Marcel

I have just this morning learnt of Marcel’s death, urgently transported to hospital. It happened just like that, I can’t do anything about it, that’s my last brother who is leaving, without us being able to farewell each other. Certainly he had left me a little while ago, not us at the Association to which he was attached by many threads, but me, and in the same stroke the ties of origin, of culture, or else of language, of learning, of work that tied us together. Stupidly, I had endeavoured to bring him to publicly produce the elements of the disagreements that he seemed to experience in the face of our references. As usual it’s pride that is affected when one seeks to re-establish a community of work.

Those who knew his office as Assistant at the Henri-Rousselle Hospital know that he had set it up as if it had been the lounge room of his apartment. In that way, Marcel only felt at home on the condition of being at home, amongst his furniture, and he experienced the Association as if I had set up my own furniture there, and therefore as a visitor. But where is my furniture? Tenderness and waste are the terms that come to me to qualify this private affair of the developments that Marcel could have contributed to the field of psychiatry. The generations to come will not know that psychiatry could have been completely put back on its feet if Marcel had not devoted himself to Séglas, Magnan, Clérambault etc., but it was them that he loved. But one doesn’t choose one’s loves, nor one’s hates moreover, and their coupling changes nothing in the profound pain that Marcel’s death leaves behind. Sarina knows how close we are to her.

Charles Melman

3 June 2021  

Addendum

J.P Beaumont tells me that those who were close to Marcel at Sainte-Anne Hospital are complaining that I did not praise his work. They are completely right since it was my criticisms on this subject that no doubt contributed to his estrangement. This being so, the Association is of course open for them to all to report on it and to highlight it.

This could also be the occasion, if they want, to look again at what we can get out of the Lacanian theses in order to put psychiatry, whose current practice is not at all reassuring, back on its feet.

Traduction faite par Michael Plastow