I am grateful to have had the chance to work on a new, informal translation of The Child and La Fête (Dolto, F., 1978. ‘L’enfant et la fête’, Une Psychanalyse dans la cité) with our team at Bubble and Speak and others at a reading group in the UK. Reading it together brought the text alive once again as we discussed this text online, and at a time when my French colleagues were starting to go back to work after the lockdown. During this time, France was already ahead in discovering the “after-world” (“le monde d’après” as it has been named in France) of the COVID19 pandemic, and while we were still in isolation in the UK my thoughts often turned towards the opening of the various French Maison Vertes. What will it be like to meet the children and their parents with these new restrictions? I feel that Françoise Dolto’s article is optimistic because it speaks about a sense of togetherness through the concept of la fête that I couldn’t access in reality during that time, but also the text questions the enduring problematic of the play between freedom and boundaries.
We chose this article knowing that it was written in 1978, before the opening of La Maison Verte, allowing us to come back to its prenatal history and maybe start to rebuild, reconstruct and project our desire towards re-opening our unique Maison Verte in London called Bubble and Speak. To dream about la fête was even more tempting when it became the most forbidden social act, the forbidden par excellence! I found myself returning to a mental space which brought back vivid memories of working in La Maison Des Petits in Paris where these moments of joy often appeared. I remembered a certain freedom in the way the children would circulate around the space which would “bring surprises” (Dolto, F., The Child and la fête, 1978). Reading this text evokes the feeling of the discovery of freedom when, as a child, one takes their first steps towards a space amongst the toys, people, colourful structures, shadows and lights…. On the other hand, Dolto highlights the feeling of anxiety and the sense of risk one takes when venturing to the other side of the limit: “The freedom to move inside a space that is a bit worrying to run in” (Dolto, F., 1978). The tension between these two feelings echoes what we experience as we find our way out of the lockdown: a walk outside the house to begin with, then breathing without a mask, allowing a certain feeling of freedom and re-discovering our senses… yet a sense of danger also accompanies these freedoms: “the feeling of the risk of freedom, and of safety” (Dolto, F., 1978).
During the confinement, I also participated in a weekly reading group with my French colleagues. We talked about Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud, S., 1921), a text which is very much in tune with some of the reactions to the pandemic, from popular opinion to the government’s decisions. Freud explains how there is a separation between the ego ideal (which manifests itself in the image of the leader) and the ego in such phenomenon, and he particularly refers to, and analyses, the psychological mechanisms at work amongst the masses. He also makes a reference to la fête (a gathering of people where the ego is also uninhibited?) and to the tension between freedom and safety which Dolto describes in her text. Freud writes:
In all renunciations and limitations imposed upon the ego a periodical infringement of the prohibition is the rule; this indeed is shown by the institution of festivals, which in origin are nothing less nor more than excesses provided by law and which owe their cheerful character to the release which they bring. The Saturnalia of the Romans and our modern carnival agree in this essential feature with the festivals of primitive people, which usually end in debaucheries of every kind and the transgression of what are at other times the most sacred commandments. But the ego ideal comprises the sum of all the limitations in which the ego has to acquiesce, and for that reason the abrogation of the ideal would necessarily be a magnificent festival for the ego, which might then once again feel satisfied with itself. (Freud, S., Collective Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, 1921).
Freud explains how these positions lead to melancholia and mania in more extreme ways. Therefore, can we say that we discover some roots of this phenomenon in the child’s experience of freedom? Do we not, in fact, keep on playing with it as adults, after having encoded the rules, and do we not attempt to explore safely while still finding some excitement in transgression, on the other side of the red line.
Tatiana Cantaud, Welcomer, Psychologue Clinicienne.
The Welcomers Project 