Amiens - Journées Nationales 2011
Violence(s)
After its National Conventions on Listening, Psychiatrist's involvement, Virtual and last year, Transmitting: a hazard and a necessity, the AFPEP - French Association of Psychiatrists in Private Practice - carries on the coherent progression of its clinical reflection in relation to social and political evolutions, with the so vast and complex theme of Violence(s). The purpose of this National Convention held in Amiens is to consider the dimension of violence in its multiple and multifactorial aspects: personal violence, institutional violence, violence with its misleading and disguised faces, political and security aimed violence.
Is there a way to examine and tell about violence ? A way to figure it in our lives and in our practise as psychiatrists attached to a clinic which ambition is to help our patients in their quest for their own word ? Through our training, we become specifically familiarised with the notion of personal violence in close connection with impulses, between Eros and Thanatos. We know how destructive this violence can be, but also how driving it is in the creative and constructive process of life.
If we consider that our work as psychiatrists is to help our patients incorporate this subjective violence, thus giving them the possibility to utilize it for constructive purposes, then not only are we supposed to have investigated this subject in ourselves sufficiently, but we also should take a clear and firm stand about the present security policy.
While not ignoring the question of that violence inherent to human beings and exacerbated by certain pathologies, we will rather concentrate here on the security response. To a question raised with violence, responding with violence can only lead to the dangerous effects of an escalation of violence; evidence of it we see everyday.
This Convention gives us the opportunity to face those issues that we cannot evade, at no time. These issues require obviously complex and plural elaborations and answers that deal with situations individually but always consider the subject, the person in its belonging to society. This National Convention is also an opportunity for the AFPEP to make its stances clear about political and security excesses and to keep on being, more than ever, a source of proposals.