Gisèle Chaboudez Interview | Alex Gilbert #284

Gisèle Chaboudez, a French psychoanalyst, discusses Particular Maternities, The supposition of the subject (Érès, 2025) by Catherine and Alain Vanier, Emeritus Professor, former ENSBA Paris. He will give a talk on July 8: “Remaining Image – Art and Psychoanalysis: How Art Reveals and Conceals What Is Lacking” (ADER Brussels) and lead seminars on Lacan’s Télévision, with Patrick Landman, Olivier Douville and Paul-Laurent Assoun.

This book is indeed about a particular clinic, gathering a fragment of the memory of two psychoanalysts’ experience—one at the extremes of faltering mental health, the other at the extremes of uncertain life. These Particular Maternities are recounted in a living approach, in an authentic voice, keeping us slightly breathless on that border where it is decided whether madness can truly engender, and whether these children, heralded in weeks and grams, can live.

Alain Vanier’s experience concerns the reception and care, over three years, of psychotic mothers within the perinatal context, with a psychiatric evaluation of the possibility of keeping the child with the mother or proceeding to separation. A young woman, naked, having abandoned all hygiene since she felt her child move, waits for that belly to be opened to let him out, then feeds him only according to her own hunger. A mother who cannot look her daughter in the eyes, for fear of destroying her or being destroyed, after having named her after herself. Another imagines her only as a teenager attracting persecutors, while in the meantime she takes care of her carefully, “like a poodle,” she says. The last one dreaded giving birth to a girl, but her anxiety eases upon noticing the calm in the child’s eyes. All this outlines worlds we do not conceive of, yet which stem from a certain logic.

Throughout this account, references are made to experiences and theoretical developments, those of Winnicott, Klein, and others, but no theory is applied as such. Rather, there is a simple tracing of a few concepts, such as the reign of the sign, established when the signifier is distant, and a supposition of subject by the mother toward the child, instead of a supposition of knowledge made to a subject—a concept Lacan defines as transference. Indeed, mothers speak to their babies as if they understood, which sometimes sets up a strange monologue shaped like a dialogue, where both questions and answers come from them. We know how Françoise Dolto posed the challenge of considering the baby as a person, to be spoken to as such. Precisely the opposite of a poodle one takes care of, as one of these mothers implies, though many people also speak to their poodles. And to approach the strange place their baby takes for each of these particular mothers immediately plunges us, at the threshold of life, into the dimension of what organizes jouissance—a term Freud did not name as such but described, and which Lacan unfolded as distinct from that of demand and desire, with different assumptions and effects. That which organizes the subject’s relation to its Other and to its objects, at the intersection of body and language through the mediation of the imaginary.

The next experience, that of Catherine Vanier, spanning thirty years in a neonatal intensive care unit, immediately takes us into the discovery of the simple and profound malentendu that exists between medicine and the unconscious. It is here that the intervention of a psychoanalyst is useful—not to practice psychoanalysis per se, of course, but to approach this dimension of the unconscious subject where it manifests itself in a highly specific context: when, instead of welcoming a full-term baby who lives and radiates, a mother delivers a minuscule, nearly monstrous premature infant, wired up on all sides, without knowing whether it will survive or at what cost. A mother who loses control when asked to take her premature baby home turns out to be convinced she had given it death, when only the doctors had given it life. They must then give her life a little longer, so she can eventually take over from them. Through the sensitive impact of this reinstated speech, a profound practice was invented and implemented in this unit, based on these elementary data of the unconscious, which seem so simple to consider but produce so much damage when they are not.

This practice became all the more necessary as there began to appear an increase in psychological disorders among former premature babies, in a context where medicine was resuscitating ever more premature infants, as technological progress allowed—sometimes at the cost of serious after-effects.

Drawing on knowledge gathered about babies’ competencies—what they do with faces, smells, and voices, their ordinary original distress in the face of the chaos of intrusions they suffer when changing environments, which the machines keeping the premature baby alive are incapable of responding to—this pioneering experience involved the invention of a whole mode of speech, care, and organization that took these elements into account, putting them to work with staff and families alike. And Catherine Vanier shares with us some astonishing findings. A child who could not breathe without the machine succeeds in doing so once the machine is left on so she can hear its noise. Deprived of contact with the maternal body, and even with the faces that usually surround it, the baby may come to identify its world with the machine—and thus itself with its object. It feels neither hunger nor thirst; its orifices belong to the machines. What becomes of drives in such a case, and the Other who answers them?

In this context, to suppose a subject in this tiny baby is also to declare it born, not wait for it to be born at term. The incubator, like a womb, seems to await the délivrance of the not-yet-born child; the mother does not yet quite know whether it is, in the indeterminate third space constituted by the unit that keeps it alive, and in her initial inability to suppose a subject in this baby, a call in its cries, and to respond. And it is here that speech addressed to the baby takes place, over the sound of the machines, to tell it its story, its coming, its life, for hours on end—speech that pulls it out of its elsewhere, its nowhere tethered to the machine. For this speech, which the entire staff of a unit takes up and which ultimately brings forth the baby’s presence, also brings forth that of the mother—herself just as premature, following the active dispossession that this naissance qui n’en est pas une represents, denied, in sum, the right to be the mother of that child, whom only medicine saves by making it its object.

And so unfold the singular stories—Justine, Laura, Adam, Rose, Nora, Gabriel, Sara. From their birth, in each of them an instant emerges that determines life, the desire to live that is sought so far away, by speaking to them in motherese, sometimes called parentese—that special voice adults use with babies, the musicality of speech that eventually reaches them. It is practically confirmed that without this speech addressed to them, a child, genetically programmed though they may be, does not speak, and may not live long. Indeed, Frederick II’s experiment in the 12th century, intended to discover which language a child would speak if no one ever spoke to them, involved removing infants from their mothers and raising them in silence. The result was children who never spoke and died prematurely.

It also seems that without this speech, depression arises, whereas one can observe that the baby, with it, attaches to signs of the Other’s jouissance.

In the years following resuscitation, symptoms arise in Agnès, Romeo—symptoms a psychoanalytic intervention can again resolve, either briefly or continuously until the entry into speech. For Pierre, who barely speaks and attaches electrical wires to everything, it was necessary that he be able to connect those wires between his analyst and his parents, while being spoken to at length about his birth, where the wires of the machine had allowed him to live, so that in a few years he began to speak—learning, notably, that those wires functioned only through the desire of those who had installed them to keep him alive. Cannelle screams at three months to show her mother she is alive, when the mother is haunted by the fear that she might die, just as her own mother had when she was three years old.

These are passionate life stories—capital-L Lives—which Catherine Vanier recounts with talent.

All of this is concluded, by Alain Vanier, with a rich conceptual reflection on the nature of the sign in relation to the signifier, stemming from this special experience of the new mother facing the enigma of the signs she receives from her child, which she “learns to interpret” as though they could have no other meaning than the one she gives them. Taking up Lacan’s remark that the sign, as an effect of the signifier, is the subject—since it is nothing but what slides along a chain of signifiers—it follows that to interpret this sign is to suppose a subject. While the sign of a subject, in turn, provokes desire—even stems from love. It is here that we understand why the proposal of supposing a subject proves to be a simple and effective way to orient a practice with babies. Especially those who are suffering—just as one speaks of a letter “in suffering” when it has not reached its destination. These prematurely expelled children present themselves as such—those to whom one speaks, and of whom one speaks, until that letter arrives—unbeknownst to the subject, but not without them.

Previous articles:
*Dialogue with Gisèle Chaboudez
*Singular Femininity
*Feminisms et Femininities