The Secret Life of France (10 page)

One battle, which I actually lost, stands in retrospect as a kind of metaphor for all the minor battles I fought on behalf of my children’s individuality. Once again, the fight was with a member of the medical profession and again it concerned my son and his so-called abnormality. At the age of fifteen, Jack had, like many of his contemporaries, a pronounced slouch, which has since disappeared. Seeing his posture one summer, Sandrine, the anaesthetist, kindly recommended a professor who had a stellar reputation and who would certainly be able to help.

The professor in question examined Jack and prescribed a corrective, fibreglass corset (I had hoped that a
few t’ai chi lessons might do the trick) to be worn night and day for a minimum of two years. Jack was to wear this mortifying contraption until he was seventeen! I protested to Laurent that these were pivotal years for the development of his self-esteem. He would be starting to date girls. Wearing callipers on his chest wouldn’t exactly help him pull.

But the professor had put the fear of God into Laurent. If Jack didn’t wear the corset, he had warned, he would have to undergo drastic surgery, which would involve sawing through his spine at the neck. I gave in.

The corset was so constrictive that at first Jack couldn’t sleep and would tear it off in the middle of the night – the crowning metaphor for a system that had always tried to confine him. In the end I stopped making him wear it. Laurent and I were separated by that time and the corset stayed in the cupboard, only to be brought out when Jack saw the professor or his father. After two years of this charade, the doctor announced that the results had been extremely satisfactory and that, thanks to the corset, we had eluded the worst. I could tell from Jack’s expression that he was bursting to tell that smug little man that he had hardly ever worn it, but he stayed quiet.

When that nursery-school teacher had told me that my three-year-old had masochistic tendencies and invoked the psychiatrist, I was still sufficiently contaminated by my British scepticism to laugh. But as the years went by and I became more caught up in bourgeois Parisian society, the ubiquity of psychoanalytic theory began to work its spell on me. Many of my husband’s friends were in analysis – mostly as an intellectual pastime – and would discuss their treatment at dinner parties, but always in the most abstract of terms. The conversation would never take on a personal note, as it would have on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It would remain beautifully theoretical, like Bettelheim or Barthes or Derrida. For in this Catholic culture, what was interesting was not the personal or the symptomatic, but the collective and the universal.

Since May 1968, psychoanalysis – entirely dominated in France by Freudian theory – has exerted a considerable influence on all of society. Along with Marx, Freud was the emblematic figure of the ’68 barricades. In the search for a viable alternative to Catholic values – one that would correspond to the deepest nature of the French people,
with their obsession for order, hierarchy but, above all, gratification – Freudian theory, with its emphasis on the libido, was a perfect solution. The media – both low-and-highbrow – have always spread the word, often wheeling out Freudians as experts on all aspects of society from the most banal to the most serious. Pioneered by
Elle
magazine, all women’s magazines now have their resident Freudian analyst who will answer all your problems from sporadic orgasm to coping with your child to dealing with your lover. The psychiatrist affiliated to your child’s school or university is invariably a Freudian, as is the hawk-eyed therapist attached to the local kindergarten who will keep watch over your toddler’s drawings.

The theory of the unconscious, one of the most influential of the twentieth century, captured the French imagination in particular, due to the beauty of its all-encompassing nature. Freud’s system never claimed to be scientific and as such cannot really be refuted. It is, as his disciples tend to show, a matter of faith. Like the Catholic Church before it, the
Société Psychanalytique de
Paris
(SPP, the union of Freudian analysts in France) requires obedience as well as respect for tradition. It does not accept refutation or change. It is probably no coincidence that recent developments in psychotherapeutic techniques, which began by contesting Freudian hegemony, are thriving in Protestant societies and struggling in Catholic ones. As W. H. Auden put it in his essay on the Protestant mystics, if the Catholic approach to faith can be summed up by the words ‘
We
believe
still
’,
Protestantism will always be a matter of ‘
I
believe
again
.’

Because of the dominance of Freudian theory, the revolution in therapeutic practices brought by more recent cognitive and behavioural therapies is decried in France, where they are seen as prosaic, limiting and quintessentially Anglo-Saxon. The pragmatic approach to mental illness, which tends towards the search for an alleviation of symptoms, does not seem to interest the French psychoanalytic community. In 2004 the SPP managed to put pressure on the French government to suppress a report by the state research institute, INSERM, which revealed the relative success of cognitive and behavioural therapies in curing mental illness.

As one Freudian analyst, Jacques-Alain Miller, a member of the SPP, explained: ‘The patient arrives with symptoms and he finds throughout the course of the therapy that they are simply a screen onto which he is projecting his internal strife. Psychoanalysis doesn’t mend his past but enables him to accept it. Because psychoanalysis is not a medical procedure, it is difficult to evaluate its success.’

To practitioners like Miller, the cure is not the point. For the small handful of pioneers attempting to spread cognitive, behavioural and other ‘problem-solving’ therapies in France, this kind of highly theoretical approach is a form of irresponsibility. For them, the role of the practitioner is not to enable the patient to accept his or her suffering but to work for a cure and provide some kind of accountability to the patient in the process. The idea of accountability, of course, infers an equal relationship
between therapist and patient, who becomes, in some sense, a client receiving a service. For the analysts of the SPP, this contractual approach not only belittles the almost mystical experience of the psychoanalytic process but also diminishes the high-priestly status of the analyst.

Auden’s observation of Protestant culture, which champions the
I
and the
Now
over the
We
and the
Then
of Catholic cultures, is nowhere more relevant than in France, where an enduring taste for collective worship is expressed in contemporary society through a passion for the Common Cause. French people are never happier than when their individuality is being dissolved in a movement, a street demonstration or a beautiful, all-embracing theory like that of Sigmund Freud.

As I would soon discover, the greatest rampart against individuality in French society is
L’Ecole Publique
(State school), and the most formidable guardians of the norm are the teachers therein. But I should not, as the French say, ‘spit in the soup’, by which I mean I should be grateful for what I have. When it comes to the education that my children have received at the hands of the French State, I would not, in retrospect, exchange it for the education that is available in Britain to my friends’ children. My children were both, for all my elitist schooling, better educated than I was. They can do maths, for a start. They have a chronological and comprehensive sense of history, while I have a patchy one (confined mostly to Tudor Britain, Gladstone’s army reforms and the Second World
War). They know the teachings of Western civilisation’s key philosophers, from Plato to Descartes to Sartre. They have a decent understanding of how the immune system works and what a gene is, and they have a deep and extensive knowledge of French literature.

The reason for this is that from the age of six, they were burdened with unbelievable amounts of homework and saddled with all the things that modern British pedagogy decries: rote-learning, dictation, relentless competition and exams. They sometimes seemed to me like rats in a cage. There was hardly any sport or art and no drama. If they wanted to practise a sport, they could do so in their precious free time, on Wednesday afternoons, and if they did, it would tend to be in an atmosphere of fierce competition.

Before the French State took over the business of educating its children, schools in France were in the hands of the Church and, in particular, the Jesuits. St Ignatius de Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, believed in obedience as the key virtue and ordered total submission to the will of one’s superiors. This hierarchical vision of education was championed by Napoleon, who had himself benefited from the rigours of Jesuit teaching methods and who set up a system of
lycées
that he dreamed would be run by ‘Jesuits of the State’. It did not take me long to realise that Napoleon’s dream had come true. For the teaching staff, my children were vessels to be filled. Their capacity to receive information was the sole measure of their success. No other criteria – not creativity, or
imagination, or physical prowess – were used to assess their quality as human beings.

Nowhere is the French obsession for nobility more clearly reflected than in the education system, which is, despite its egalitarian philosophy, extremely hierarchical. The teaching body is divided between those who have passed the vertiginously difficult
agrégation
and are forever glorified in the eyes of society (no matter how lacking they may be in pedagogic skills) and those who have taken the more practical teacher-training programme, the CAPES (
Certificat d’Aptitude au Professorat de l’Enseignement du
Second Degré
), and who are perceived as second-rate and treated as such in their careers. My son Jack, a survivor of and convert to the French education system, once tried to explain to me his urgent desire to sit the
agrégation
.

‘If you pass it, Mum, and most people have to sit the exam at least three times before they do … But
if
you pass it, you never have to prove yourself again. You become an intellectual god.’

Beyond my surprise that a nineteen-year-old should aspire to such stasis was a sense of despair that my own child should have been so contaminated by France’s obsession for intellectual status.

Behind Jack’s explanation lies a shocking reality: that you can pass an exam in your early twenties, be shrouded in glory and never, ever be fired. In most societies a degree or diploma is a starting block after which the individual must prove his or her professional worth. In France the
right academic qualification will set you up until retirement. French
lycées
are filled with these
agrégés
, literally ‘whole’ beings, dangerously imbued with their own sense of entitlement. These are the mandarins of French academia who, in the name of excellence, block any reform that might represent an attack on their status.

The student body is also divided: there are more or less noble paths – Academic versus Technological – and more or less noble disciplines – Maths and Sciences carry considerably more value than the Arts. Maths – in obedience to France’s most influential philosopher, René Descartes – is the final arbiter of intelligence. But above all, Maths is seen as the great leveller. There is no need to come from a cultivated background to have an affinity for Maths. If you are blessed with a gift for numbers and at the age of sixteen choose the most prestigious of all the baccalaureate options, in which Maths carries the most weight, you are destined for greatness. Napoleon, who spoke poor, heavily accented French, excelled in Maths and was consequently able to succeed. Maths in France is the contemporary Latin. My daughter, who inherited her father’s Maths brain, on entering the sixth form took it as the principal subject of her baccalaureate. She noted that her teacher strove to teach it in the most abstract way possible, keeping it as firmly divorced from the uses of everyday life as it could possibly be.

This attachment to an archaic and non-pragmatic pedagogy is compounded by a deep and lasting problem of denial. The republican obsession with equality means that
no one – neither the politicians attempting educational reform, nor the teaching body itself – will ever admit to their underlying belief that some are more noble than others. This means that it is utterly impossible ever to tackle the reality of a diverse student population, or ever properly address the needs of those children in difficulty, especially if they happen to belong to an ethnic minority. Talk to a French secondary-school teacher, an
agrégé
employed by the Ministry of Education for life, and you will quickly hit the bedrock of their prejudice. Their huge self-importance, coupled with their egalitarian ideology, makes them despise notions like ethnicity, diversity or special needs. Perhaps part of the reason for this is that they lack the human gifts required for nurturing these children.

While my daughter Ella thrived on the extreme rigour of the system and always performed well in it, Jack was miserable from the start and did not. In Britain, I’m sure he would have been seen as a special-needs child and helped accordingly. Here in France he was placed in that ignominious category known as
en echec
, which means, quite simply, ‘failing’, and then – more shaming still – marked out for a
bilan psychologique
(psychological assessment). Laurent and I, unless we wanted Jack expelled, were forced to take him to Paris’s main psychiatric hospital, Sainte-Anne, for close and gruelling psychiatric scrutiny.

As we walked with our eight-year-old through the lugubrious grounds, past the patients in their various postures of lunacy or distress, I inevitably wondered what we
had done to our son to find ourselves in this situation. As it turned out, an analysis of Jack’s drawings revealed that I had not allowed him sufficiently to regress. I was not sure what this meant, but at the time I felt terrible. It is, of course, a constant of Freudian analysis to look for the mother’s role in the elaboration of complexes and repression. Long after autism was found to be an organic disorder, triggered by genetic factors, French mothers were still being blamed for their ‘failure to bond’ with their child. The myth of the ‘refrigerator mother’ who causes the autistic symptoms through her ‘unconscious wish that the child should not exist’ was propagated by theorists like Dr Bruno Bettelheim and echoed by the French psychoanalytic community for decades. Even today there are plenty of French analysts who refuse to accept the biological nature of autism and continue to compound the anguish of families with autistic children by apportioning blame. I know of one such family who ten years ago moved to London because behavioural therapy for autism simply did not exist in France. In this case the mother was sufficiently strong to resist the temptation to believe that her son’s condition was all her fault.

Jack was a dreamer and for this he would be punished for years. He also loved abstraction and this would ultimately equip him very well for tertiary education in France, provided he could stay the course. In his last year of secondary school, Jack, along with the rest of his class, discovered philosophy and he became very good at it. But in all the previous years, the system judged and
condemned him. At the age of seven, that symbolic age for Freudians when the ‘repressive phase’ begins, the age which the Jesuits used to call ‘the age of reason’, Jack was expected to be alert, receptive and able to absorb, without questioning, huge quantities of facts. On the one hand, the French school system insisted that he emerge from the dream of childhood, and on the other, the psychiatric establishment was telling me to let him go back there. At the time, I was lost, consumed with guilt and endlessly worried about my son.