CLINICAL INCIDENCES OF THE EXILE

By Fethi BENSLAMA

 M.Karim Khelil :

Mr. Fethi Benslama is a psychoanalyst responsible for the Maghreb Research Group of the Paris University VII. He is also the director of “Intersignes” (Mysterious Signs) exercises Publication. He published a considerable number of articles on psycho-analytical clinic, anthropology of the Arabic thinking and a book titled, “La Nuit Brisée: Mohammed et l’Annonciation Islamique”, 1988.

This evening, Mr. Benslama is going to brief us of the clinical incidences of the exile.

First Part-

 Mr. Benslama: In his publication on “ the Creek Mythology and Thinking”, Jean-Pierre Vernant opens the chapter on the double and the image by a very informative text devoted to Kolossos’s figure, to the practice around the Kolossos’s figure, and its symbolic value among the ancient creeks. According to him, etymologically the word did not mean what it finally meant i.e. the colossal, gigantic effigies. Its prehellenic etymology attaches it to the radical “KOI” which has to do with something erected, standing up, an idol or a figurine which is distinct from other kinds of idols and a figurine called Bretas or Xoanon because this figurine was carried around in processions, hence a mobile thing other than Kolossos which are fixed.

He wrote, “Kolossos will be represented in two forms. Either by a pillar statue or in terms of a standing statue carved from an upright stone, from a tombstone planted inside the ground and sometimes interred”. The auther briefly examines all the practices in which Kolossos appears. In the first place, he tells us that Kolossos was found inside the tomb, an empty tomb. To figure out as a substitute to an absent corpse and the Kolossos represented death. This practice corresponds to a belief according to which when a man who is away seems to have disappeared without his corpse being buried, his psyche continuously wanders between the living and the dead. His spectrum comes to haunt the living and cruelly ill-treats them. Apart from representing the dead, the Kolossos is a double which enables fixing the dead’s psyche and put it in its dwelling place, etc. Therefore, Kolossos enables putting a dead man his dwelling place.

However, Kolossos is not always a substitute of death or relegated into a tomb, it can be erected on the land surface to establish contact with the dead, and between the dead and the living. Through the Kolossos the dead partly manifests himself to the living, in a form of light to the eyes of the living, while still engraved to the ground in contact with the dead’s world. His stellar presence signals absence. Thus, Kolossos represents passage between two worlds, life and death and between two states, presence & absence. It is in this regard that in some rituals such as the one that involves the supplicants, to give hospitality to the dead who comes back through his psyche to haut the living, it is through the Kolossos that the psyche is caught and fixed inside the house. Therefore, Kolossos retains a spirit that wanders between two worlds and it gives it a place to stay.

I proceed further without mentioning all the examples given by the author inside the archaeological and epigraphic documents in the creek text where the direct rapport between Kolossos and Psyche is established. This link lies on the fact that they are antithetic and complementary. According to Vernant, the Kolossos is engraved underground, deeply rooted underground and eternally fixed. Kolossos are literally those spirits which cannot scatter their legs to walk. Psyche moves without touching the ground, it hovers above the ground; it is eternally mobile and untouchable. However, the climax of this text is reached when the author notes that a living man who walks on the surface is at middle ground between the Kolossos and the Psyche. He writes that, therefore, Kolossos and Psyche are opposed to the ways of the living man, like two extreme positions as compared to the mediated condition –the Man’s. While the Kolossos is fixed to the ground, the living man is just in contact with the ground. In contrast with the Psyche of which there no contact with the land surface, and the Kolossos which is totally immobile, the living man is characterised by progressive movement to cover successive positions, even when confined to a fixed position. Nonetheless, the Psyche is ubiquitous all over the area,” and the author concludes that by engraving a stone to the ground, the point is to fix, immobilize and lodge this untouchable Psyche (which is nowhere and everywhere at the same time) at a definite point on the ground.”

After this text, Jean Peirre Vernant raised what he called the operational value of the Kolossos, which consists in fixing the Psyche which finds itself under abnormal conditions and it enables establishing correct relationship between the two worlds of the living and the dead. He says that its duty is to translate death into a visible form and to establish its insertion into the world of the living.

Reading this text whose contents I have just summed up, I remembered one situation that I encountered a few years ago during a consultation that I gave at Children Social Aide Agency, in one of the popular suburbs of Paris – Cité Qautre Mille de Courneuve. I am going to report on the essential elements of this situation.

In this consultation, I often received a social worker bringing a child, or a child brought by parents or a mother who has some problems. Hence, I was requested to give my opinion or to evaluate the situation. Normally, while the social worker relates the problem; I take into account the fact that he/she is a role player in this situation and in the first place, I receive him/her and the people for which he/she made this evaluation request, and I expect him/her to tell them why he/she had to make this request.

On that day, a child entered with his father and a social worker. This child seemed to be 6 to 7 years old. In fact, I later on realized that he was 11 and half years old. He looked very weak, with wild eyes, his mouth open and twisted a little. It looked to have turned back on its own. He sat down in such a way that he would stay with us until the end of the interview with his father. The social worker told me that this child had enormous schooling problems and not only that he was troubled but he was even more troublesome and violent. However, the main reason for bringing him was that he often told his friends and relatives of the strong anguishes of death, metaphysical concerns, and harassments for the whole day, on God, and after-death, the tomb, hell and paradise. He asked questions to his relatives. He talked of death and the other world and many things to his guardian (aunt). This troubled everybody especially his aunt who is his guardian in France, because his mother had long left France for Tunisia. His father was often away because he did not have a specialised profession. He bought and sold almost anything of any kind like watches, bags, bracelets, etc. He travelled from city to city without making enough cash for survival. I was told that he was hassling in search for an uncertain business. According to him, sometimes he runs a loss, gets robbed, cheated, etc. He only took a few days at home. He was very sad and seemed very worried for his son. He cheated on some social services, yelled at his son, nicknaming him, beating him (sometimes severely). From there he would go away as usual. Unlike an ambulant merchant, he is a wanderer who evenly wanders all over France.

This time, given the situation of his son which was becoming uncontrollable, his friend advised him to come and ask that his son be put in a boarding school so that “he could be under the responsibility of the state.” When the father spoke, the child looked to be scared, he frizzed in fear, and he even shrivelled and looked elsewhere. The father explained that he preferred that his son be classified and lodged with disabled people. Therefore, his son would receive pension leaving him in peace so that he could face death without being worried for his son.

Ali’s father did not seem so sick; he was only 45 years old. He looked to be healthy and he related this entire story in perfect French. He lingered on talking about his death, on the perspective of death and ended up by saying this, “In my culture and tradition, a father does not live long” in Arabic language. I asked him if he ever talked about his death to his son. He told me “Yes”, and that the only thing that worried him was the life of his son. If he died in exile, his son will be abandoned; he would be alone in exile. In Arabic, the word that designates exile is“Ghorba” which means “foreignness” or in rather literary manner “queerness” and the term means sunset, and the exile is the West, which still means the place where the light ceases and vanishes. Therefore, I asked the father if he ever talked about death to his son and he told me “yes” and his anxieties are not regular, but there are times when he thought he was going to die and he was scared of what would happen to his son.

Then I told him that all these death anguishes and metaphysical concerns of his son could be linked to these anxieties that he has. He was not shocked and he told me that at that time he found it fitting that his son knew a little about religion. That maybe religion might appease him in his questions and he wanted to bring him. Ali’ father began to talk in fits and starts mumbling something “I wanted to bring him”. But he failed to find the proper word. He began to search and made gestures that showed me that he wanted me to help him out with the proper diction. He said in Arabic, “How is this said?” He did not find the word in both French and Arabic.

After a considerable period of time, which was too long, he turned his head to the social worker and said, “You know what, I wanted to take him to our church”. He was a bit puzzled and at this moment he appeared like someone falling down during an interview. I then decided to give him the word, “mosqué” which he did not find, then he did not continue. He seemed very much crushed down and he did not continue talking. Thereafter, I was left with Ali who seemed very much relieved by his father’s departure. The child who had shrivelled began to relax. He was no longer as weak as he seemed when he arrived. I then saw the father alone, who briefed me of the following stories.

He told me that he started to wander after the death of his father in France. At that time Ali was around two years old. Therefore, it was nine years that he found himself in this situation. He buried his father under shameful conditions because he was not able to take him back to the home-country or give him an individual tomb. He was buried in a common grave as it is the case with people who do not have the means. One day when he passed by his village cemetery he heard a voice, maybe the voice of his father, he was not sure. This voice said, “what have you done with your father?” This voice was a bit striking and he further told me that this voice left him insane and it is still vivid in his memory .I thought that it might be something that he often heard, a hallucination, but it was not at all. He still could remember this voice. He no longer heard it thereafter, but could still vividly recall it.

Second Part:

Here is the text and the case. The text does not explain the case and the case does not illustrate the text. There is a large space of time that separates them between the civilisations which will enable us to ignore any culturalist explanation. However, there are multiple resonations between the two which converge at a particular point, which is the question of the dwelling place. The question of the dwelling place or the question over life and death which makes the human being wander. It is around this question that I am going to try to base the main point of my argument for this evening, “Clinical Incidents from the Exile”. I first wanted to propose these two documents, the mythic document and its commentary and the current clinical document with commentary in order to go straight to the target or rather the hypothesis that infers on my point and which is as follows.

Regardless of all other fields of cultural references, whatever the cultural background, and if I have anything to say this evening, it is just that I propose that this clinic which focuses on the foreigners, the travellers, should abandon the culturalist influence. It has to do with the old meaning which is, therefore, anachronistic of the exile which can be updated inside somebody’s life. This sense comes from a crucial and essential experience which concerns the foundations of the psychological being. This experience has to do with the relationship between life and death, in other words, the question over the place of existence. For a foreign patient (here once again, I don’t talk of any immigrant, and I will tell why). For the foreign patient, for those who happened to travel it is just a matter of looking for the place which is central to their life, their search and their sufferings. Therefore, the most important thing for the therapist is not to invoke into mind any given cultural sense of their origins, as indicated in one culturalist theory, but to focus on this question over the place at which the patient and his psychotherapist have to open themselves and that they should both accept.

At the end of my presentation, I will soon come back to the mythic texts with a case study. Let’s keep this question over the place and the dwelling place in mind. All these motives behind the relations between the Psyche and the Kolossos, Ali’s fathers’ wondering, because he did not give a burial place to his father (who, at the same time, cannot find a shelter for himself) and the fact that we can see again his young son becoming a victim of this mistake of the dwelling place, therefore, leads us to think of the destiny of the existing travelling between the fixed and the mobile: How can we fix the mobile and give mobility to the fixed, at the same time? Because, as we have just said that the living is the middle ground between the Kolossos and the Psyché. For the last five years, as a consultant whereby I used to meet many people from different cultures, with various problems, my mind was occupied with what I called “Clinical Incidences from the Exile”. Initially I had in mind, as it is the case with all of us, the major culturalists hypotheses of the Psyche of which ethno-psychiatry is one of its dominant forms in approaching these “immigrants” patients’ problem today. Everybody knows ethno-psychiatry and we can easily remind you of the basics. The clinician must have the cultural theory of his foreign patient’s subjectivity, but not only that (subjectivity); he must also have his unconscious cultural theory. In addition, he must assume that each individual, belonging to any culture, has an unconscious called “ethnic”.

Apparently, it is always Africans and Maghrebis who have “ethnic unconscious”. This is not the case with the Europeans because any one who makes allusion to the other’s ethnicity can only be universal. This is the point where stems the hypothesis that having a cultural theory of the Psyche of his patient in his finger tips, the therapist can understand something regarding the symptoms, his patient’s troubles and give him the cultural sense which he missed at the same time in a situation of suffering. This is why the new ethno-psychiatry clinic developed a theory called Cultural Spoon-feeding in order to feed this African and Maghrebi patient of some the lost elements of his/her culture.

I would like to highlight that we all come from there, we all come from there and we needed that support – culturalism support. The American psychology and colonial psychiatry’s major invention. Me, myself, I was very closer to it. For a long time I worked with George Devereux whose theories are very much careful than the ethno-psychiatry of today and deserves closer look. He is a very careful and well-informed man especially because he took long time among the indigenous people and he respected them. Another common characteristic of today’s ethno-psychiatrists is that they do not despise their patients but they want to help them in administering and injecting a sense of their culture.

After a considerably long time in the profession I started to realise that we have to stop using the major culturalist hypothesis. In other words, I had to eliminate reference to the subject’s indigenous culture from my clinical services in order to focus on the question of travelling, experience and the length of the distance covered by the subject or his family background – sometimes on two or three generations. Because people we see or may see may have gone through this experience of travelling, but they did so as young children. I also realised that it can be annoying, very much annoying, to base oneself on culturalist explanation in relation to these patients in the case whereby we are referring to maghrebi subject’s cultural sense, or in relation to some behaviours and complaints, which could just hide the question of the travelling experienced in their life and the search – the search for a place. Therefore, it can be seen that I avoided using the term immigrant or immigration and preferred using the word travelling. I am going to explain why.

I had to abandon all this culturalist theory because I realised that when I came to contact with people. This is a central fact. The experience, around which their problems revolve, their troubles, their suffering etc, is not the content of those cultural references, but the travelling itself (which I will call exile for the second time, and I will explain the reason). It is the experience of travelling itself which is central and which is the major cause of these patients ‘suffering.

However, travelling is done in relation to the values, ritual emblems in relation to the family, village, language and generally in relation to the point of reference. The essential element is not the sense but the fact that experience in exile includes a choice of tear and distance from the subject’s original references. Whether voluntarily or involuntarily (made by the subject, if he is an adult or his parents from one or two generations) there has been a choice, whatever we may call it, a choice of distance, of rupture from the references - choice that he will assume, either consciously or unconsciously. The decision for leaving became final from the time when he left. According to ethno-psychiatry or culturalists theory, this act of leaving ones origins shall never be repaired.

The second element is that in accordance with the host-country, he is continually coaxed to abandon his references to become what I later called, reference renegade. If we pay a little attention to details we will realise that immigration debates are either centralised on rejection or abandoning of references− abandoning one’s original point of reference. It is this particular experience of subject’s transformation (“I left and you have to leave”), disorientation and search that he must live, carry and tolerate. Therefore, it can be seen that bringing forth and drawing back one’s old cultural habit will block a person or render his life painful or sometimes it will give him an illusion that he has never left his place of origin and he can maintain the same standard. Injection of an old cultural sense is practically a foolish injection,in some way, because when the subject just has to face the consequences of his travelling, when he just on the point of facing this “quitting”, “abandoning” and “leaving” the premises which belonged to him, then they tell him, “ No, here is the old sense, your culture and identity”.

In short, in the first place, travelling experience is just an experience that has do with abandoning one’s original perception of things: changing one’s perception of things which necessarily imposes turning one’s head to the outside. The subject should not be reengaged into this abandoned sense; rather he should be allowed to psychologically elaborate leaving it, to do something about it. The subject should not be obliged to remain with his ethnic sense or to the sense’s ethnicity. This old cultural reference should neither be denied nor cultivated in him. But he must open his mind so that his search for a place of which he can make himself at home is not painful.

I have just summed up the critical points vis-à-vis culturalist theories. But the strongest criticism must be getting deeper. Enough attention and closer look should be exercised. This culturalist construction is now 2 centuries old and is now being revived. Today culturalism is associated with everybody.

I started to classify patients into two large extremes through people whom I have seen.

The first extreme includes people for whom travelling or going on exile seems to be an event that can be talked about, but as an inacceptable loss, an awful bereavement which has not only led to changes in the family, also his children and his partner – something so unbearable. We can make a collection of what these suffering subjects say when talking about being in exile and travelling. They do not deny it, it is a talk-about, and it is an element or an event that they talk about on daily basis. What is it that they say? They state that, travelling was irrepressible, inevitable and we were pushed by necessity. This implies that they were subjected to going on exile as a matter of necessity. Then the second proposition which is the most important in my opinion is that this exile, this travelling has made us the foreigners to both the host-country and the country of origin. The problem does not only stem from the fact that one is a foreigner in the host-country, but also from the fact that one is a foreigner even in his country of origin. In his article, “Inhibition, Symptom and Anguish”, Freud talked about symptom as a foreign thing to the ego. These people have become foreign themselves and foreign vis-à-vis the foreignness. They are constituted as foreign subjects. They are like border-posts which welcome the repressed from both sides. As a result, these subjects maintain excitement and rejection phenomena from both sides. This is the same in both their home-countries and host-countries. Because what seems to be the source of their pain, what they always plot is the other – the other in the host-country like the other in the home-country – does not stop to refuse, to repress vis-à-vis the other place, to the other reference. Their existence seems to be tuned to welcoming repressive elements from both sides, and it becomes intolerable for the indigenous people on both lands. This anguish of double foreignness is their everyday life, in every step they take, in their relations with their children and in what they will become.

The second largest extreme includes those who were fathers or mothers who lived this travelling experience but there is nothing much to say. Not only that there is nothing special to say, it is also motionless, just like a chair or a wall. They do not even want to know about it because it has no value and it is not part of what they want to talk about. The subject remains foreign to his exile. This does not mean that travelling does not have effect: for example, it can even have harmful effects on children who travelled. There are silent processes of abondening a habit. For instance children find themselves French overnight, while they were originally Algerian and their family is completely opposed to their becoming French just because their grandfather was killed by the French soldiers. In this case the person is confronted with symbolic genealogy change (because nationality is something that has do with genealogy) which is done silently and sometimes in contrast with the children’s will. These children are faced with what I call massive designification process. For instance, there are some rituals which have meaning for the parents, but meaning nothing to children. Not only that they mean nothing but parents also do not bother attaching any meaning to them. They are imposed on them and they are forced to undergo them. And here there are conflict, the conflicts of which children revolt against their parents. It happened three or four times that I listened to patients, especially women telling me, “We are Christians”, while both their parents were Muslims. The other one even asked for the church’s address whilst she did not even know what to be a Christian meant. But she stated, “I am Christian and no longer Muslim”. Here I am just giving insidious silent examples of the designification process and of change and of symbolic genealogy.

As for these exile and travelling problems, in a nutshell, there are three attitudes, three approaches to those problems.

1°) Universalist approach: this consists of saying, “let’s do exactly what we do with other patients. Why should we take these peoples’ particular problems into account? Let’s just take exile as an element of their history and continue”. Somehow, I find this position to be much less dangerous than the culturalist position.

There is a culturalist position of which I talked about, but there is another position which I find to be much more insidious, which is too bad and it is sociological. This position inspired a lot of psycho-pathological and psychiatric literature until the 1970’s in what was called, “psychopathology of the transplanted and immigrants”. It relies on the central concept of immigration. As the term immigration itself designates, it is a term that has to do with animal life. It is an ethological term which means travelling in search for pastures, under the influence of subsistence tropism, not existence. Therefore, we have an influx of immigrants because people came in search for food and subsistence. Logically they are in need.

Sociology of immigration and this subsistence psycho-pathology have a lot to talk about, for example, it was this theory that developed the theory about immigrants as “bodies”. (Immigrants have a bodily language, their bodies talk louder which is logical from the time when we talk about organic logic). Therefore, it is in relation to these three trends (but the most important confrontation to me is the one that has to do with culturalism and sociologism) that I resorted to take note of in exile.

While culturalism saturates travelling from one’s origins’ cultural sense, a sense given culturally and while sociologism orients towards the notion of immigration, the subject linked with the need, the term exile seems to qualify an entirely human movement (the term exile has to do with human travelling alone). In addition, it designates getting out because of the root “ex” and “il” which means a place in French as in the case of the words “fournil” bakery or “chenil” kennel. Etymologically the word “exile” means getting out but it later changed to mean banishment. The word exile means “out of the place”. It designates human movement and it should be noted that it does not have to do with wandering in space for subsistence, but movement from one place to another, leaving a place, going to the other place for existence. When I take the concept of existence which was unfortunately practically abandoned by psychiatry since Binswinger, I noticed something inside the notion of existence which is precisely closer to the exile because to exist is just a matter of keeping out of oneself. Ex-ister (to exist) means keeping out of oneself, thus keeping outside.

Therefore, it can be seen how this notion of exile is in perfect concord with the essential meaning of existence because it touches this ecstatic dimension that a human being has of the desire to get out, to the exterior − desire and fear at the same time, an experience of exposure to the outside which can be painful. In addition, we discover that this notion of being in exile is based on strongly-rooted cultural foundations.

Third part

I am going to tell you of something. In this third part of my presentation, I would like to describe the consequences of this crossing over to the concept of exile as the most adapted in founding our approach on problems of human subjects who are travelling, without making reference to immigration, transplantation and the culturalist approach, etc.

In founding our practice in relation to the travelling subjects, around the notion of exile, at that time, separating it from culturalism and socialogism, there is something which in my experience has been turning around the two terms that transpires. I realised that for many subjects whom I saw, what I was given as approach on their existence which can take a dramatic course around the exile, turned around these two essential terms – a child and a place.

In the first place I could present on this configuration “of the child and the place” in stating that it has to do with raising the child, sometimes under hard conditions. It seems that a child enters into conflict or dangerous antagonism with the question of the place. By using the word “child”, I don’t literally mean a real child (much as this could still mean the real child), but also an “imaginary” child. This childish figure found in every one of us, which is both very powerful and fragile at the same time, which is the memory and desire at the same time. I wish to clarify that I don’t only mean space by the word “place”. Maybe the best way to approach the place which is the most vulgar in the local sense is to use this famous phrase, which was sometimes brought into disrepute i.e. “somewhere”.

Aristotle in his 4th book of physics stated that only the non-being is nowhere. The place would be a localisable area where the being finds a site to make a home so that it could be said that he saw God. The same method is found in Plato’s Thimée where plato attributed not only the role of welcoming the human body to the place, but also giving it a territory including the role of the genesis of shapes. A place gives shape to anything. But he tells us that the problem of the place is that it only gives shape to anything without taking shape itself and that the place will disappear once that object leaves that place. And he continues to search the nature of the place. Is it sensitive or intelligible? Plato identifies the third kind which is neither sensitive nor intelligible but a hybrid which is both sensitive and intelligible, the kind of the place as stated in the following passage, “... finally there is still the third kind, which is the place. It is immortal and provides shelter for all objects which are born, it is only visible thanks to the hybrid reasoning which only accompanies a little of sensation, it is hardly believable. However, this can only be seen as a dream (thus, this place would be a dream) when affirming that all the being is necessarily somewhere in space and occupies a certain place and anything which does not exist on earth nor in heavens, is but nothing at all.”

Amid this difficulty of determining what this place means, Plato suggests, “to move objects”. In moving objects we perceive what the place is and we stumble exactly upon our problem that it is travelling that reveals the place as if our settlement had hidden us from the place.

For these subjects about which I am talking, displaced subjects, those still travelling or those who have gone through travelling problems, their implicit or explicit place concerns sometimes become so invading to their lives that they trigger symptomatic signs to the extent that I came to consider it as a drive and to thing of the exile as the obsession of the place. Especially because according to Freud obsessional neurosis is dealt with as a motivating factor for travelling. However, in our case, it is travelling that would create the place obsession and that the exile illness will be the travelling disease. Freud makes a link between religious services and obsession. Which reminds us of Plato when he said that the place we can hardly believe. It is as if the place included its own obsessionality because we can hardly believe it.

I am going to raise the cases of these signs and I will hide the psychological structure of the patients. Because I think that this question over the place takes precedence over what we are used to considering as such and such a structure.

I called one of these cases, “a place which does not make up the world”. For some subjects the place where they live does not make up the world, it is not the world. I found this case in women who fell pregnant for the first time in exile. I met them in Mantes-la-Jolie because I was part of the research team on Problems of Pregnancy among Immigrant Women. I met a large number of them, 300 within the space of two or three years. I could realise that for this women, the place anxiety is expressed through questions such as these, “How can one give birth abroad?” “How can one give birth to a child on the foreign land?” And this is associated with complete desertion. It was as if I was going to die during the labour period, in exile. There is also a vital anxiety for the child who is going be born abroad. What appeared to be awkward was that these women seemed to forget that all new-borns are born foreign at birth. As if being in exile makes them to forget or rather made some pains existential (making foreign men come to the world) and that being in exile made these existential pains more excruciating. One of these women told me that when she fell asleep, she heard a voice saying “where are you from?” She abruptly woke up in fear that her child was falling into a pit. Her husband told me that she was only scared of not being able to give birth here, alone. Eventually I started to realise that these women showed a difficulty that could be summed up thus, “Giving birth does not just involve delivering” She somehow feared that expelling her child from her belly might end up redoubling being in exile, throwing the child out would be an “out of place”, a “non existence”.

For some women there is the “here”, this “here” became bad, hostile, capable of absorbing the child and dissolving it. The place’s hostility, as if it would become indicative is noticed from this question, “where are you from?” as she was asked by her dream. What is this question, otherwise what does this “here” mean or establish in her identity? Who asked her this question? These women’s fear would be the fear that the child falls into the place imposed to them, a place which is hollow – a hole in this question.

I give another figure which I called, “the child sacrificed to the place”. I could raise this question through this sentence of a young Maghreb woman who has abandoned her child. She says, “I gave a child to France, now I have a right to live there”. Evidently, this point corresponds to the idea of sacrificing the child to the place so that staying acquires legitimacy, “I have a right...” Here I think about all these young girls’ situations, these girls who are from traditional families, whom you have undoubtedly met, who wait for a husband chosen by their families or a return to the country. Sometimes both at the same time and who would rebel and make a baby with the first boy-friend one day. If the mother chooses to keep the child, she must go away from the family and if she wants to stay with her family, she must abandon the child. You know these cases are very frequent. Sometimes a child is abandoned, which starts this sacrificial relation to “the here” which can quite quickly seem to be disastrous. It is followed by an irreparable loss sentiment whose place would be a turnover cause to an interminable pain. The one, who decides to leave the family, is the one who is abandoned like a child and she accuses the child who would be the cause of their desertion. In all these cases, the configuration, “the Child and the place” is the cause of being abandoned and abandoning as if the place claimed desertion, child sacrifices, like this antiquity gods.

The third figure seems to be important because it is surrounded by one of the major founding myths of exile. This figure is sometimes linked with the preceding, and I see it among women who are abandoned by their families, or more frequently by the child’s father, who wanders in search for shelter. I am telling you a story about one of these people, “I am like an aircraft which does not find an airport, I am turning round and round and during this time I get out of fuel. Luckily, this one, (she is pointing at a child) is my fuel, without him I fall down”. She continues talking about wandering, “when I remember how I arrived here, I tell him, (and she tells her child) all what I lived. Sometimes, I say to myself, “It’s foolish of you to talk like this to your child.”But who can listen and understand?”

Wandering with a child, search for the place, this figure, this question, “but who can listen?”(talking to the child so that there could be a listener). I take this figure as a central element of all this setting of the child and the place, because these two terms are found in a dramatic composition which is the major myth founder of the Islam itself. Because it has to do with Hagar wandering in the desert with her son Ishmael: Abraham didn’t have a child with Sarah, Sarah suggested to him to take Hagar, the servant. And as Hagar fell pregnant Sarah fell pregnant too. Thus, Abraham under the instigation of Sarah, sends Hagar into the desert where she wanders with her son. She is on the point of dying of thirst and this marked the origin of this beautiful statement, “Hager, do not fear anything because God has heard the voice of a child in a place where he is. Raise him and take him by hand because I will build a great nation with him”. And there, under the child’s feet, formed a source of water which is the one found at Mecca today according to the Muslims.

This myth of listening, understanding and childhood is one of the biggest myths of being in exile which found the place from the exile, from listening of this understanding of the child wandering with the mother.

Although, there are many case, I will end up by the last case which involves a man and which will enable me to come back to the case and the text that I presented at the beginning of this presentation.

Among all these exile figures where the question of the place comes up with acuity, there is one which the place seems to tear the father into pieces. You must have met it in practice. In any case, this idea that being in exile includes the risk of tearing the father into pieces is still present in mine. This tearing into pieces is sometimes real. Fathers are the ones who are really torn from their role, physically torn, broken, smashed down, unemployment and alcoholics or becoming insane, etc. Even the institutions over here contribute to this rupture of the father in making him a bully-person, incapable of listening to his children, violent man, etc. Sometimes taking into account children’s’ fantasies. As if being in exile away from one’s home included less risk of losing a patrimony for the subject, losing one’s country, rather than losing reference to the father and being outside, “outside the fatherhood”.

Psycho-analysis has at least rendered the fact that the father should have a conventional role and that if this role is not backed up by being a mythic father or a symbolic father, it cannot be played: he needs this back up. The problem of these foreign fathers is that they lack the back up to being symbolic and mythic fathers of the place in exile. Because they often do not have resources, signifiers, material to back up his role of being a symbolic father within the host-society. Thus, he finds himself in an awkward position, and they are easily retrenched from their jobs. Attention should be paid to what institutions could do to these fathers by giving them no possibility for this back up.

In relation to this case and to the question of the father who plays his role, (how can we give shelter to the father?) that for the human subjects, although existence is given, there is no shelter. The first literal meaning of being in exile is that of being alive but without shelter.

But the dwelling place does not depend on having a shelter, refuge or country. It is a totally a unique operation that the mythic text by Vernant and Ali’s father’s case reveal it in hardly implicit terms.“The wandering Psyche is captured by the stellar surface of the Kolossos which therefore receives the deads’ inscription among the living.” Ali’s father’s wandering is linked to the fact that he didn’t bury his father formerly, giving him a tombstone. In other words, the dead father’s inscription. He forgets the name of the home for the mythic father i.e. the Mosque. Because the Mosque is the home for this symbolic father. He even forgets the word that he could say. The impossibility to name the place for the mythic father is equivalent to the absence of a tombstone for the dead father of which is perceived in the form of death’s anguish by Ali, of metaphysical fury which do not have any other meaning than the search of a dead father. Ali’s father is in exile wandering and the exile means that he is cast to the outside existence in search or waiting for the dwelling place operation.

DISCUSSIONS

Dr. P-S. Lagarde:

I would like to commend you for this remarkable presentation and I would like to firstly highlight the poetic aspect, great wealth of the concepts that you bring forth, as well as your skill to combine all these ideas in a series of clinical illustrations. Here are a few impressions in order to start the discussions.

You started by making allusion to the mythology through the Kolossos and the Psyche and immediately thereafter, I recalled of a Turkish patient whom we have followed for some months with my colleague Ahmet Kaptan − a patient who lived this situation of being torn between the two lands. He was completely lost in France, the same thing applied with Turky. When he was given a chance to go back, he refused because he would not identify his home village, not even the rest of his relatives. He was encountering problems in French and it was even worse in Turkish. This patient, who was wandering between medical services, came to see us one day. He was accompanied by his son without even making an appointment. This happened once or twice, although it was long time after the first psychotherapy, and we were shocked, but this did not allow any comment, neither from his side nor from ours. This evening when I heard you talking about the Kolossos and the Psyche, I came to ask myself a question as to what extent this kind of dyad which have formed up twice inside this sick father who is accompanied by his young son who was unable to speak, whether this kind of dyad was not a living being which attempted to introduce a new faith in this form? He being astray like a Psyche’s phantom, without any contact with any land, the Kolossos, the root that thrusts itself inside the life, would be represented by this young boy here. On that particular day, for this man, this way of self introduction, was it not a final attempt to be still alive?

The second point that I wish to highlight is that you bring about a new notion which is relatively new to us. I want to refer to travelling.

Because through all what you have said about this travelling – also bearing in mind that you stressed that it does not necessarily refer to “migration” alone − it looks like you once again refer to the ancient creek philosophical texts.

And yet, I will raise the point that Plato said about the creek colonies. These colonies are swarms of bees that the hive, the Creek City, sent away to found new cities. These colonies’ images as used by Plato put emphasis on a certain kind of link between the hive and its swarms of bees and this link is based on kinship. When I was listening to you, the last ancient evocation came to mind.

The last point which came to my mind about the antiquities is the Romans’ famous “Ver Sacrum”, in other words, “The Holy Spring-time” which to my remembrance includes the following facts; when a misfortune befell the city, a fury, a divine vengeance was generally invoked. In order to obtain god’s grace and their pardon, people resorted to the holy principles. The other remarkable point is that twenty years after the catastrophe, people who were born at the time of the catastrophe were banned from the city. It must be noted that such people are already 20 years old.

The reason for raising the point about the Roman’s Holy Spring-times is that we find the link of kinship between the person in exile and the one who banned him, in this kind of stories. The parent is banning his own son from the family so that a new city could finally be founded.

While in the course of your presentation you have raised the exile, you present it in a form of “fundamental human desire”, “desire to go somewhere”, “to go out”. But what I raise through the story of the Romans’ Holy Spring-times is not “the son’s desire”, but rather “banishment by the father”. And it seems to be absolutely necessary to come back to these points because the contrasts raised are fundamental. Therefore, it is a question that one asks himself in a concrete manner about immigrants of which we are concerned. Do they leave their home-countries because of the “desire to go somewhere”, or in some way, are they sent out by their parents?

Finally allow me to come back to this central notion of your argument – travelling.

I wish to compare it with another notion which seems very familiar to us, which I also attempted to bring in through the story of hives and swarms and ver sacrum i.e. the notion of Oedipus complex; with all questions on sexuality which are correlated.

When we adopt this other perspective which would be that of exile being taken as a “fundamental human desire”, at hindsight this sexuality can seem to be excluded or at least relegated to the secondary plan. This is the origin of my question: how is sexuality related to the notion of travelling? This question on the relationship between travelling and Oedipus complex, can otherwise be asked in the following manner: in fact you are saying that exile – in its more prosaic reality i.e. someone who quits his country, who leaves his family – then you are saying that this exile will exacerbate all that has to do with travelling to the person who lives it. On the other hand, such an allegation makes us to think that the sedentary, the westerner for example, who lives and stays in his own home-country has less chances of experiencing this “travelling”. The other thing: in your presentation you raised two groups of patients i.e. on the one hand, those who suffer due to their being in exile and those whom this being in exile is not a problem. Maybe it would be necessary to talk about the second group. But these are people whom we do not see.

M. Benslama

…But we do not see these people.

P-S Lagarde:

Of course they do not come to our consultations, but we still have other occasions than consultation to talk with them.

Therefore, as I stated it earlier, we have an impression that the exiled goes through an experience which force him/her to invent a new way of life.

Hence, here is my last question that I wish to ask by way of introduction: what do you think about this other experience that someone leads on a divan, etc. In short; do you talk about exile in analytical experience?

……………………..

  M. Benslama:

Can the child be the Kolossos, in some way, or more precisely the son? By the son as represented in the Latin tradition which means “boys and girls”? Hence when I say “son” it is exactly in that sense. Sometimes I asked myself if we should talk about a child or a son. But it is for the reason which responds to your second question i.e the Oedipus reason that I kept the word “child”.

Can a child be anything, in some way, that can be firmly rooted? I would say “yes”, I tend to think like this because in essence, the Kolossos has a phallic dimension, the Kolossos as an erected thing, in fact erection (whose root is in the word “KOÏ”) could be associated to the son as well as a child as a symbolic substitute of the phallus. We can claim that through the child there would be something that has to do with firm-rootedness, of fixation which can be made for the father. I tend to think like this and our experience with our patients tells us.

For example, I have patients who decided to take French nationality the very day on which she gave birth to a child. It is very important t note that they never thought of it before the birth of their first child, they refused it until the day when they gave birth to a child, a son or a daughter, the child automatically becoming French by the land law, autochthon’s law (this is the beauty of this law of nationality by the land not by blood). Because it is through the land that the father proves the need to become “autochthon” i.e. choosing live − the land. Therefore, I would say that the experience shows it in this case.

This is valid when everything is normal. But if things are not normal, how do you pay for children whose parents are in exile? This is like in this case where they are sacrificed and in the case of this woman who sacrificed her child. It is evidently a case of an oedipal child.

I believe that the oedipal dimension cannot be eliminated from humanity. We turn around and we find it. We find it in very different forms, but we always find it and we do not need to make it conspicuous under the aspects of what we call the oedipal myth. They are found in diverse versions, Senegalese patients or maghrebis tell stories which bring about the question of the oedipal issue i.e. the question on the exile. All these questions are found in different forms. If I do not state it, it is because I consider that today repeating the same thing is prohibited.

I tried to raise this travelling dimension, and for the moment I do not find enough of its relationship with the big psychological myths of the psycho-analysis. Not that the link does not exist but because the theories on Psyche whether analytical or non analytical, are theories of autochthons and that although the latter thought of a psychological being in sedentary, they thought of it overtime and space, but they never thought of it in relation to the question of the place. The question of the place is theorized in a rather different manner - the sedentary manner, of those who had never quit their land or their references. However, an exception is that the American cultural theories often write about the immigrants coming from Europe who have theorized their own exile through culturalism.

You know the very large example given by Linton on what he called “Qu’est-ce que c’est une culture” or “What is a culture ”. He states that in order to understand what a culture is, “We realize what culture is when we draw a fish out of water, and we put it on the surface. At this time, the fish realizes what a culture is, and for it, it is the heat, the heat and death, the two go hand in hand.” All that has to do with the Red Indians was thought in this light and when the colonial psychiatry or psychiatrists arrived in the maghrebi states, they thought things in this light i.e. the question of life deprivation and the surroundings. Nonetheless, if one wants to listen to what is happening today and what takes place in our world, we should not only consider people who are displaced or travelling as coming from abroad. Travelling started in Europe by the major travelling which is no longer talked about within Europe i.e. by the massive eradication phenomena around towns and the immense immigrations which disrupted and destroyed the references and made the culture in which we live today. The exile is not only the problem of those who come from other states or countries but it is also a problem of today and tomorrow. Therefore, in essence, let’s start by paving the way through this history of culture.

It is very important to come back to the question. Maybe it is even more important than others i.e. the question about the exile and the question about the son, boys and girls at the same time. Because when parents went to the exile and that theses children have been part of this travelling, it will result in a problem of transmission between the generations, between the parents who went to the exile and those who did not go to the exile but who suffered the travelling. I think that if there is any oedipal issue, it should be rethought in relation to this. You know that according to Freud there is an essential experience which he links to the oedipal question. This is the transmission between the generations, from one generation to the other, of an asset. The psychological asset which was acquired by the first generation has to be transmitted to the following generations. And yet it looks like in the problem of travelling this asset was not given as if the sons must redo the work. And it is in relation to this “redoing of the work” that we find the sons who go very far that they even want to become fathers of their own fathers. We are on the oedipal issue which has to do with travelling, while we rather had to think about Oedipe who travels from Thebes to Colonne.

Dr. Lagarde:

The direction in which you are leading, in saying that an exiled would be more exposed to certain existential pains, the exile and the travelling, could they not be considered from a different angle according to some cultures? I think of the following two anecdotes:

It seems that Mirabeau said that one’s homeland is the land that one does not carry with his shoes’ sole when one just goes to another country. For a westerner a homeland is a portion of the territory with boundaries. This is very much western and it is just easily forgotten. I think for example about the Black Africa, whose boundaries were marked by the westerners, which have no correspondence with other boundaries. Parallel to Mirabeau’s quotation, we can oppose what Ibn Khaldoun in his “Prolegomena”, about the remark that the Calife Omar could make in the past which is the following, “Don’t be like these Nabatians who answered like this when asked from where they were: I come from such and such a village”. For a Muslim, he would answer by stating his ancestral line from which he comes. It could be seen that references are radically different here. On the one hand, there is a territorial reference and on the other hand the person goes straight to genealogic reference. Hence, the incidence of the exile is it not a little bit different when one refers himself to the homeland or when one claims himself to be the son of, to have so-and-so as grand-father and grandparent so-and-so, etc?

 M.Benslama

Good question. It is a genealogical question. The land is part of the genealogy. In some countries, like in the Muslims culture, someone is called so-and-so, son of so-and-so or of so-and-so i.e. the name of his father, his grand-father, his great- grand-father, but first before giving his first name, sometimes he is given the name of his son or his daughter because a man or a woman bears the name of his first child. For example, in the case of Ali’s father, let’s assume that his name is Sala, they will add Abou Ali (Ali’s father); followed by Abou Ali Sala, then the name of his father. He will be given the name of his village or town, his group, his clan, the name of his tribe and finally the name of his country. There is a succession in which the land is partly included but does not include the land alone.

Today our problem is that the birth of the form of the national state, which is born in Europe and which made itself known in the world, has caused a mode of the land genealogy which is fixed around the terrestrial boundaries, with a sovereignty, and the state sovereignty which takes the characteristics of the civil state and takes a nomination. We have a modern form that tends to spread at the expense of so many human sacrifices (for example: Bosnia); the national state which wants to be constituted as the reference, gave itself very precise territorial limits. And from that time, we are indeed locked in the relationship with the exile which is no longer what it used to be, and I would say that it is this relationship with the exile which caused immigration, because immigration is the exile of the modern times i.e. the exile as an experience among the national states. Nevertheless, immigration is the product of the human circulation around the national states, because this term did not exist before the recent era where it originates from ethology and animal register. It is all this aspect that we should take into consideration.

-M.X:

How about, for example, the pieds-noirs (French colonial born in Algeria) or the French cooperatives who are immigrants and others, who spend much of their time in the Maghreb states? Can the same instruments that you are using be applicable?

 M.Benslama:

Absolutely, I think so. In this open consultation of all and sundry, where I see the multitudes of people: the Harkis (Algerian soldiers who were loyal to the French during the Algerian War of Independence), the Pieds-Noirs, and the children of the so called the Pieds-Noirs. They are called the Pieds-noirs, something so interesting as a name, because the pied is linked to the land, and here we find something that has do with the Kolossos, displaced and removed from its stature.

I encounter the same problems with these differences; however, the children of the pieds-noirs do not have the same problem that some Maghrebs’ children or Black Africans’ children encounter, of being confronted with the symbolic genealogy change. The pieds-noirs are still taken to be French.

I encounter the same questions in relation to the loss of the land despite that the mythic father is not ready to shy away. He is not ashamed, he had always been there. The French National State was there on that day. While for the Harkis there is a very complicated affair where we have something quite remarkable and strange. Acquisition of the French Nationality is done through the land, but in this case it is done through the blood, through blood’s debt. There is an enormous problem for this Harkis’ question which is not yet resolved at all because according to the French Law, the French Nationality is not linked to the blood. It is genealogical or linked to the land. In fact, in this affair there is something where there is a substitution of a genealogical logic to that of the blood. It should be improved but with a case. I believe that it can only be discussed from the casuistic.
  J-M. Heinrich
  Don’t you think that it can be said that for all the beings with speech there is an important place which, at the same time, is not a place and which is our language? From there, what are the incidences of the exile in relation to the language?

-M. Benslama:

I would say that the language is the effect of the exile. The use of the language is the effect of the exile and if we want to follow that idea, language and exile are two things which go hand in hand. In this case we are all at the same wave length.

Here the problem is that this exile which took place for every one of us which has included a repression and which has enabled the edification on this repression of the language and the speech, it seems that for these people who are travelling, this exile is reactivated. Therefore, travelling is the reactivation of this first exile experience. And if the travelling deserves our interest, and that it does not get into the culturalism, it is because their travelling has to be taken as a reactivation of this exile. The exiled in some way, or the one who is travelling, works and titillates the innate repressions. And thus, the common thing done repeatedly comes back and start the work again. This is the reason why the exiled and the immigrants remind all the societies – the ones from which they come as well as those who host them – of the things they have already forgotten.

We have a very big example, the cases of which I very often think about, the one that involves Salman Rushdi. Here is an immigrant whom, while everybody has forgotten about the satanic verses which exists inside the texts called “Satanic Verses” (this is text which raises doubts on the purity of the Koran) subtly puts these verses in a story which becomes a worldwide scoop and a dangerous affair for himself. This should have been done by an immigrant and not an autochthon.

Immigrants always do the same thing, and they never stop doing things like that one. And this tends to irritate people with whom they live, and people in their countries of origin. When they come back, they bring them a little of satanic verses all day long. The story of satanic verses is a story of which nobody still thinks about, except for the scholarly people. What is it about? It is truly a matter of repression coming from the text. During revelations the devil interferes (it is the story of communication), he interferes with an angel who transmits and injects the passages which call people to submit themselves to the Pre-Islamic divinity while the entire Koran and the Islam advocate for one unique and abstract God,etc.

Dr. P-S. Lagarde:

You seem to correlate the language, in the exile, with something. If we wanted to make a little bit of metaphysics, exile could be considered on one hand as “the essence” and on the other hand as the problems which are linked to the language (like those which are caused by immigration) as though they have something to do with the phenomena. And the essence is it useless to remind us of it? We have a problem getting it such that when you talk about the exile in this essential manner, and in addition you are stating it yourself, are we not on the side of the primordial repression which is opposed to the secondary repressions which are the only repressions on which the work can focus on?

M. Benslama:

Yes, what is important is to bring travelling into the story of the subject and not to make it a hero who, like Oedipe, breaks the enigmas and retrieves the non-repressed of the cultures. Because there, just like all people break the enigmas, he cuts himself the neck at the same time, he is killing himself. Therefore we should bring in the question of the exile and the travelling into the story of the subject and its family. This is the only possibility to bring, not just the cultural sense which is his culture, but also, to bring the operation of his own destiny. It is also essential that our patients could manage with creations, and they are often in this position which the children therapists sometimes tell us about. They say, “it is strange, these Maghreb children, one can say that they behave like psychotic children, yet they are not…”. We often hear this remark.

M.Osman Turan:

Some circumstances sometimes can make a person to be in exile while still at home. One does not even have the exiled status. For example, I am thinking of the Kurds who do not recognize the exile. I would like to match up travelling with doubt. By travelling from one place to the other the exiled may be plunged in a situation of doubt which is reminiscent of the obsessional one, and to a certain extent, this doubt impedes realizing the bereavement.

 M.Benslama:

The entire part of the metaphysics and the Islamic philosophy thought of the spirit as the exiled. We are therefore, inside something which resembles the wandering psyche. The Islamic metaphysics establishes the entry of the spirit inside the body and thinks that this operation is an exile operation. In addition, Avicenne, in his beautiful poem concludes by these verses which qualify the spirit as an exiled. The point is that there is a construction. God first makes the structure, the earthly human body (we can pick the element of the Kolossos), then God commands the spirit to enter the body. But the spirit refuses because the body is somber, it is black. Avicenne writes this poem on the spirit in this manner. God has to repeat the same thing several times in order to force the spirit to enter into the body. The spirit enters and it enters by force. It enters into the black and it is only inclined to return (by return we mean death), to return to the world of light. Therefore, death means return in the Islamic metaphysics. The real return means death. The metaphorical return is called interpretation by the Muslims. Metaphorically, the spirit can only return home by interpretation. The interpretation is, therefore, one of the processes of the return of the spirit in a sense which is not original but in its literal sense. I would even say the primary sense rather than the first sense. From there, the exile is the foundation of the human interpretation and therefore of the search for the meaning.

In essence, to some extent, this is the proposition that I make i.e. the question of the exile should not be thought in accordance with what is given, but according to the interpretation. And therefore as therapists, we must put our patients in these lines and guide our work with the patients. It is the question of the West i.e. the question over the black, the human body as a black substance, the “sunset”, the West is the nostalgia of the light. All this metaphysics centered on the exile revolves around the West, as if travelling to the West means leading into the night, into the darkness. There is a very beautiful text inside the Misterous Signs Book on “the story about the exile in the west” by Abdelwahab Maddeb who just relates the story the exile to Kairouan. For the easterners, the town of Kairouan in Tunisia was considered to be the place for the exile.

As for the relationship between Travelling and Bereavement, I was already asked this question. I do not think that the problem of travelling should be matched with the problem of the bereavement. There is a problem of bereavement; bereavement in relation to its first references given that there is no return. When there is a return it is not meant for retrieving an object to its position, in this case, there is a question of bereavement, but it is more complicated than that.

-M.X: (Inaudible)

-M. Benslama:

For me this father is not sociological, rather he is the contrary. It is just that what is being attacked is this father who is sociological and patriarchal. I am the first to give him the status that he deserves, to solve his problem, and in addition it is the duty to our generation as a whole. People belonging to these cultures must be able to solve their problems themselves. Actually it is this sociological father who should be given the status of a symbolic father. It should be noted that the symbolic father is an empty place.

I am going to relate a story to you. One day, I was going to see the consul, but I will not state in which country, in one Muslim country. I went to the consulate (I went there in order to make a request for some official documents). I was warmly admitted by the consul. He was a very believing and affable man. We talked about the Islam. He took a small paper and said to me that he was going to tell me of something which was a secret. He wrote something on the paper and he gave it to me saying, “What are you reading here? It is Mohammed in Arabic, and look, if we put it like this, what does it mean? (this time the consul showed me this sentence vertically) this is a good man”. He was almost delirious and he said, “All those who walk in the street are the Mohammed and they are the good men”. He was delirious, that is what a symbolic operation means. I believed he was crazy, but in his craziness he pointed at something of the working language. It is good because it is working and it is something which can be called the symbolic father. Apart from all these, the rest is just refilling and this refilling can be drained, we can put another thing. I believe it is just due to the misunderstandings that we sometimes have with the culturalists and sociologists on the symbolic father which necessitate clarification of concepts.

For the psychoanalyst, the symbolic father is a linguistic operation; it is nothing but a name. What we should avoid cracking our heads with is just the name; it’s just the name but nothing more.

The second remark: on the recovery of the origins, I would say that the origin does not re-appropriate itself and precisely because the origin is what we quit, we can do nothing. It is not a recovery; I would call them hermeneutic operations. They are the operations of interpretations. The word re-appropriation misleads people. There is nothing to be recovered by the origin, because the origin is precisely what we are not suited to. We all leave it. This is the reason why we should abandon these clichés which are very dangerous. To recover ones’ origins is just a matter of making oneself the owner of his origins. It is the integratist’s speech.

-M.X

The question of recovery is sometimes asked when we estimate that part of one’s memory was confiscated. I just think of the colonization.

-M.Benslama:

When a patient tells me that, my memory is confiscated, I ask him, “by whom?”And from there, he will start to talk, to relate the story on the whom. What is interesting is that he will relate a story which very often will be his about the disappropriation action that he made of himself. And it is this time which is important to us; it is the time on which we should talk about what is the most important.

 Mme. X:

I appreciated the manner in which you handled immigration, and especially because you did so through these two notions of travelling and existence. It is the first time that I attended a conference in which the exile is handled in this way. In fact, even in history that the question of exile was never dealt with in terms of redemption. These theories are in one way or another founded on expectation and on interruption of this expectation. Thanks to the manner in which you talk about the exile, maybe we will finally be able to escape from the theologies.

 M.Benslama:

Thank you for this remark, it is exactly in that sense, and in the numerous articles that I wrote and published in the Mysterious Signs, I dedicated a long time on exile according to the monotheism i.e. the exile as a punishment, and return as the end of exile, the punishment of having sinned at all times and exile as the effect of sinning.

If there is anything that can definitely be part of our work with the patients, it is to help them out of that i.e. free them from thinking that returning means redemption if it is not like metaphorical return. There is a phrase that I found in the book of Marçais who is the French grammarian. Marçais calls a metaphor “demeure empruntée” which means a borrowed home. In fact this is what is meant by exile i.e. borrow a home…and in my point of view this is the most beautiful metaphor about the exile.

M.K.Khelil:

About this question on travelling, at the end of your presentation I was definitely derailed…When you started the story of the child Ali, I had completely forgotten, consciously or unconsciously, that you were talking about the child. What came into my mind was the figure of Ali, the father of the Chiites. How can one be able to understand, or want to understand such or such other thing in relation to travelling? In my opinion, the notion of exile is already operational in the country of origin. To emphasize it, I would like to take an example of a literature text, the “Repudiation” which can be translated by “Condamnation” by Rachid Bouiedra. Just a brief reminder: it is about a man who rejected his wife in to marry another woman whose age was closer to his children. The patriarchal power is seen exercising itself in all its forms across the story, its violence and its terrorism. It seems that the Maghreb traditional family structure, which copies a great deal of this model, so traditionalist and conservative as it is, it is as if it did all it could to make this gap, to make this gap among the family members. Between the son and the father. The narrator calls it “une mise en solitude avec le père” which can be translated as, “coldness with the father”. As if the family worked towards this patriarchal power to introduce this gap, keeping a distance, which is thus very well illustrated by a statement which comes to my mind where Rachid states, "effarés nous allions nous aligner dans cette lutte difficile, où les couleurs ne sont jamais annoncées, la recherche de la paternité perdue." which means, “alert we are going to be prepared in this difficult fight, where colours are never announced and the search for paternity is lost”. This is a very beautiful example of what this patriarchal power shows that there is a distance to take, which may open the way for other places, other situations, other positions, for the members of the family from which they can position themselves and which do not belong to the structure itself.

 M.Benslama:

You know that in the history of the Islam Ali is the successor of Mohammed, and I would say that all the sons are in a way the Alis. The role of being the father is played and it is being played at all times in the same manner, in the family, whether patriarchal on not? It should be noted that fathers are sons too, and that they are fathers because they were son before. And that the relationship is always in the sense of son to son or between sons, and that there is someone who plays the role of the father and the entire society recognizes this role. This implies that what a symbolic order takes into consideration is to support the role and also to support the role of the father, what can be called “the father represents”.

I am going to relate to you the story which explicitly shows what the father is in these chauvinist and patriarchal societies. This took place at Kairouan. One day I was in a café. A man passed by holding a child in his hand. In passing by the café, he saw his friends whom he greeted. One of them asked him, “Is this your son?” and he outrightly said this in response, “Yes if his mother told me the truth”. The other quickly answered, “Only God knows it”. This man did not want to put his wife in doubt at all. He only meant that the person who knew whether he was the father is his wife; it was only by the words of his wife, the fatherhood is not a certain thing. However, it is an operation based on the mother’s words, and that fatherhood is just a linguistic operation.

In addition, this speech is only guaranteed by the truth of the unknown i.e. God in heaven. Nobody can claim anything i.e. mothers should be trusted. We are in a chauvinist patriarchal society, but the father is the one designated by the mother, the same is found everywhere, here and elsewhere. And this point of view cannot be challenged by any cultural norm. This is the same with the Aztecs, the Incas, the Arabics and the Zulus and nothing will change it.

Everywhere, the father is the one designated by the mother. The Romans thought in this manner. They thought the “pater incertus”, and the law tells us that the child whether son or daughter is designated by the bed, by the marriage i.e this is a purely administrative operation. But what really obtains about the father is the power of the Holy Spirit.