Catherine Millot is a psychoanalyst. When she is not welcoming you into her Paris office, hypnotizing you with her deep blue gaze, or inviting you with a broad gesture to lie down on her old couch, Catherine Millot writes. Most often about others. Sometimes about herself with a wink to her patients when she begins “Ordinary Abysses” (Gallimard 2001) with these words: “Here is my most secret life.” In it, she describes her initial feelings of the cosmic void, her moments of derealization in an undefined space. She also relates a dream: the vigorously contested feeling of an inevitable death, soon followed by immense inner peace. The grand fraternity of psychoanalysts will recognize themselves in it.
These episodes foreshadow and illuminate her latest work on the lives of three women from different eras, whose entire existence focuses on an interior absolute. Three stories of feminine spirituality. Thus the mystic Jeanne Guyon who, according to one of her confessors of the late 17th century, “sought outside what she had within.” She embarked on an authentic conversion based on these prophetic words, which led her, not without the – inevitable – chaotic detours and paths strewn with obstacles, on the ways of a “perfect life.” Next comes the straightness “of the boy” that a demanding mother once recommended to her daughter. The tragic fate of the writer Simone Weil was traced. With a rigor as relentless as her maternal injunction may have been for her, she imposed upon herself never to deviate from a narrow path, wedged between “the two keys of emptiness and nothingness,” hoping to find therein, as Sophocles already articulated, the very essence of the human condition. She embraced the consequence of divine withdrawal, the famous “Tsimtsum” of Jewish Kabbalists which leaves man both free and imprisoned by an immeasurable void. She sought refuge in thought and books, defeated in advance in a physical fight against the barbarity of the 20th century she wanted to wage but which destiny denied her. The trilogy concludes with the evocation of the life of Etty Hillesum, contemporary of Simone Weil and deported to Auschwitz in 1943. A contemporary and ally in this community of fate. But with the difference that she threw herself into the “heart of human suffering” at Westerbork, one of the two transit camps in the Netherlands from which Jews were sent to Germany and Poland. Surrounded by the horrific, at the heart of the unbearable, she nevertheless reached that “immense silence” which continued to “grow within her” until it transformed “trials into beauty.” Total resignation that becomes transcendence, an escape to avoid the inevitable.
This abolition of the self, this “fundamental omission of oneself” open to these beings a passage within themselves to another world, a scenario already recognized by St. Augustine. This Church father also practiced “Anabasis.” An expression borrowed from Xenophon regarding the retreat of the Ten Thousand, the final chapter of the Achaemenid dynasty in the 5th-century BC Persia. “And we ascended further within ourselves… And we reached our souls… We touched it for a moment in a total surge of the heart…”, as many stages of this “expedition into the interior” experienced at Ostia by the future Bishop of Hippo with his mother Monica. But the psychoanalyst, understandably, sticks to the number three, a signature of success for another of her writings on the intelligence of perversion dedicated to Gide, Genet, and Mishima. Tertiary presence as in the analyst’s office. “If there are three, if there is a third,” assured the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, “then there is a possibility of justice.”
Catherine Millot, “The Perfect Life, Jeanne Guyon, Simone Weil, Etty Hillesum,” Coll. “L’infini,” Gallimard, 2006, 260 p., 17, 50 Euros.
Jlvannier@free.fr 06 16 52 55 20
