« COME WHAT MAY ! » EMPATHY AND MIRROR NEURONS : THE THERAPEUTIC WORK OF THE INTERNAL CLOWN
Fernand DENDONCKER is for more than thirty years the head doctor of the Psychiatric Hospital Jean de Dieu at Leuze-en-Hainaut, Belgium. Following the events of 68, he will be a conscientious objector and brought to practise the general medicine in an enormous psychiatric hospital of state making him the determining experience of the noxious consequences on the patients of the not managed institutional incoherence. It will undertake him to pursue a complete programme of psychiatry, surrounding areas of systematic psychotherapy of Mr Elkaïm, as well as a training to the analytical psychotherapy of C.G. Jung given by the professor J.P. Legrand. In Zurich, he will meet in particular Professor Meyer, the direct follower of Jung, and the Prof. Guggenbühl-Craig, secretary of the International Jungian. He will pursue his psychoanalytical training with Pierre Solié. Within the framework of the Society of Psychoanalysis Charles Baudhuin, he will present several conferences. Let us pin: » Between the Jungian feeling and the scents of Oc, the transhistoric thought of Pierre Solié » (1987), » The road of the castle, peripatetician meditation together with Kafka » (1991), » The divine heart, the breath in the storm » (1993), » Between one denying and one denied, in limbo of the One » (1995). Therapy and the mediators of expression also intervenes in colloquiums on the Art: » The framed picture framer « , around the notion of therapeutic frame (1999 ). Within the holy Psychiatric Hospital Jean de Dieu, he develops a concept of institutional psychotherapy centred on the therapeutic atmosphere today that facilitates the coherence of the nursing or that make synthesis at ill people. This central preoccupation was summarized in a presentation given in 2006 in Bordeaux, on the occasion of the International Congress of Gestalt and taken back in the exercise book 21 of the European Middle College of Gestalt-therapy under the suggestive title: : » The nursing choir: an aesthetics of the therapeutic coherence in institution « . Opened from the childhood to the variety of the values, worried of developing collaborations beyond the philosophic options, he maintains relations with both main universities of the country since his studies and becomes a boss of training course for the stemming psychiatrists of both the Catholic University of Louvain and the Free University of Brussels. Organize since 1982 a scientific biennial event: Mentalidées, who received in 27 years many psychiatric and philosophic leading experts, a cycle of annual conferences: Shrink Roads, and a clinical seminar. Has presented, in this frame, presentations which concerned more the organization and the methodology, for example: » The lack in all its states » (1993), » To be really there, to make choir around the disease, the new concept » (2003), » The institutional therapy of appropriation: when Mister Jourdain makes of the network » (2005), “Does the network allow an ethical synthesis of the economy and treatment ? ” (2005), “Etiologic vigilance, preamble to the psychic treatment” (2007). Administrator at the Employers’ federations of the Doctors, he obtains with the Council of State the suspension of the law on the Minimum Psychiatric Summary. Since 1996, he explores space between the medical scientific requirement, the institutional complex interactions and the empirical jubilatory experiment of the clown, with the hope to make useful synthesis there. Initiate in 2007 a therapeutic group resulting from his research and present its bases in a talk given in 2008 carrying a title close to that which we have the honour to publish in exclusiveness in PLASTIR. And indeed, it is a privilege, because we assist here in an excavated, precise, methodological and anecdotic article at the same time, with all the genesis of this therapeutic approach, with the gigantic steps which has achieved Fernand Dendoncker to exceed his sufferings, to exceed cleavages, to seize the brilliant intuition of the clown C. Moffarts and to integrate it in his psychotherapeutic practice, to adapt it to psychiatry and to nursing people themselves. But the author is not satisfied to report these individual experiments or of group, he implies the reader, also carries out him towards the psycho-body awakening, opens him with new prospects, as well on the level of psychodynamic as philosophical. Science is not forgotten there because F. Dendoncker benefits also from the recent discovery of the mirror neurons and their role proven in empathy to rebound on this important characteristic of primate and human consciousness. Quoting Damasio, he returns thus to the clown and to his central role, buckling the loop and our way or advance: “- The sensorimotor system intervenes in the rebuilding of what one feels when one is in a particular emotion by means of the simulation of the body states in connection with the emotion -. We will see that the clown bases since always his art on this process. ”
TWO PREPARED PIANOS : SECOND PART – CONSTANCE OR MUTATION : THE CHALLENGES OF THE CONTEXT
Mariana THIÉRIOT LOISEL is coordinator of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Monastery of Saint Benoit in São Paulo in Brazil. She carried out a post-doctorate in philosophy of education at the Laval University in Canada under the direction of Professor Thomas De Koninck in which she gives us the early product. The first part of this work: “In the shade: desire and neutrality” were published in the n°14 of PLASTIR. As we had indicated, his title, “Two pianos prepared”, is resulting from a composition of John Cage “Concerto for prepared piano” which passes by every season and ends in an ‘autodafé’: the interpreter, an Eastern composer burns the piano. Mariana Thieriot thus stresses the inevitable share of destruction in the production of a work and on that which survives with the aid of the other piano. More generally, this whole post-doctorate’s work of which we present the second and third parts in this issue is centred on the concept of human change or mutation and all that it involves in terms of context, introspection, research, myth, speech, glance and mobilization. In this second part, she directly enters in philosophy – autobiographically – and with the ambition clearly posted “to establish a relation which allows the circulation of direction of the text the context”. This inflection continues under the aegis of Habermas, as well on the plan of the language, of live experience as of a common world making possible to withdraw ourselves from totalitarianisms. In the field of interiority, they are the pathos and the affects which are excavated by the means of the contribution of Michel Henry questioned vis-à-vis Heidegger or post-modern philosophies. “Affectivity is understanding only because to understand is emotional and insofar as it is it. Because the understanding is emotional, emotional is also what it includes, the world itself and its horizon”, dixit Henry. However, the author says to us well “that it is not a question to deny the contributions of Habermas on the need for developing the impalpable presence of the human reason using these logical tools that are the mental operations: induction, deduction, abduction, dialectical, but of contextualise this contribution”. That implies a neutral territory, within the meaning of Barthes, and raises the delicate question of the media transfer of these neutral concepts through territories like South Africa. One of the solutions evoked by the author to dam up these stoppings resides in freedom of movement of the fruits of the research and the development of Transdisciplinary exchanges throughout the world
TWO PREPARED PIANOS: THIRD PART – A SUDDEN TRANSFER: SENSE, TEXT AND CONTEXT
Mariana THIÉRIOT LOISEL, while defying us to yield to the nihilism, approaches in this third part the heart of the subject: “I make the assumption that this interaction between an intention and a conscious will and an unconscious desire appears under the mode of an evaluation and that this evaluation can make possible the human change”, dixit the author. Us thus plunged here in the inextricable bonds between affects, desires and super- or de-valuation, all character traits specifically human, therefore fallible, and at the base of a debatable, even usurping ethics within the meaning of Barthes, it means by an attempt “to substitute the truth by the myth”. Only loophole with this frightening trap: the creation “of an ethics of the comprehension” preached by Edgar Morin in “the Method” or an attempt of “reconciliation of reality and men, description and explanation, object and knowledge” according to Barthes. Mariana Thieriot thus comes from there with Habermas, Michel Henry and using many examples such as the sculpture of Giacometti, the astronomy of Galileo or the mathematics of Leibniz to put the question of the true direction of the truth, of the internal structure of the sense or meaning, at what they mask or reveal and at the need for punctually locating the nonintentional context of a human change.
THE SPRINGBOARDS OF UNCERTAINTY
Maurice COUQUIAUD is a poet, essay writer, former editor of the polypoetic PHRÉATIQUE review in which he published many famous writers and scientists and member of the CIRET. It is to say that he is an enthusiastic defender of the Transdisciplinary values and a prolix author. Among his works, many books of poetry enthralling such “Songs of Gravity”, L’ Harmattan, 1996 or “The awakening of stagnant waters”, New Athénor, 2006 and of reflexion such “The poetic astonishment: A struck down glance”, L’ Harmattan, 1998 and “The poetic horizon of knowledge”, L’ Harmattan, 2003. These last two titles underline with large feature the poet(h)ic aims of the author: to remain unceasingly astonished and open on mixing of ideas and men. From where his thirst for knowledge of science discoveries and his in-depth analysis of the contemporary philosophical thought. Thus, the drafting of this newspaper written in 2004 in which Maurice Couquiaud develops his readings from day to day, his participation in conferences, his free thinkings or what inspires him certain poems. One is taken in the voyage with the first quotation of Hubert Reeves indicating the peremptory necessity to practise science and poetry, without disparity, without absurd scission and mixture of the kinds. It is then the universe of Cioran which is revisited on the plan of his positions about scientism, culpability, nihilism and metaphysics being completed with this reconciliatory ode from Supervielle:
» The sun expert which names and which counts.
Gives its share of day to what leaves the shade”
A plea follows on “the hidden side of research” and this famous uncertainty integrated since the advent of the quantum physics that Basarab Nicolescu approaches on the virgin ground of “transnature” and Jean-Pierre Luminet on the plan of the “crumpled universes”. Lastly, it is naturally the universe of the poets that is surveyed by the author with Random, Gilbert-Lecomte and Rene Daumal in his evocation of the slow rise of the human consciousness.