L’Express: Much has been said and written in recent days thatEmmanuel Macron would have lost his mind by choosing to dissolve the Assembly. You see it rather as a calculation based on a need to repair a wounded narcissism. Could you explain this to us?
Genevieve Delaisi de Parseval: At first glance, this seems like paradoxical behavior, but with a little hindsight, I am now convinced that the president tried, with a somewhat Machiavellian design, to find his own benefit in this failure. Was this dissolution a real act or cynical behavior? What is certain is that the President of the Republic is an old hand in politics. He also has advisors other than those in his restricted group. In any case, I see this gesture of dissolution and calling for elections as a carefully considered game of chess. His narcissistic wound was too great for him to submit his destiny to the chance of highly uncertain elections! Faced with a narcissistic wound, it is common for the subject to be tempted to turn it into its opposite. This is exactly what we are experiencing.
The French people have let Emmanuel Macron know that they no longer love him, no longer support him; he could not fail to take this massive lack of love into account. How can we turn it around? You no longer love me? Fine, you will see, tomorrow you will love me differently. By calling these legislative elections, he anticipated that everyone, his ministers, his allies, his opponents, his advisers, would confront each other, get into each other’s faces; he knew how to provoke a political uproar, possibly very dangerous. But at the same time telling himself that he alone would ultimately emerge from it by appearing as the savior. For a narcissistic personality, the bet holds up. Faced with a future National Assembly of bits and pieces, his own drained party, and triumphant oppositions, he intends to appear in the months to come as the institutional bulwark, the guarantor of the smooth running of the State, the guarantor of public freedoms. What better way to repair a battered image?
Isn’t that a dizzying risk?
Certainly. It seems to me that he put his personal interest before that of France. It is clear that our country is going through a very serious crisis. In psychoanalysis, there are two meanings of the word crisis. The first, the most common, is the crisis understood as a moment when we break everything, we shout, we argue. The second meaning considers the crisis as a phase of maturation, as the integration of impulses. Childhood and adolescence are an example of periods in life when crises follow one another and make a child grow up to adulthood. The president wants to go through this crisis as an opportunity to integrate the life drive and the death drive. The death drive was clearly seen in the macabre staging of his television announcement, at the end of an economy of words so rare in someone who loves to talk, explain, etc. That evening, it looked like an obituary…
Since then, life has resumed its rights: people are busy all over the place, talking, calculating, arguing. Meanwhile, – behind the scenes – the president is maneuvering to be the one to whom tomorrow we will turn in the face of parliamentary disorder and the absence of a clear majority. When, like him, you have built an exceptional destiny, based on a singular family story (moving away from your family to live with your grandmother, marrying an older woman, your teacher), it is probably unthinkable for him that a lost vote would break this magnificent inner story. Everything happens as if he were trying to feed it again.
Psychoanalysis shows that in times of crisis a subject has several defense mechanisms, including denial and denial. Denial consists of telling oneself, in this case, that nothing or almost nothing has happened (the yellow vest crisis, the chaotic pension reform, galloping poverty, all that is in the past). The President of the Republic seems rather to want to activate a form of denial, a more subtle mechanism: the crisis exists, there are deep, violent, dangerous movements that he admits through gritted teeth and that he underestimated, but he minimizes them. His main concern currently lies elsewhere: he intends to leave in History an original, interesting image of his presidency, especially not one of failure, or even marked by ridicule!
What feelings, what sensations do you see at work in the vote for the National Rally ?
I believe that the driving force behind the RN vote is the contempt that these voters feel – not without reason – from the wealthy, from the elite. By their vote, RN voters tell Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella that they understand them. I think that Emmanuel Macron’s presidency has fueled a strong feeling of contempt for the middle and working classes.
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