This sunny day in March, sitting on her sofa, hands folded on her knees, Marie-France Hirigoyen lets the silence settle in. She is more used to listening than telling stories. About twenty minutes from his apartment at 5e district of Paris, on the other side of Luxembourg Park, she has received hundreds of patients every year for forty-five years in her office as a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, victimologist and systemic family therapist.
Thousands of hours devoted to listening to the small and great sufferings of men and women damaged by invisible violence, violence without physical blows or injuries, ordinary or massive violence. She preferred to receive at home, in this immaculate and bright interior, because she spends ” too much time “ in his office, this precious observation post of the dysfunctions of our society. “I don’t invent anything, I’m not a theoretician, she explains. I describe what I perceive through what I hear. »
In the closed doors of his office, we confide to him what we tell no one, neither to his friends, nor to his colleagues, nor to his family. We express ourselves without censorship and we tell the inaudible. Marie-France Hirigoyen listens. And she takes notes. From year to year, his consultations have nourished his books, essays which have marked the public debate on psychological violence and which have contributed to their legal recognition.
Protect children
Twenty-five years after her pioneering book on moral harassment, the woman who has been probing for decades the limit between ordinary conflict and violence publishes today Separations with children (La Découverte), a large-scale work on the suffering of the youngest when parents separate. “It’s not about making parents feel guilty, she asks straight away. Children do not suffer so much from the separation as from the way it happens. »
In this work, she applies the same method as in her previous books. Based on the stories of men and women, children of divorcees or parents in the process of separating, she notes common points in their stories. It was from the end of the 2000s that she observed a form of psychological violence increasing worryingly: the manipulation of a minor in a context of conflictual separation. One of the parents, seeking to settle scores with their ex-spouse, will try, sometimes unconsciously, to use the child to get him to reject the other. “This is emotional abuse which has serious consequences for him,” she explains.
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