Gentlemen, these women who speak are not hysterics (2017)

The extraordinary opening that has just occurred with the Weinstein affair invites us to think differently about the terms that these sexual assaults reveal. Not least to underline that it is not only a system of oppression whose mechanisms must, moreover, be dismantled and denounced. It is also—let us not ignore it once again, if possible—about what sexuality is in human life, and the disturbances it creates, many painful manifestations of which persist today as in the past. Sexuality causes trauma and often fosters it, because it carries within it this capacity for violation. Stating this is neither moral nor political. Taking it into account can help advance the work of civilisation.

At the origin of psychoanalysis lies an attempt to take seriously the denunciation, by those labelled hysterics, of the sexual trauma from which they seemed to suffer in a way specific to their symptoms. Before discovering that sexual trauma—in assaults, in seduction—had become a cultural norm, shaping even the unconscious. And that other women, too, could speak sexual truths outside the constraints of phallic power.

Since Freud, psychoanalysts have been able to take up this challenge of taking very seriously what it means to speak, beyond the impossible speech about impossible things. Speaking is not saying. But one does not go without the other. Such is the dilemma we were able to perceive in the dispute between Christine Angot and Sandrine Rousseau. Whoever comes to the analyst makes this extraordinary effort to try to say, with speech, and in doing so to alter the effects, the consequences of their lived experiences. The good ones and the others: assaults, harassment, ill-treatment, rape.

But times have also changed somewhat since Freud. Those who speak today are not patients nor necessarily victims; they are women who say what we do not like to hear about what we know. Today, the fact that these voices are raised is not a symptom—or else it is the symptom of the system that prevents people from speaking. These voices are not stigmas, nor exaggerated complaints like the encouraged theatrics of the patients of that time; they are truths. The scars are elsewhere, and all possible denunciations speak of things other than accumulated suffering. Nothing can make it known; each person manages as best they can, but may find support in this sudden solidarity.

For, ultimately, speaking opens the way to freeing oneself from the power that assigns and subjugates through sexuality, and for which speech remains the best means of seizing the opportunity for change. Not without society also being able, alongside this, to change the ways it inscribes these offences and crimes into pathways that are not only legal, but also cultural and political. Not without the unconscious, for it is by ignoring it that this system of oppression is erected, and by refusing it that it is reinforced.

What has opened up may close again quickly, under the effect of the prevailing discourse. It does not matter. If we do not forget to continue to welcome what is being said, others will end up hearing. And who knows—harmful solidarities among the commissioners of sexuality will diminish a little under the pressure of what we are sure of and about which there is no need to doubt. For what is symptomatic lies indeed in the reactions of some—men and women—who take offence at this supposedly newly discovered violence and demand silence to crush the facts. Truth can make one weep, but it does not kill; silence does.

Vincent Bourseul, psychoanalyst, author of Sex Reinvented by Gender: A Psychoanalytic Construction.