Local thinkers | Nicolas Lévesque: know yourself

After finishing my reading of ptoma of Nicolas Lévesque, a year ago, I wrote to him to ask him if he wanted to be my shrink. In this book, he recounted experiences lived in his office with patients, and the very human solutions found to untie, or sometimes simply accept, the knots of life.

For Lévesque, psychotherapy is not necessarily a response to an illness. It’s a way, just like culture, to get to know each other, to be accompanied, a bit like in the master-apprentice relationship of Antiquity, “which worked quite well all the same! “, he launched me at the end of the line. It’s a special bond with someone who follows us and knows us intimately, to learn how to live better, and living better starts with knowing who we are deep down inside. His most recent book, which has just arrived in bookstores, A shrink on the microphoneadds: this relationship should be accessible to everyone.

At my candid request last year, Lévesque tenderly replied with a refusal, telling me that we would have to meet in the professional world no doubt, given our reciprocal belonging to the literary world, and that it was not a good idea. So here we are. He had just read one of my own books, around the bereavement of my father, and gave me a list of people to call without fail, “if you need to talk”. It’s going very well, for those interested, but I must say that if my shrink told my life in a book, I might be a bit cursed.

Did he have patients angry to see themselves dissected under his pen, breaking the fourth wall of therapeutic staging? “Yes, it happened, with my two previous books, Phora and ptoma. »

Some did not at all like being told like this in broad daylight. But of course, for the reader, especially one who has never closed a closet door behind him, perhaps, much of the interest is there.

Curiosity is great and voyeur satisfaction is enormous when reading it. “I don’t know if I would do it again. On the ethical level, I was correct, but on the ethical level, I still ask myself the question. The shrink’s interest in this approach was to bring his ideas down from theoretical heights to embody them concretely in his essays, while Freud himself recounted his cases in his writings.

Circulate ideas

A shrink on the microphonewhich is a lot less stressful to publish, Lévesque told me, is rather composed of chronicles delivered here and there on Radio-Canada, on the now defunct program The more the merrier, the more we read notably. Marie-Louise Arsenault, in a memorable joke, is seen by the author as his own shrink. I must say that it made me think of the therapeutic virtues of my years with Serge Bouchard, who, like the classic caricatural shrink, often liked to say almost nothing when I visited him. Jean-Philippe Pleau, who published a first essay on February 2 at LUX, then joked that Serge sometimes went “to have a coffee” while I was chatting.

Lévesque begins his book with a sort of announcement of mourning for his membership in The crazier we are, but also, I had the impression, of his 11 years of collaboration with various Canadian radio programs. “Maybe, I don’t know,” he reacted, while understanding that he gives that impression, since mourning is an essential source of his writing.

During these 11 years, he bet on the media “Trojan horse”. “It’s important to me that all these ideas don’t stay in Outremont. His father lived a more hermetic intellectual life, but the son needs something else. Claude Lévesque, legendary philosophy professor at the University of Montreal who opened my eyes to the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida 20 years ago, still stayed quite a bit in his ivory tower, according to Nicolas. And when a son comes from the educated bourgeoisie, he summed up to me, he then often seeks to reach as many people as possible in his own adult life. To say that I recognized myself in this sentence would be an understatement.

We find in this book psychoanalysis of Mary Poppins (the nanny-psychoanalyst), James Bond (what is behind ultramacho?) and Michael Corleone (freedom against family control).

These figures are at the beginning of the work, so that the horse enters Troy. Then, we quietly open our stomach: we have Romeo and Juliet, and then hop, Madame Bovary and suddenly a self-criticism of the author’s prejudices regarding the term “holistic”. This book shows, by its fragmented form and its variegated background, that thinking is relevant everywhere, all the time, for everyone. Provided it is done with heart, and not just in the head.

During our interview, Lévesque gave me this scoop literary. Next year, he will completely leave his practice of psychiatry to devote himself full-time to the world of publishing, within the Nota bene Group. It’s as if for a long time, he told me, he had been working as a commando in his writing, alone against the world. But there, what he wants is to build an army of fighting prose. Prepare your manuscripts.

A shrink on the microphone

Nicolas Levesque

Miscellaneous

204 pages