By Nikos Pavlatos Translation: Christina Iosifidou, Maria Kakogianni, Andreana Maragou and Nikos Pavlatos. We live in a period of prolonged social distancing, that is, under a legal prohibition of social contacts which concerns almost all… More
the blog
To Megalo Mas Spiti (Our Big Home): two weeks after reopening, to be continued…
We felt motivated to be back in Our Big Home after four months of lockdown, although we only had two weeks together before the summer closure. The team was eagerly awaiting this time to arrive, but it certainly took some time for the warmth and friendly atmosphere to find its place again. It took time for the Welcomers to welcome again in the same way, for the parents to feel the familiarity of the place and at ease, and for the children to interact with each other. There was a deep concern about feeling secure regarding Covid-19 on top of everything else that could not be disregarded. The residue of the circumstances of the pandemic that we are experiencing were, and still are, very present.
Overall we had very few visitors over those two weeks. However, the high temperature of the summer period in Greece may also play a part in the limited visitors, or for their arrival at 7pm (one hour before closing time). According to our new measures we were only able to welcome up to five children at a time, therefore there was, somehow, a sense that the children were being watched by the adults, and we suspected that the ratio of children to Welcomers may have influenced the atmosphere of the place. One initial thought was that by limiting the number of families, and having some restrictions on socialization and ways of interacting in general, effected the social aspect of our work. The visitors arrived hesitantly at the beginning, but as soon as they started to communicate, to realize the stability of the place, and to remember the toys, they seemed more relaxed. The small children were trying to reconnect – with the place, the Welcomers, between themselves, as well as with the elderly visitors. Some parents wanted to share their concerns with the Welcomers, while at the same time the children were trying to interact with them. There was a need for parents to talk about the lockdown, their difficulties, and the changes that have emerged. At the same time they expressed their happiness about our reopening. One mother told us how she often checked social media for our announcements to see when we would open, and it seemed as if Our Big Home had a protective role for her.
From our side, we were content to see how the children had grown – for example, some of them used to crawl and now they were walking around and exploring the place by themselves. Others came to say goodbye as they turned four years old. This by itself shows the importance of the closure for both the children and the parents, and the impact that this place can have on the family and the child’s development. Furthermore, a number of families visited us for the first time during this reopening period, which may bode well for September onwards.
Until now, we used to reopen in the first week of September, normally after the summer holidays. As it is now highly recommended to stay in quarantine for a week after returning from a holiday abroad, we decided to have our first team meeting on the first Sunday of the month, and to open Our Big Home the week after. However, there is an uncertainty around the circumstances of the pandemic and whether we will need to reconsider our measures once again.
We keep our desire for Our Big Home despite the difficulties, as we make the effort to reconnect and readjust to a new reality.
To be continued…
Written by the team at To Megalo Mas Spiti
La fête (part two) : how to be together?
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.
La fête (part one): risky play and the Carnivalesque
At a new reading group in London we have been lucky enough to receive some informal translations of Dolto’s work by Sally Bird. We began by slowly reading through her very thoughtful translation of an interview with Dolto in 1978 where Dolto describes something – a concept or a notion, perhaps – which she names la fête.
La fête seems to be something akin to a momentary state of being which involves joy, surprise, a being with others, but also risk. It has both a simplicity and a complexity to it and gave rise to many thoughts about our work with young children in the community both theoretically, and practically in thinking about how we design our spaces.
A first question that arose was the translator’s decision not to translate la fête but to leave it in the original French. Our French colleagues spoke about the very specific connotations of la fête in French – a term, it is worth mentioning, that does not have the same meaning as the village fête in England. In French la fête connotes joy and community, to revel, and to feast with others. And, in Dolto’s la fête there is an enjoyment which only appears through the experience of risk. Dolto describes play itself as “the enjoying of a desire that is carried through to a successful conclusion by way of some risk”. The element of risk in what Dolto describes could not be found in the translations that the group put forward for la fête including how we understand the word ‘fête’ in the English language, and it is this aspect of what she describes, the element of risk, which particularly caught my attention.
Risk
Dolto describes “the risk of freedom”; something which takes place in a liminal space between safety and danger. Thinking of the British context, her opening remark in the interview, “La fête is freedom within security”, echoes that of A.S. Neill’s mantra ‘freedom not license’. It points us towards the idea that joy, or enjoyment needs an element of risk without danger; that risk does not mean ‘anything goes’ (as Neill was often accused of) but that ‘anything goes’ within a framework. Summerhill – the ‘school with no rules’ as the British press liked to call it – has a very fundamental framework of democratic meetings. Similarly, The Maison Verte has a framework: there is a red line (introducing the idea of a limit rather than a border) and the children wear an apron when playing with water. Within this social framework there is no normative which might be found in other settings where things like ‘developmental milestones’ are monitored and regularly assessed. At the Maison Verte there is the risk of subjectivity on offer.
Practically speaking, the discourse of ‘risky play’ which is being developed in the UK also has a very useful mantra: they talk about facilitating ‘risk not hazards’. In one demonstration for example, a play worker pulls out nails from some pieces of wood for his adventure playground. These are a hazard, he says. The fire pit in the middle of the playground, that’s a risk.
The Carnivalesque
The idea of the carnivalesque came up as a possible translation for la fête which includes risk. Although, perhaps, too rowdy and infused with profanity, Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas of the grotesque and revolution could represent what we do at the Maison Verte, and I was intrigued by this suggestion. In fact, in a more subtle way I think we do see the Maison Verte as having a revolutionary potential. The Maison Verte makes space for the experience of both community and risk, alongside each other, and it makes space for that to be a possibility for our very youngest members of society. Dolto advocates for children to have spaces where they can meet others but also take risks and Dolto described the work as ‘psychoanalysis on the street’. She saw the Maison Verte as the people’s agora which sits outside of the council driven, risk averse, bureaucratic institutions of the nursery and the crèche.
The grotesque aspect of the carnivalesque also resonates. Bakhtin describes the grotesque as a literary trope which expresses “biological and social exchange”. There is an emphasis on the holes of the body – the mouth, the anus – as that through which the outside world enters and leaves: through eating, shitting, singing, burping etc. When reminding myself of Bakhtin’s theory which I read more than 10 years ago, before any engagement with psychoanalysis, I was immediately reminded of the drive and its objects which circulate; the anal, oral, voice and gaze. While at the heart of any psychoanalysis the drive is of particular importance for young children and their parents as they learn to speak, eat solid foods, become ‘potty trained’ and become subjects with a relationship to both the body and the social bond.
Lastly, the carnivalesque, in Bakhtin’s analysis, is constructed through polyphonic dialogue which he describes as creating a ‘dialogic sense of truth’. It involves a decentralisation of the authorial voice in favour of simultaneous points of view. Applying this to our work, I am of course reminded of the Welcomers’ role and the structure which sees a rotation of those who intervene. Welcomers speak neither from the position of the expert nor from the position of the ‘institution’. At a Maison Verte one experiences a polyphony of voices including the Welcomers, other parents and, of course, the children themselves.
While I don’t mean to make a direct comparison between the carnivalesque and Dolto’s concept of la fête, I do think that this sometimes ungraspable phenomenon we call play is a revolutionary work when we give it space. In this interview Dolto describes play as “the enjoying of a desire that is carried through to a successful conclusion by way of some risk” and I am reminded of the video below.
Written by Catherine from The Green House Playgroup
The Welcomers Project 