God, where there is no place for vulnerability? If these hypotheses are true, with secularization supplanting the compassion of our world, don’t we risk getting stuck in this impasse in France as well—an impasse that threatens all countries, but France even more dramatically—reducing the disabled to either patients or workers? John’s story, which I mentioned at the beginning, is an example of this: Americans manage this “process” more efficiently than we do, and consumerism triumphs in the most insidious of good consciences.

I would prefer to try to rehabilitate the subject in the imperfect body, to remove him from the exclusion in which in which he has commonly been enclosed. I prefer to believe that real and necessary cultural change will help us improve laws and material compensation.

Twenty-five years of analytic practice have convinced me that listening to the unconscious reveals the vulnerability of the speaking being: at the borders of biology and meaning, a permanent imbalance, a source of anxiety but also creativity. Since psychoanalysis is the quintessential intimate experience, there can be no politics of psychoanalysis. On the other hand, listening to the speaking being is a Copernican revolution of values and norms, opening new possibilities of connection to others, which constitutes the very essence of politics. If listening to the unconscious reveals the vulnerability of the speaking being, psychoanalysis must inevitably encounter the central preoccupation of the third millennium: what meaning to give the limits of life—birth, death, deficiencies? Transferring the religious and philosophical ambitions of an Occident concerned with human singularity to the very core of scientific rationality, the Freudian discovery of the unconscious is probably the only approach to the human that is likely to avoid euthanasia in the name of science as well as the pseudo-humanism of armoring the patient in the carapace of a worker. We all know about bodybuilding; we have come to the point of producer-building. Will advanced democracies have the means to support life with its limits and shortcomings, soliciting and favoring the subject within them? That is the issue for which the Freudian discovery of the unconscious prepares us, if we admit that it is a discovery of the essential vulnerability of the speaking body.

To sum up analytical listening this way requires some explanation:

Eros and Thanatos, which Freud unveiled in the unconscious of twentieth-century men and women, did not reveal a desiring superman (as certain acolytes of Lacan would have it) or result in feeling sorry for suffering humanity (as post-Freudian orthodoxy suggested). In fact, the duel between the hedonists and the nihilists is one of those French exceptions that do well in the media, but that cannot withstand the complexity of psychic life as revealed on the couch of the contemporary psychoanalyst.

It is the delicacy of the speaking being that the analyst listens for today, the analyst who knows his Freud and has read Lacan, Melanie Klein and Bion, Winnicott and Frances Tustin. The Freudian journey into the night of desire was followed by attention to the capacity to think: never one without the other. The result? Modern psychoanalysis, as I understand it, seems to be the bringing to light of this vulnerability that arises at the intersection of biology and language and a perpetual rebirth of the subject, if and only if this vulnerability is recognized. Situated in this untenable place, psychoanalysts have the (unique?) privilege today of accompanying the emergence of new capacities of thinking/representing/thinking, beyond the frequent and increasingly noticeable disasters of psychosomatic space—capacities that are so many new bodies and new lives.

As for biology, it has been observed that “cellular death” is “programmed” in the gene pool of living beings, so that it assumes the role of a sculptor, gradually “removing” or “canceling out” inherited elements of both parents, chance and error being the fate of this creative destructivity, of this cohabitation of death in life.⁸

From another perspective, we need only observe how people all over the world, who brood over politics when they don’t reject it, will mobilize for causes considered “humanitarian” (though not without discrediting them at times). In reality, these are modern experiences of the tragic that ask humanity to give meaning to its very being—to birth, death, reproduction, ecological catastrophes, health emergencies (the tragedies of tsunamis, “mad cow” disease, “bird flu,” deadly heat waves, not to mention AIDS), and, with even more anxiety, to give meaning to the limits of humankind itself, revealed by personal “deficiencies” inseparable from social “disadvantages”: I have named the obstacles.

Coming from different horizons, a question is emerging: how do we inscribe in the concept of the human itself—and therefore in philosophy and political practice—the constitutive part of the destructivity, vulnerability, and imbalance that are integral parts of the identity of the human race and, singularly, of the speaking subject?

By adding a fourth term (vulnerability) to the humanism inherited from the Enlightenment (liberty, equality, and fraternity), analytic listening inflects these three toward a concern for sharing, in which, and thanks to which, desire and its twin, suffering, make their way toward a constant renewal of the self, the other, and connection. It is because I have been sounding out the delicacy and vulnerability of men and women who have put their trust in me for more than two decades that, in the plans of the president of the Republic to catch up in terms of personalized support of citizens with disabilities in France, I believe I have heard an appeal … to psychoanalysis! Because no other discourse, no other inquiry or therapy, is better able to recognize lack of being and to inscribe it in a project of continual rebirth, whether subtle or startling.

I am not speaking only of the psychoanalytic approach to psychic disability (psychosis or autism), which, in the best of cases, causes the subject to come about where he was barred. Without denying pharmacological help or other approaches that facilitate social behaviors, I also want to discuss an approach whose goal is the protection and optimization of psychic life, insofar as it is an infinite quest for meaning, bios transversal to zoe, a biography with and for others. What John, in the documentary, did not manage to say or think, although the film (almost in spite of its producers) allowed one to imagine the possibilities. Because other disabilities—mental (trisomy), sensory (deafness, blindness), or motor disabilities—lead those affected by them to situations of deficiency that expel them from the social link in different ways. Because those not afflicted with these incapacities are faced with the anxiety of castration, the horror of narcissistic injury, and, beyond that, the intolerableness of psychic or physical death: thus deepening the most untreatable of exclusions.

Having come to terms with their vulnerability, analysands and all those trying to open their speech to the unconscious can offer disabled subjects the best chance for the desires, anxieties, and creativities of excluded people, those not like others, to be expressed and worked out. Finding our limits gives us the ability to share those of the disabled subject, failings and flashes of brilliance alike, in the full sense of the word share, which is not fusion, osmosis, or identification. To share: to take part in a distinctiveness beyond the separation imposed on us by our fates; to participate, without erasing the fact that each is “apart” and recognizing the part that cannot be shared, that is irremediable.

Those rejected because of race, social origins, or religious difference have given rise to political struggles that, for at least two centuries, have taken up the baton of charity and have managed, against all odds, through law and mindsets, to reestablish the well-named “rights of man”: a horizon that is still unsatisfying but now a part of “good sense,” so that it seems obvious to us to resist racism as well as religious persecution or disparagement based on class. The same does not go for the exclusion from which people with disabilities suffer. The voluntarism of the beautiful humanist soul that sustains a fairly generous solidarity, followed (not always) by legal and social measures, has revealed itself incapable of traversing the fears and anxieties that control the unconscious—and often conscious—rejection of the disabled by those who are not.

It is precisely here that psychoanalytic listening to vulnerability could take on political meaning, addressing not only those affected by a disability but the society of others, who, instead of integrating them, might have real interaction with them. Rest assured, I am not suggesting “psychoanalyzing” anyone (unless they seek it out, which does happen), nor am I saying “we are all disabled,” as we were able to say “we are all German Jews,” New Yorkers in the Twin Towers, gays, or women! I am simply saying this: by lending a psychoanalytical ear to the incomparable singularity of this exclusion that is not like others from which people with disabilities suffer, it becomes clear that it concerns us. Not necessarily because “it could happen to anyone,” but because it is already in me/us: in our dreams, our anxieties, our romantic and existential crises, in this lack of being that invades us when our resistances crumble and our “interior castle” cracks. Because to recognize it in me will help me to discover the incomparable subject in the limited body, to construct a common life project. A project in which my fear of castration, narcissistic injury, defect, and death, repressed until now, is transformed into attention, patience, and solidarity capable of refining my being in the world. In this encounter could the disabled subject become not my analyst but my analyzer?

I am not claiming that this social contract supported by psychoanalytic listening might dissolve disability in vulnerability. If every speaking being is constructed around a central deficiency, disability inflicts a very different trial: the disabled subject is confronted with the irremediable, lacks or insufficiencies that evolve within certain limits, when they don’t stagnate or worsen. Yet the analysand who has not confronted the irremediable in himself has not completed his journey to the end of the night. And how many unfulfilled desires, aptitudes in a state of vigilance, and possibilities for an amazing life there are in this cohabitation with the irremediable!

Aren’t we very far away from psychoanalysis in this dream of citizenship shared with the most fragile? In a way. But not really, if we admit that far from being a world away, a coded language, or a cult of initiates, psychoanalysis is another way of being in the world.

As I write these lines—here as in my Open Letter to the President of the Republic—I catch myself hoping that our efforts to “sensitize, inform, and train” can really change people’s mentalities. That each of us can slip into our own dreams, the most bizarre or most repetitive, and rise to the surface, listening to those who speak, walk, hear, see, or move about bizarrely, crazily, or scarily. New worlds then open to our listening, difficult or enchained, neither normal nor disabled, a flowering of surprise, worlds becoming polyphonies, resonances, different yet compatible, worlds finally returned to their plurality. Don’t tell me I’m dreaming or that this is poetry. What if this were the private face of the politics of disability?