Marie Rose Moro does not arrive on Rocinante’s back, but on a bicycle. The child and adolescent psychiatrist, in her sixties, shares with Don Quixote, a character she adores and a compatriot from another time, a taste for dreams and utopia. Make the world a better place, find meaning to escape chaos, despite the blows, which she brushes aside with the back of her hand, in front of her glass of iced sparkling water, in the darkness of the Hemingway bar at La Closerie des lilas, in Paris.
We are very close to Maison de Solenn, which she has run since 2008. The establishment attached to Cochin hospital welcomes suffering adolescents and their families. Every Thursday morning, she holds a consultation there “transcultural” with other therapists.
“I remember a teenager, born to a father from West Africa and a Breton and Catholic mother, who had converted to Islam and who, during our first meeting, had refused to shake my hand. It’s difficult to be proud and open when your parents devalue themselves or don’t pass on anything. Some suffer from miscegenation, always having to explain where they come from. We talked about the links between the Bible and the Koran, about what gives meaning to life. As he left, he agreed to shake my hand, at first out of convenience, then finally, out of affection. A contact, a bond was born. »
“We impose violence on our children”
Being born elsewhere, being from elsewhere, this daughter of Spanish exiles knows. Her parents left Castile in the 1960s and she arrived at the age of 9 months in the Ardennes, on the border with Belgium. The eldest of five children grew up there surrounded by the love of her family and in the warm welcome of the inhabitants of the village of Pouru-aux-Bois, where a Spanish community lived. His father became a lumberjack there. “He, who had not gone to school but had learned to read from the Bible, the only book at his disposal, wanted his children to have access to culture, something impossible at the time in Franco’s Spain. » At home, we only speak Spanish, the language of the interior. French will become, for her, the link to the outside world and ideas. And the language of his studies of medicine and philosophy followed in Nancy.
The gap between her experience of exile and the reality she was confronted with will be the source of her commitment. “When I arrived in Paris, I had the feeling that migrant children were being mistreated. For my part, I had not experienced their difficulties, and was not torn like them. I experienced the community as solidarity and not as exclusion. » Becoming a psychiatrist out of rebellion and to change destinies, she began to take care of babies and their families with Serge Lebovici, a great figure in child psychiatry, at the Avicennes hospital in Bobigny. “I was horrified that we considered it impossible to do therapy with strangers, that we believed that parents would not be interested in their children. » Lebovici then pushed her to invest in what would quickly become the heart of her mission: work with migrants.
In her practice, she embodies transcultural psychiatry and ethnopsychoanalysis, a discipline founded by Georges Devereux, and applies “profane psychotherapy”dear to the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, “the one that belongs to everyone”. “Psychological care cannot be reserved for specialists alone because there are too many children who need it. » So she gives back ” stuff ” that it learns so that adolescents and their families – essential in the treatment – are actors, so that these future adults are capable of improving the world they inherit. “Let them overtake us at the bottom…”
But the resistance is strong, unsurpassable: “We don’t trust them, thinking that we, the adults, are the only ones to have the truth. They would only be interested in social networks, would not be engaged… Lots of false things are said about these beings under construction who are never disappointing, but always generous, despite their whims. » It is with this conviction that she wrote What if we loved our teenagers? (Bayard, 2017) and Let’s dare to be a parent (Bayard, 2016).
The hubbub of conversations does not in any way disturb his resolution: “Putting young people at the heart of our policies, our concerns, our laws. Taking good care of it is everyone’s business. » Marie Rose Moro quotes the philosopher Marcel Conche, specialist in metaphysics and ancient philosophy, who, in Philosophical orientation (Belles Lettres, 2011), in the chapter “On the suffering of children as an absolute evil”, writes that we measure the greatness of a society by the way in which it treats the youngest… For the psychiatrist, the observation is implacable: “We’re not there at all: 6,500 teenagers per year consult at Maison de Solenn alone, that’s a lot. We impose violence on our children, and enormous educational pressure. »
But, of an optimistic nature, she is delighted that, on the ground, those who work with families are becoming more and more aware, and that prejudices are losing their force: “Doctors, judges and community workers train to do the right thing. And do their job well. » It will pay off in the end, she is sure of it. She works hard during consultations, conferences and seminars on transculturality, and the diversity of families, ways of being a father, of being a mother.
“I don’t like to clear my head”
Don’t talk to her about mother’s guilt, she sees red and if her day was over, she would have even had a Campari-orange, “for bitterness” ! “Mothers don’t need anyone to blame them. And it’s a waste of time, this feeling blinds and prevents you from seeking help and finding solutions. This doesn’t lead to anything, we are related to our history, our resources”affirms the happy mother of Lola and Pablo, who knows that big questions arise during the transition to adulthood.
Always in motion, always in turmoil, it ensures “don’t like to clear your head”. Everything is food for thought, even the songs. “As a child, my parents listened to the radio in Spanish all the time at home. To my father the news, to my mother the songs. » Could this be the reason why this romantic adores “these nuggets of everyday stories, these concentrates of life and love” ? Always looking for a form of clinical writing, she is thinking about a story about her mother, who died a year ago. A project mentioned in whispers.
Very quickly, a smile lights up his sad face. Without transition, she confides that she recently started flamenco. Spain is never far away. It’s thanks to yoga “very muscular”, finally mastered, that she arrived there. A challenge as she likes them, “hard, very, very hard”. We are surprised, she laughs: “One day I told myself it was now or never. It reconciled me with the fact that it’s not just ideas that make me. I also have a body but I tended to forget it. » A discovery that comes with age. “Dancing flamenco is one of my windmills. » Marie Rose Moro, feminine Don Quixote? The idea does not displease him.
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