The Work of Culture

A patient returned to see her analyst after several years of analysis simply to reflect on what she was living through: she had a cancer recurrence. She trivialised her illness, but was very angry; she felt lonely even though she had a companion and her daughter, who was still young. She spoke mainly about this family environment, but also about her parents who did not understand her, the reactions of relatives, clumsy caregivers, her noisy and gnawing feelings of bitterness, and her resentment. Through the evocation of her daily life, burdened by illness, one could hear her extreme difficulty in taking stock of what might well be the end of her life. This approaching end of her life was as denied as it was omnipresent in her decision to return see the analyst, as were her painful moments of wavering that she could barely perceive. “A place to think about my life”, she would say, over the course of several sessions.

How can she continue to inhabit her life, the analyst asked herself as she was accompanying her, as an articulation between culture and death. Whether it was a case of her anger, her despondency, or her multiple emotions and life reviews that were not named as such, all these thought processes between the analyst and the patient constantly navigated between the exploration of her own internal mysteries and the vestiges in her of her relations to the other. In this process the key moments of her own life that were also bound up with a collective memory emerged. Within the emotion of these sessions the following trend of thought was present in a veiled form: there is something of me in the other and something of the other in me; but there is also this need to “prepare yourself for death” - to use Montaigne's words. All this concerned the two protagonists involved and confronted them with the same term, provided that the analyst did not resist, even deeply within herself, this approach of the depths in each of them.

If culture, with respect to civilization, i