In 2012, me and my art partner at the time conducted an art project with an inpatient community for developmentally disabled individuals located in the outskirts of Paris, the marginalized “banlieues.” A painter friend of ours had set up an art therapy program for its residents that she calls “Café Curious[1]” and we were interested in taking part, and that I had begun my training analysis I could perhaps lend a helping hand. But upon working with these individuals, specifically the schizophrenic members, I quickly realized what Lacan and others had claimed: that, contrary to psychiatric tradition, it is not “word soup” that they speak, but a literal language, and in fact, as Lacan claims, the psychotic is “possessed by language itself,” and absolutely NEEDS TO BE LISTENED TO EXACTLY WHAT HE OR SHE IS SAYING. However, he insists that a clinician should not listen for the meaning of their words, which would also escalate delusion (they are plagued by too much meaning), but the literality of their speech. The classic psychoanalytic example is that a psychotically structured individual, upon hearing the phrase “it’s raining cats and dogs” would believe that canines and felines are about to fall from the sky. In other words, listen to their language, not yours or what is “correct”.

Taking this into account I immediately realized its efficacy, and through various observations and playful explorations, we came upon the idea for the project: I would listen intently to their free association as they spoke about their lives and their dreams, Johanne my partner would work with her immense library of photographs to help elaborate situations and descriptions when they could not find the words, and additionally, Sabine, the painter, would use her talent to paint their dreams, fantasies and life wishes. In the end, they were able to communicate to us in their language and of their reality, and not ours. By extension, the medical and therapeutic models in the USA, like for example ABA therapy for autism and developmental disorders, attempts to normalize and acclimate their modes of adaptation to normal society, to force it, and why would they not reject this, their natural mode of being? I strongly believe the psychoanalytic account that autism is an unconscious hiding from the cruelty of the outside world and society, for which they do not want to be part of. Why violently try and rip their subjective defense mechanisms away from them. Much better to allow them a place for play to find a creative solution into the outside world. To be respected on their terms.

This is but one aspect of mental health today that I see as problematic and rampant. Let us take for example the APA paper we read from, Addressing the Mental Health Needs of Racial and Ethnic Minority Youth: a guide for practitioners.

“First, practitioners can educate or train members of the public and provide them with the knowledge and skills they need to help their own communities deal more effectively with challenges. For example, through a focus group, members of a Latino community gave input to shape the content of a mental health literacy video intended for low-income families. As a result, the video used culturally appropriate language understandable to parents in that community and discussed parents’ stated concerns. Doing this not only helped normalize the experiences of Latino parents who subsequently watched the video but also opened the eyes of the practitioners as to what Latino parents see as barriers to care (Umpierre et al., 2015).[2] “

Who are they to say that these practitioners, by fabricating their language to suit their Latino clients, can somehow pretend to know “what Latino parents see as barriers”? Worse still in my opinion is the impetus on “normalizing the experiences of Latinos” – what that means is to coerce Latinos to employ the dominant language and discourse, or to be understood. These therapists think they are helping Latinos be understood! Know, they are enforcing the therapists form of understanding onto the other.

By means of analogy, let me return to the individuals I worked with on the art project, but to make an observation about how mental health interprets and portrays, and ultimately coerces the developmentally disabled as a whole. The mental health discourse and agenda (often enforced through financial injunction of the medical industry and insurance companies) renders them as other, and by employing a kind of “understanding” that is more akin to pity, they infantilize the patient and keep them trapped in a submissive role assumed to have no agency of their own, and render them “disabled” – literally, dis-abilified - . This approach stifles these individuals and is the opposite of empowering them, because the “empathetic” practitioners are not allowing them to speak and be from their own subjectivity, from their own specific reality, but either from one that is inferior or rendered handicapped, when in reality it is just different, not other.

Fanon presents us with such a tableau, by way of Hegel, in his chapter of Black Skin White Masks, “The Negro and Hegel”:

Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or recognized.

—Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind

Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, that other will remain the theme of his actions. It is on that other being, on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend. It is that other being in whom the meaning of his life is condensed.

There is not an open conflict between white and black. One day the White Master, without conflict, recognized the Negro slave.

But the former slave wants to make himself recognized. [3]

Often, mental health care further disenfranchises, subjugates them to an even more inferior social status, and instills in them a sense that they are not only other, but outsiders, (outsider art can become social practice if allowed) and made a minority class, rather than particular individuals within the social fabric, in other words, they are made slaves – not only by how they have to adhere to subjugation and infantilization, but because their labor (that is given to them on the pretense that they can’t do anything else) is not a representation of them as individuals who generate their own meaning that is just as relevant, but people who are understood as not capable, when in fact they just have alternative modes of adaptation. Allow for that alternative process, and they may even be relieved of what ails them, set free.

Contrary to how Americans botched psychoanalysis with their condescending medical model ego psychology, Freud was on the side of subjective realization and particularity, not of pathologizing. Philosopher Richard Rorty puts it as such: “Rather than discuss rationality in the abstract, simplistic and reductionist way in which Hobbes and Hume discuss it (a way which retains Plato’s original dualisms for the sake of inverting them). Freud spends his time exhibiting the extraordinary sophistication, subtlety, and wit of our unconscious strategies. He thereby makes it possible for us to see science and poetry, genius and psychosis - and, most importantly, morality and prudence, not as products of distinct faculties but as alternative modes of adaptation”[4]

Artistic means can be an extension of oneself, and thus, a “medium” with the double sense of the word, or vehicle, of transmitting subjectivity, rather than acclimation to standards and normalization. Lacan rightfully pointed out that James Joyce was psychotic, but kept relatively sane and, crucially, productive, BECAUSE he was able to utilize his distinct medium and understanding of language, that his art kept him “together” – this phenomenon would later be theorized by Lacan as being what he called “le sinthome” – a neologism that could translate to “synthetic man” “synth” “homme” )[5]

When these individuals came to and were in and shown at the exhibit, they were not outsiders, but humans, with a common connection and a language that was able to be translated, but not corrected, through art, and had part of their world seen and experienced, rather than being seen through the lens of our world, of societies world. Finally, what if we shouldn’t think about minorities in the broad sense as being disadvantaged, but different, rather than other, with their own methods of alternatively adapting?

[1] Compagnie Cultures & Performances – Café curious – Ille de France

[2] Pg. 14 Outreach and Collaboration in the Community https://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/mental-health-needs.pdf

[3] Fanon, p. 169

[4] Rorty, p. 33

[5] See Seminar 23, Jacques Lacan http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/THE-SEMINAR-OF-JACQUES-LACAN-XXIII.pdf

Sources

https://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/mental-health-needs.pdf

Fanon, Frantz. 1986 (1952). Black Skin, White Masks. Pluto Press, Sidmouth, England.

Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England.

Freud, S. 1962. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 3, “On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena” p 25. Hogarth Press, London.

http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/THE-SEMINAR-OF-JACQUES-LACAN-XXIII.pdf