Abstract
With the evocative title Maintenant, il faut se quitter, in English Now We Must Part, Catherine Chabert introduces the subject of separation in a psychoanalytic frame. In the course of this deceptively slim but very dense volume, she develops the idea that separation, the capacity to separate, is fundamental to the human condition and to psychoanalytic theory and practice. Though the book stands alone, it represents an important link in a chain of publications elaborating Chabert’s ideas. The theme of separation and differentiation has been addressed in the previous work of this author, including L’amour de la difference (2003a), Feminin mélancolique (2003b), La jeune fille et le psychanalyste (2015), and Les séparations: Victoires et catastrophes (2013), the last a collective work on the subject. In each volume, the author writes about the experience of separation and its importance for the construction of identity, sexuality, and appreciation of difference.
Catherine Chabert is a well known and highly respected training analyst in the Association Psychanalytique de Paris, and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Paris Descartes. In addition to her work focusing on separation and difference, she has contributed articles and books on subjects including neurosis, narcissism, depression, psychosis, otherness, and psychoanalytic interpretation of the Rorshach and the TAT. Chabert is an important figure in French psychoanalysis, known for the depth and breadth of her work, which has received wider attention from the many colloquia she has organized, and from international invitations to keynote important conferences, most recently the IPA meeting in 2019, expanding the reach of her teaching and publications.
In Maintenant, il faut se quitter, in theoretical discussion and clinical examples, Chabert examines how in all kinds of separation, whether tragic and final ruptures, as in loss to death, or in partings that are formative and liberating in the process of maturation, one copes and grows from such experiences throughout life. Her title is full of possible meanings. In French, the “il faut” translated as “we must,” can imply the “we” of mutual decision, as with adults who must part, including the analytic couple at the end of treatment. “Il faut” invokes as well the admonition to a child, as in an authority imposing the parting. Chabert begins the book with a prologue including an anecdote of two little girls united for a summer, playing in a close and joyful way on their last day together. The voice of the adult man that interrupts with “Il faut se quitter” repeats the injunction three times, and the girls must obey and take leave of each other. This anecdote touches much of what will be elaborated in the book. It brings the reader to the immediacy of the sadness, the poignancy, and the helplessness felt by the girls. Helplessness in the moment, which evokes the helplessness of human development pertaining to the forces, internal and external, that push toward separation, independence, and, with these, loss and the construction of the self.
Chabert demonstrates her work with separation as it appears in the lives, psyches, fantasies, and dreams of her patients, as well as in the analytic relation itself. Her work is very much based on the foundation of Freudian metapsychology. To the classic psychoanalytic formulation that addresses the realms of love and work, Chabert adds separation and the capacity to separate. For her the question of loss and separation remains a fundamental aspect of the human condition, metapsychology, and clinical work. “One could add [to love and work] ‘to separate oneself,’ ‘to be able to leave,’ as a corollary or prolongation of the capacity to be alone according to Winnicott” (p. 9; all translations mine). As part of psychic life, separation functions as a motor, a driving force forward; it cannot be reduced to a developmental stage.
Chabert’s work resonates with an intimate and vibrant relationship to the work of Freud. One appreciates throughout the originality and relevance of Freud’s thinking, as Chabert uses this foundation for lively thinking of her own. American readers have a lot to gain in exposure to this deep and dynamic relationship with the work of Freud.
In terms of human development, Chabert points out the ordinary ruptures and separations that continue from birth and early separations from parents to the formation of separate identity and on throughout life. Chabert emphasizes the importance of the separation from childhood itself, that is, from childhood fantasy and the first loves of childhood, in order to construct a separate self in identity, sexuality, and new passionate relationships. The “il faut” implies the internal conflict, the pull to stay small and not alone that exists along with the drive forward to construct a separate self. Drive, in the sense of the internal push forward, is at the center. Oedipal struggles therefore figure importantly in separation. The theoretical emphasis in the concept of development is different from that of Mahler and Anna Freud, whose theoretical influence has been so important in the United States, with their emphasis on phases and lines of development. Chabert’s focus (and that of French psychoanalysis) is on the unconscious and psychic life, on the drives and their vicissitudes and influence in internal and then external life. The emphasis is on the return of the repressed throughout life. The feelings of those little girls are always with us. They had to part, and this can symbolize the parting from the independence they created as latency children playing apart from parents, and then the next step, of creating a singular independence, which will involve leaving family and the substitutes created in childhood and adolescence with best friends and first loves. The fundamental point is that the struggle to be a separate self continues throughout life, as we live with our unconscious forces, which never cease to emerge.
In the first part of the book, Chabert examines anxiety (angoisse, which connotes anxiety as well as anguish), painful sorrow (douleur), and mourning. She relates these states and symptoms to separation. She presents as evidence that “the consubstantiality of anxiety and separation appear . . . in all their forms—castration anxiety, anxiety of loss of the love of the object, annihilation anxiety to which is added anxiety in the face of worry. Each of these mobilizes an operation of separation” (p. 22). She examines in this context the place of the object in the psyche of the subject, which cannot, of course, be entirely distinct from each other. She points out the dangers of nonseparation coming from anxiety, anticipating the loss of the difference between the self and the other, impeding forward development.
The structuring of the oedipal phase, and its reworking in the treatment, Chabert writes, encompasses the recognition of separation and separateness. Within that complex is the desire to separate the parental couple. This fantasy moves the child forward to the differentiation and ambivalence necessary for the full oedipal fantasy and its renunciation, which includes separating from the parental object of love (pp. 29–30).
In the context of the oedipus complex, “the taboo of incest is literally the taboo of the not separated” (p. 30). Chabert’s case of Camille is an example. Hidden beneath her anxiety about the death of her parents were oedipal desires and accompanying wishes for destruction of the parents’ bond in the primal scene (p. 30). At the end of her analysis, as she separates from the analyst, she works through her separation, in fact liberation, from oedipal conflict. She dreams of being on a train with her father, of leaving the train, her father and her baggage still on the train; she is watching as the train leaves the station. On the platform, alone, she first feels very anxious, upset, and then “all of a sudden [is] filled with a violent joy”; she doesn’t “remember the rest of the dream, just a landscape that stretches before [her], and a road that continues toward infinity” (p. 31).
The word “mourning,” for Chabert, has particular meaning following Freud. There can be analogies to reactions to other kinds of loss, but the irrevocable loss from death, and the unique narcissistic loss of the self, in that case, leads to a process that requires a more fundamental construction of one’s self than other losses and other ruptures.
An example of this traumatic separation from an object who has died is that of the young adolescent Jonas, who had lost his mother several years earlier. Before coming to treatment at fourteen he had “adapted” well at the cost of splitting off the full experience of the loss of his mother. In a dream early in treatment, he is in a boat with a man who lowers a woman into the water as bait for fish. After too much time, the large, strong man does not bring her to the surface, despite the entreaties of Jonas in the dream. Jonas screams and attacks the man, to no avail. He awakens in terror. Chabert recognizes the split; that Jonas both acknowledges and does not acknowledge the permanent loss of his mother (p. 37). In the course of treatment, investing the analyst transferentially with the qualities of a mother and of a third person, Jonas works through the loss of his mother and the “loss” of his father as the latter remarries and goes forward in his life. The violence of his loss is matched by the working through in the analysis and in the separation, in the transference, at the end of his analysis. He is finally able to “finish” a recurrent dream from which he had always awakened before the end. In this final version, he is with his mother’s coffin high on a cliff, and the coffin is to be pushed into the sea. He realizes that his mother is alive in the coffin, and she calls out not to throw the coffin off the cliff. No one hears, and, finally ending the dream, Jonas sees the coffin fall from the cliff deep into the sea. In a letter to the analyst years later, Jonas demonstrates the construction that occurred for him in his psychoanalytic experience. He tells his former analyst that he was able to fall in love; he believed he had found the love of his life, and he was sure that the analyst would like her (p. 45).
The example shows, as Chabert has been describing theoretically, how psychic separation is necessary for the construction of an independent self. The subject can then go forth to form relationships with a separate and new object, while remaining connected internally to the benign aspects of past relationships. One can see in the story of Jonas how the ordinary violence of internal life, in the oedipal situation, in adolescence, and throughout life, echoes, intertwines, with the traumatic loss and separation of death.
Both examples show how in the context of the transference one can get to the root of separation experiences, or fears of separation that remain deeply rooted in the unconscious. She explicates the differences in the transference between the neuroses, in which the conflict and therefore the work resides in exploration of “the interior theater” understood through dreams, fantasies, and memories, and that of the more disturbed, in which the elaboration uses the external scene, current life, and insistence on the reality of the situation (p. 84). Using clinical examples, she elaborates for the reader the ways in which the patient can be helped to tolerate, with the analyst and in the transference, experiences and fantasies of separation and loss, and thereby transform them into possibilities for growth and change, including through experiences of separation from the analyst: separating in the rhythm of the weekly sessions, during vacations, and finally in termination (p. 57).
In the first subsection, “Depression and Melancholia,” of the second section of the book, “Humeurs noires” (“Dark States of Mind”), Chabert explores the importance of narcissism in the understanding of symptoms that seem to be based exclusively in mourning and loss. In describing two patients who at first seem similarly depressed, she elucidates the differences revealed at the level of narcissistic investment, which indicate very different psychic experiences in the two patients. Although both are depressed, suffering from loss, in one patient, Jérémie, the striking characteristic is “a form of disinvestment, . . . but also an identification with his dead ones, as if he let himself be taken away with them. It is this impossible separation that the melancholy drift stigmatizes” (p. 73). Chabert describes him, in terms borrowed from Pontalis (1977), as not having the characteristics of depression such as “self-reproach, self-destructiveness, or an excessive feeling of being small.” For the other patient, Mira, presenting with similar depressive symptoms, a rupture with her beloved husband is felt as a “catastrophe, a collapse marked by a pain without limits, radical and tormenting. The narcissistic wound appears inordinate, and leads to a disqualification of herself that is immense and desperate” (p. 73). Chabert emphasizes that although Jérémie at first appears to present the narcissistic and melancholy model, and for Mira object loss seems to prevail, “deeper study brings to light a construction that is almost the opposite. The melancholy of Jérémie could be complications, perhaps transitory, from a mourning process that is incomplete, whereas Mira’s disappointment in love reveals an immense narcissistic fragility, an incommensurable dependence of the ego that goes well beyond the most classical affect of loss of the object” (p. 74).
Chabert asks, in the second subsection, “A qui apartient la pulsion de mort?”—To whom does the death instinct belong?—to elaborate the role of the death instinct in depression and in separation. Drawing on the work of Nathalie Zaltzman and Ferenczi, she finds herself closer to Zaltzman in describing how the death instinct has a constructive function, contributing to separation and differentiation. Referencing Freud before 1920, before the structural theory, Chabert writes, “death is not only the opposite of life, it is not only its end, it is in the service of life, above all when it qualifies the forces of the drives” (p. 90).
Chabert elucidates this complex configuration by drawing on literature outside the psychoanalytic canon. In her study of Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost (2007), she emphasizes the particularity of Mendelsohn’s search for his familial roots lost in the Shoah, and the ways in which his relationships and understanding of his living family change as a result. This study of disappearance, “no departure, no separation, no death, no ritual, no ceremony, no burial or grave” (p. 96), highlights the reconstruction of family for the second generation, so that mourning could be possible. Chabert points out that for the first generation, including Mendelsohn’s grandfather, who immigrated to the U.S. before the tragedy engulfing the rest of the family, there was a lasting guilt complicated by the normal competition between brothers, one who survives while the other perishes with his family. Late in life, the grandfather commited suicide. In killing himself, writes Chabert, “the grandfather lets himself be pulled by his dead objects . . . by a possible identification with the dead brother, he of whom one could never speak” (p. 104). For the grandchildren, particularly for Mendelsohn himself, there was a bringing to consciousness and a working through of the family history, and in this process a working through of his competition with his own brother, and his consequent ability to separate from childhood and embrace adult relationships with his siblings.
Throughout this work, Chabert appreciates and elucidates the interweaving of narcissism in separation and differentiation. She explores the painful ways that one’s narcissism is challenged. When one separates from someone, one separates from a part of oneself. An adolescent separates from the child that she was. Particularly noted is the difference between the separations she characterizes as ruptures (death and its permanence, a loss rather than a separation, with the need for the work of mourning) and separations that are an ongoing part of life. “The big difference between mourning and melancholia is that the fact at the origin . . . of the latter remains enigmatic, on one hand, while on the other hand one witnesses a ‘an extraordinary diminution in . . . self-regard, an impoverishment of the ego on a grand scale. . . . In mourning, it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia [depression], it is the ego itself’” (Freud 1917, p. 246; Chabert, p. 69).
Narcissism is integral to the distinctions Chabert makes between separations in the course of normal development and, in a final chapter titled “L’amour manique,” the more internally violent rupture of a passionate love relationship. With the rupture of a love relationship after the idealizing intensity with which it begins, more of oneself is lost because of the narcissistic investment of the idealization. She describes the manic phase in which narcissistic needs and wishes prevail, in which there is no real recognition of the difference and separateness of the other. Chabert goes on to observe that if one can move from this narcissistic, idealizing phase through the disappointment to acceptance of difference and imperfection, there is development in the relationship, not rupture. What is violently ruptured is the idealization, and if the relationship cannot withstand that (Don Juanism in both men and women is cited by Chabert), the relationship is ruptured (pp. 121–122). Idealization that cannot be given up in order to embrace difference and disappointment indicates a lack of separation from the original childhood loves, idealized as they were.
Chabert takes the reader through a close analysis of the meaning of separation in the contexts of anxiety, the oedipal situation, mourning, sadness, depression, and the death drive. Throughout she emphasizes the importance of separation in transforming passive to active, and in the recognition of difference—from the other, between the sexes, in finding a unique identity. She emphasizes the dynamic character of separation, as well as its sad and sometimes traumatic aspects. She finds the enlivening, differentiating sources of potential for change and growth. In this nuanced work, Chabert clarifies that while making the distinction between permanent losses that require mourning in the sense that Freud described, it is nevertheless true that with mourning and working through, even catastrophic losses can lead to important internal changes, differentiation, and growth.
It is my hope that this book, and Chabert’s original and quite valuable work more generally, will be translated for English-speaking readers.