Lived Experience

The train was departing and the young girl, distraught at being taken away from her mother, looked at her standing on the station platform. Later, when she was also a mother, even though she herself had been neglected without understanding the reasons for it, she nonetheless let her mother take care of her own daughter. Why had people hit her and rejected her so often? Why had she been separated from this mother who was undoubtedly abusive, but whom she loved madly and found attractive? She was to ask herself this question for a long time. These distant events had taken place between women, in a world from which men were excluded and who did not seem concerned by what was going on under their noses. Here, life as a child was spent in childcare centres run by other women with daughters like her, who were isolated, often silent or suddenly violent. And then, one day, she was allowed to return home where the usual violence resumed, this time in her family. Soon, having grown older, she was the one who left; she was alone in another way, but at the time of her choosing. Until, that is, she returned home again as an adult, still alone, but with her own daughter. And there was the intolerable feeling, humiliating even, that repetition was at work, the repetition of a history that could only repeat itself.

A lot of time and sessions, but also long moments of troubled incomprehension, were necessary before this narrative could finally organise itself so simply and find the rhythm of its chronology by bringing together the fragmentary and painful traces. Words had to pass beyond blanks and tears, anguished silences and sudden rages against her mother who was a fighter, against him, her forgetful father, and against herself, the little girl who was too submissive, too submissive. The analysis helped her to give herself time and to make it her own time, where she could talk about herself and listen to herself, organising to some extent, with the support of words, the different