The Immigrant, His Shrink, His Judge, His Social Worker, and Other Representatives of the Occult1

Tobie Nathan

ROFESSIONS, OBJECTS, NETWORKS Someone goes to see a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a social worker, a

teacher... But behind every professional stands an entire world and above all, of course, a profession: teachers who have handed down habits, attitudes, philosophies, a "school" of thought; clans, hierarchies; and also, networks of influence, of power, of friendships . . . andlet's speak plainlynetworks of objects. Foras
we well know, networks are structured around objects.

What kinds of objects? you may well ask. Real objects, objects as we ordinarily understand the word object. In the West, when one approaches questions of psychology and psychiatry, those objects are books, that is, publishers, editors, publicists, printers, distributors, booksellers, trade presses and specialized presses, critics who guide their readers, etc. Our professions are also organized around drugs: laboratories, factories, marketing techniques, colossal budgets, tens of thousands of employees.... Finallyand perhaps especiallythere are objects of thought, concepts2: the "psyche," the "unconscious," "anxiety," "depression" . . . banner-concepts under which are grouped specific networks, specific ideas that are propagated thanks to elaborate strategies, nepotism, conquests of fiefdoms and bastions: Such and Such University has an "Institut de Psychanalyse" approach; So and So's private practice has an "Association de Psychanalyse de France" tendency; the entire education philosophy of the "Protection Judiciaire de la Jeunesse" has yet another tendency. . . .

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As a rule, when one reads a form of the verb "to be" in a text from the human sciences, it means that one is coming up against one of these "banner-concepts." For example: dreams are the indirect and hallucinatory actualization of a repressed desire"; "the unconscious is structured like a language"; "the father is the separator of the fusional relationship between the mother and her infant"; and so on and so forth. Behind these banner-concepts there is a kind of army organized into battalions, regiments, cells, whose strategy consists of getting hold of a sector of power by means of tactics that are very similar to those of political influence. Such is lifelet's admit itin our hybrid, complex, fragile professions that could be called those of the "practicioners of the human sciences." Thus, a person comes to consult one of us and perceives, behind the psychologist, the psychiatrist, the social worker, the psychoanalytic school that disseminated the banner concepts, the conflicts of influence with other schools and with related professions... an immense network. Then, overcome by the vertigo of the abyss, he dives into a kind of confused fear that some people call "transference!" When this person comes more or less from the same world as we do, he appropriates fragments of the network, and ends up saying, in one way or another, "In France, we have at our disposal the psychoanalytic method that comes closest to Freudian intuition (not like in America)... or the most humane (not like in Argentina)... or the most ethical (not like in Eastern Europe)." "The treatment didn't cure me, of course, but those seven years of weekly appointments in the semidarkness of an opulent office on the boulevard SaintGermain . . . the smell of wax on the wooden floors in the cool of December Wednesday mornings, the dark paintings hung on the walls that led me to imagine a thousand things . . . a school of philosophy and of individual freedom . . . Socrates revived." Or else, "Thanks to their tireless research, our scientists have proved that depression is a sickness like any other, a chemical imbalance capable of being corrected," etc. And, in one way or another, the we will come to take the place of the ill and lonely /. And even if his position is peripheral, the white man will always manage to integrate himself in one of the white man's networks. And he will derive pride, pleasure, and intellectual understanding from belonging to the great work of light, even if he thinks himself, forever after, to have missed, one damn day in the first year of his life, that delicate transition between "primary, cannibalistic orality and paranoid expulsion of bad internal objects . . . " For if the psychoanalyzed white man thinks of himself as a "unique and irreplaceable" individual, if he believes that he has gotten, not without suffering, a unique strength from the ascetic experience of spreading his personal responsibility to the wild unconscious drives that are boiling on his "lower floors," this strength derives especially from having joined a group. A curious paradox, indeed, to feel oneself to be "unique" because one finally conforms to the model

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proposed by an ideological group. Analyzed, yes, but from now on an obscure Lacanian, seeking in the twists and turns of dusty corridors his peers huddled around the same light. . . Psychoanalyzed, social worked, rehabilitated, and, dare I say, pasteurized' the white man lives in solitude, proud to recognize himself amid a crowd of others living in solitude. If he gives up his illusions, the all-powerfulness of his infantile thoughts, if he accepts the supposed Oedipian interdicts, he does so in order to join an elite that preceded preceded him only by a few lengths on the path to redemptive illumination. This is perhaps true for the white man. But what about others? What about the (obviously Islamic) Moroccan, the great-grandson of a Berber marabout whose tomb pilgrims still come to honor from the four corners of the country, and whose grandmothers, mother, wife and sisters all know the secret ingredients of lovemaking: spices to put in the sauce to make wives even more desirable to their husbands; incense that will make a man lose all his vitality in the presence of a strange woman? This man, too, is inscribed in a multitude of networks, at the crossroads of which we will necessarily find imams, cheikhs, fkib (traditional healers), chouafas (seers), as well as the Bambara from Mali, a conscientious street cleaner between the hours of 6:00 and 8:00 a.m. and 7:00 and 11:00 p.m., who has been named, circumcized, initiated, and healed by karamokos, moris, and Bamanans. And this dissymetry becomes flagrant when these people find themselves confronted with the Western professional. Not that the networks of whites are more pertinent (this is of course what they claim), or harder (as in "hard" science), or more effective (as everyone knows, this effectiveness is very often revealed to be relative in our disciplines), but simply because the worlds of others are deprived of all representatives. On the one hand, we find the white professional, the approved and labeled representative of a complex network with countless offshoots inviting the other into an infinite solitude that he is also advised to desirethe solitude to conceive of himself as a unique being, a psychically structured monad, the individual bearer of universal lawsand this solitude is not even nourished by the same theoretical ancestors, by the same philosophical sources. A brutal solitude, the solitude of a human being cut off from his universe, his gods, his beliefs, his dead. The solitude of a naked man, a "wild child," an almost animal solitude. "Who are you?" is a question the black man doesn't dare ask. And the evasive action consists in not giving the only answer that would not be a lie: "I am the local representative of the neo-Hegelian tendency of the third scission of the psychoanalysts of the fourth group (the one from 1988).'" For the otherthe Bambaracould never present himself in this way: "And I, I belong to the second generation of Malinke from Kita to emigrate to Konakri... the family that was in charge of burying the boli in the sacred forest." He cannot introduce himself for, usually, those who need to know him can guess

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Prsentation
Je suis le reprsentant ^ local de la tendance nohgellienne de la troisime scission des psychanalystes du quatrime groupe... Qui tes-vous?

"I am the local representative of the neoHegelian tendency of the third scission of the psychoanalysts of the fourth group (the one from 1988)."

his origin by the way he holds himself, by the way he pronounces the Bambara language. He cannot introduce himself especially since in no sense is he a representative, he who, most of the time, has not been invested with any authority to unwrap offerings, honor divinities, "treat" the dead, or worship ancestors. In his world, in fact, just as in ours, certain categories of people are entitled to enter publicly in relation with the vital forces of the group. The Bamanans do business, in the name of the group, with the powers of the forest and with fetishes; the karamokos and the moris with the god of Islam; and the griots, the "men of words," with public words, public speech, speech that appeases and that declares war, that curses, words of the daylight, brightly sung to the monotonous rhythm of the cora; words of the night, murmured in the hole in the tree by the master hunter. During ceremoniespublic or privatethe hron, the "free man," requests, under his breath, the public word from the griot. Thus, solemn messagesof births, marriages, deaths; of leavetakings and returns; and naturally of misfortune and illnesscirculate, thanks to the griots, from one individual to another, and from one familial or ethnic structure to another.6 So, knowing all this, let's not try to bring up here notions of transference, coute, empathy, and I don't know what other ideas that are as "profoundly" mystical as they are intellectually vapid. Whoever speaks solely to the individual, circumventing the authorized representatives of that individual's groups of reference, powers, and the objects that animate them; whoever claims to understand the person, "recognize the subject," "listen to his desire," is in fact merely preventing the representatives of the powers of his group from speaking. If the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) can, at the end of his treat-

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ment, recognize in his therapist the representative of the group to which he dreams of belonging and with which the therapeutic movement has slowly led him to desire being affiliated, the "other," on the contrary, the Moroccan, the Bambara, when he is taken up by the white man's network, can only experience the cruel absence of any authorized representative of his groups of reference. Once the question is framed as such, cultural or ethnic affiliation or identity7 reveals itself to be a false problem or, rather, a misplaced problem. As I have just explained, belonging to a certain universe is never an automatic given; it is not at all a matter of identifying the "member of a logical class"and who would have determined the ensemble of logical classes in the first place?8 And who would have determined the criteria for belonging? In reality, it is always a matter of the dynamics of connections among a multiplicty of networks. For example, take the Bambara group: it seems that the word Bambara is a French deformation of the word Bamanan. When one asks a Bambara what language he speaks, in French he replies Bambara and in his language he replies Bamanan. But the Bambara language is a close relative of the Malinke and Mandingo languages. Everyone seems to agree that the originary language would be Mandingo. But in Mandingo, the word "Bamanan" signifies "insubordinate" or "rebellious." The story goes that during the founding of the Mandingo empire, under the harsh rule of Sundjata Keita, one group refused to submit to Islam and seceeded from the larger group, under the name Bamanan"insubordinate" to Sundjata? And in Arabic, the word Mam is the command "submit [to authority]." The Koran even explains that when Abraham came to tell his son Ishmael that God had asked him to sacrifice him, the son responded to his father "Islam!" ("Submit!") Given that, today, most Bambaras are Muslim, the fact that they designate their own group by a non-Islamic name, one that indicates that they are not submitted to the Muslim religion, highlights two things. The first reminds us of a historic fact: "We are Bamanans, the descendent^ of those who, refusing to submit to Sundjata, went to take refuge in the Segou and Bamako regions." The second brings into play another meaning of the word bamanan. When a person is sick and all the other family recipes of plants, incantations, and various fumigations have been exhausted, a Muslim healer is first called in, someone who knows "the book" and who knows how to "make writings." He is called a mori or a karamoko. But when the Muslim healer has proved ineffective, or even at times simultaneously, a Bamanan, an "insubordinate one" will be consulted, that is, someone who handle bolisfetishes.9 Thus, in this second meaning, the word Bamanan signifies the group of people who are still part of the networks structured arround extremely complex and powerful objects: the bolis. In other words, a Bamanan is the person who, when he is seriously ill, can only be healed by the bolis of the Bamanan, the fetish manipulator.10 Things become even more complex when we consider that this definition is the only one that respects the Bambaras' own formulation. For, if they recognize themselves in several kinds of groups: "I am a Muslim"; "I am a Marxist"; "I am a Mandingo"; "I am from Mali"; "I am an engineer," they

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completely change their way of formulating when they announce: "I was cured by the Bamanan." A Bambara thus does not define himself through his affiliation with a logical class (the abstract group of Bambaras), but by an almost visceral tie that binds him to the bamanan, the manipulater of the bolis, the objects that structure the
network of the Bambaras. A Bambara therefore defines himself by identifying his most

active therapist. What, then, is more logical than giving this therapist the name of the entire group, that is, Bamanan?

IMMIGRANTS, SHRINKS, AND THE JUDGE

The problem of belonging is naturally even more acute in the judge's chambers. Magistrates are obsessed with questions such as: "Does the Bambara understand the meaning of the law I am refering to? Does he even know this law exists? Musn't we make sure that the person in question falls within the law's jurisdiction? Don't all Bambaras, as a matter of principle, fall under Article 64?" Isn't the law that I am going to apply to him in direct contradiction to Bambara law? Wouldn't he fall under the laws of Mali, or even the laws of custom?" And we react sympathetically to the magistrate's questioning, for we know that between the suject and the penalty, the judge must necessarily construct meaning. Between the crime and the author of the crime, the judge must insert motives. This is why judgesall judgesare so fond of psychology and psychiatry. But jurists have two advantages over psychiatrists and psychologists in treating the cases of immigrants: first, they believe the laws they deal with to be approximate and modifiable, whereas psychologists and psychiatrists imagine that there exist "laws of nature" that have been scientifically established and are therefore immutable. For a jurist, it is easy to imagine that a "Bambara law" exists, wereas nothing is more difficult for a psychologist or psychiatrist than to imagine the existence of a "Bambara psyche." Secondly, jurists are used to dealing with fabricated truth, truth that has been constructed by means of confronting a great number of representatives of different interest groups: prosecutors, defense attorneys, experts, social workers, etc., whereas psychiatrists and psychologists handle one truth "in and of itself," a natural truth, and thus in general they dismiss from their office any representative of their patient's group, or, when they. do let him in, treat him with suspicion and skepticism. Thus, in situations concerning immigrants and which involve the cooperation of legal experts and shrinks, we are faced with a paradox: legal experts require, even more so than others, psychological discourse in order to insert meaning between the offense and the persons involved, whereas shrinks, by their very mode of functioning, have a tendency to make any trace of a "representative" of the group of the other disappear, and to put themselves in the position of the most active therapist of the person in question, that is to say, in the final analysis, to try to affiliate him to their own group.

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A CASE STUDY
I first met Bachir when he was in prison and. I had been called upon as an expert. He was fourteen years old, had light-colored eyes, a perfectly smooth face, a sleepy way of carrying himself. He barely seemed to notice me through a cloud of confused preoccupations. He had stabbed a man. He didn't know why. He had been a bit on edge. He hadn't been alone; others had been with him. They had all taken part. The policemen interrogated him for three days before he confessed. Of the five youths, he is the one to have held out the longest. Does he ever think about the dead man? Yes, a little, sometimes. I hardly dare ask him: how can this event be explained? I wait for an answer . . . nothing! I think: "What good is it to ask him questions? How can he, a child, bear witness to whatever forces were working in him?" Bachir was born in France, the second son of a Moroccan father and a Portuguese mother. The father had wanted to give this nameBachirto his firstborn, but finally decided to give him another. And this is how Bachir became Bachir. I would learn later that when the father called home to announce the birth of his first son, to whom he was about to give the name Bachir, his own father asked him to call the boy Soliman. One day when his brother had appeared in court, the father promised that if his son were freed, he would give the name Soliman to his next born. But the old man had had no more children, and the boy who was just born was his first grandson. He still wanted to make good on his promise. So this is why the eldest sonthe old man's grandsonwas called Soliman, like the judge, and the youngest Bachir, a name originally meant for the eldest. Bachir's father took him back to Marocco when he was two, and placed him with his own aunt. There, Bachir became a little Moroccan boy, speaking Arabic, calling his great aunt mother and her husband, father. When he was six or seven, his father came to take him back to France. He literally had to kidnap him. Bachir did not want to hear of leaving with his father. Since then, he grew up in France, smiling, discrete, secretive. He forgot Arabic, expressed himself well, in French, did well, more or less, in school. And there you have it. What other elements are needed to draw up an evaluation? How can motives be communicated to the judge, how can he be helped to formulate his own meaning regarding Bachir? I only have at my disposal descriptions of behaviors based on the young man's own words. He was separated a first time from his foster mother at the age of two and from his nanny at seven. Twice he changed languages. Am I to base myself on attitudes, on behaviors? What can I say? Should I speak of, calculate the anxieties of separation? Call Spitz, Bowlby, or Harlow to the rescue? Should I take advantage of the situation to put forward my own theories? Can I honestly base what I am saying on his mood, his gestures, his behavior dur-

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ing the meeting that I had with him? Do they have any life beyond the time and space of the interview? How can I decide if they are not simply reactions to my presence, even to'my personality? Fate had it that a few months later a temporary parole enabled me to receive Bachir with his parents for a long ethnopsychiatric consultation.12 The young man sits down near his father, a man of about forty who was visibly tornmented. Little by little we begin to speak in Arabic, talking about his country, his home town. As we speak about these things of the past, about the homeland, Bachir is silent and looks at his father, his eyes wide with surprise. Bachir and his father belong to an old family of marabouts, of Berber orgin. The father is the only one of eight children to have emigrated. He married Bachir's mother, a Portuguese orphan, who was also rootless after having been placed as a servant in several families. The father says that he himself was not religious, but rather quickly I perceive that he has a priviliged and special relationship with God. Because he had been very troublesome as a child, he had been sent as a teenager to an extremely disciplined religious Muslim boarding school. One day he was caught misbehaving and was tied up and suspended from the ankles in front of the others before being beaten with a stick on the soles of his feet. He fled. After having had several small jobs in cafes and hotels, he decided, at seventeen, to go to France and take his chances there. The idea seemed to be that he occupied a special place in the eyes of God and that he didn't deserve the treatment he had gotten. A few moments later he says that the problems of his teen years had been preceded by two remarkable events: first, when he was two years hold, he fell seriously ill and it was believed he would die. A taleb told his mother to go on a pilgrimage-on foot, carrying the child on her shoulders-to a shrine located some 100 kilometers from their home. The entire family believed this pilgrimage to have saved his life. Second, when he was about seven years old, he consistently had nightmares in which he saw the same man dressed in white come out of the night. Today, not one night goes by without his being overcome with a kind of paralysis in the middle of his dreams. He wakes up, wide-eyed, startled, and remains for half an hour or so in his bed. Then he must get up and doesn't manage to fall back asleep for a long time because of his confusion. He knows exactly what to call this event: abougbetat, literally, "father of the cover." The underlying idea is naturally that a supernatural forceGod or one of his emissaries-comes to him just as Gabriel had come to the prophet, suffocating him." It is only then, after an hour and a half of discussion, that Bachir finally begins to talk. He says that he, too, in his dreams sees himself slow down to the point where he can barely move, to the point where he is almost paralyzed. I say, "The son is not as far gone as the father . . . he can still move, even though he does so with great difficulty."

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We have just brought into the room the living forceaboughetat-and its possible representativestalebs, cheikhs, and fkihscapable of controlling it. In other words, those professionals who are mandated by the group to control the ties with this power. Now we need only to inform Bachir and his father of this. We ask him, "On what day was Bachir born?" "On a Friday! I remember it well! In fact, both of my children were born on a Friday." Friday: in Arabic, "the day of the Mosque"yam et gem'aa"the day of assembly." We ask him the time of birth. "At noon," he responds. Noon, the hour of the disappearance of shadows, the hour when ihejnoun come out into the human world. We tell him then that he must absolutely, urgently, pay a visit [ziara] to the shrine and make an offering in Bachir's name. One of my cotherapists says, "I have the feeling that Bachir is older than his father." Another adds: "Or that he was sent to his father because his father did not know how to receive the messages that the hidden powers were sending to him." Father and son look at one another. I catch a glimpse of emotion in the social worker's eye. Later she will tell me, "That was the first time I saw the father react like that." It's safe to say that from that point on Bachir became "recoverable." In fact, the adjectives that professionals were attributing to him suddenly become unsuited to him. We can no longer think of him as a "psychopath, prepsychotic and immature." Another network of meaning is suddenly revealed to us, a network that the judge will in fact be able to use. And by what miracle did this occur? Simply by the fact that we convoked the representatives of his group and, in so doing, in a very intense dynamic movement, we recognized his affiliation.

SOME THEORETICAL AND TECHNICAL REMARKS TO CONCLUDE

Since we must, at any price, make the authorized representative of the group appear, it is indispensable for the session to take place as much as possible in the patient's language and according to his way of doing things.14 It is just as indispensable for the nodal point of the treatment of the patient to be an understanding of his problem according to the logic and the objects of the therapists of his groupthe only true representatives of the concepts of a given universe. Thus we are obliged to describe the therapeutic exchange as communication from group to group, from representative to representative; it becomes the only way to avoid the sadistic condescension of the advocates of "good medicine for everyone." What can we say about our profession other than that it forces us into a place that is already known to the professionals of the intermonde, a place described by Isabelle Stengers, who knew so well how to discover its true nature, its adversity and its greatness: the place of the diplomat.'11

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If our profession could be said to have a "moral," that moral should forbid us-yes, forbid us!-from thinking about an immigrant's suffering without reference to his own group. The power relations are just too unequal. A network, structured, organized, equipped, armed to the teeth on one side, and on the other a single individual who hasn't at his disposal the least means of integrating himself into the network, even in an isolated niche... . How do we get back symmetry, balance? It is enough to understand that in a particular case, the interlocutor is not the person, but the group, because we are all ourselves a group! Not the group, but its representatives, since we are all nothing more than representatives. But we hate to think of ourselves as members of a group, don't we? So what are we doing here, together, talking about all this? translated by Alyson Waters Notes
1. This paper is a revised version of an article that appeared in 1996 in Melanpous: Revue des juges des enfants. 2. For the notion according to which a concept is a created object and the fabrication of concepts the main activity of philosophers, see Gilles Deleuze, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1991): Deleuze quote, 10. It still remains to be seen whether the concepts used within the human sciences deserve the name "concepts-especially those at the origin of social and professional practices. These are indeed the point of origin out, like armies, to conquer entire areas of social reality. This is why I call them here "banner-concepts." 3. And I dare, if only in homage to Bruno Latour's remarkable work on Pasteur: Les microbes: guerre et paix. (Paris: A-M Metaille, 1984), and Pasteur, une science, un style, un sicle (Paris: Perrin, 1994). 4. A kind of saint who, while alive, heals, and circulates Muslim doctrine and whose gravesite becomes, after his death, a site of pilgrimmage and therapeutic cults. See E. Doutte, Magie et religion dans l'Afrique du Nord (1908); revised by Maisonneuve and Geuthner (1984); and E. Dernebghem, Le culte des saints dans l'Islam maghrebin (Paris: Gallimard, 1954). 5. And here I am using a somewhat parodied version of one of Bruno Latour's examples: "Let's take a very simple example. During a study that I did recently at the Pasteur Institute, a scientist introduced himself to me in the most wonderful way, saying: 'Hello, I am beer yeast chromosome eleven,' to which I responded, 'Hello, I am Bruno Latour!'" In "Note sur certains objets chevelus," Nouvelle revue d'ethnopsychiatrie 27 (1994): 21-36. 6. See Ismael Maiga's comments in S. de Pury-Toumi, Cl. Mesmin, and Tobie Nathan: Rapport de recherche. Du role des entretiens en langue maternelle dans l'interaction avec les familles migrantes et notamment de leurs benfices dans insertion scolaire et sociale des enfants et des adolescents. Recherche MIRE/DEP, Convention no. 93235, September 1995. 7. See G. Devereux, Essais d'ethnopsychiatrie gnrale (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), and Ethnopsychanalyse complmentariste (Paris: Flammarion, 1972), especially the chapter entitled "L'identit ethnique, ses bases logiques et ses dysfonctions." 8. See J. L. Anselle and E. M'Bokolo, Au coeur de l'ethnie. Ethnie, tribalisme et tats en Afrique (Paris: La dcouverte, 1985). 9. For the meaning of the word "fetish," see Bruno Latour's interesting, complex, and problematic discussion "Du culte moderne des dieux ftiches," forthcoming from Les empcheurs de penser en rond. 10. The Bambaras' lives are filled with narratives where patients move from therapist to therapist until they arrive at the boli, who, having put them back into contact with their fetish, allows them to be cured. Also, we recall here the president of Benin, who was hospitalized in Paris right after he was elected, before returning to the forest to be treated by voduns, and, reportedly, was immediately cured. 11. According to Article 64, "there is neither crime nor misdemeanor" is the person is recognized to have been insane at the rime of committing the acts. 12. For a description of the main techniques of ethnopsychiatric consultation, see my Fier de n 'avoir ni pays ni amis, quelle sottise c'tait. Principes d'ethnopsycbanalyse (Grenoble: Editions de la Pense Sauvage, 1993).

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13. Gabriel squeezes the prophet until he begins to suffocate him and presents him with the Koran, crying "liera" "Read!" But Mohammed did not know how to read. Twice the angel asks the same question, squeezing the prophet until he begins to suffocate. The third time, Mohammed begins to read. 14. See my L'influence qui gurit (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1994). 15. Isabelle Stengers, Ecologie des pratiques.

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