Qhat do we know about the suffering of infertile men? Nothing. Not a novel, not a film, not a testimony exists on the subject. Studies in the humanities can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Our society of compassion, fascinated by suffering and intimacy, refuses to think about the fate of these thousands of men who struggle to become fathers.
Such blindness is called “negative hallucination.” Unlike “classic” hallucination, a mechanism that makes us see what does not exist, negative hallucination consists of refusing to see what is obvious.
Because, yes, the decline in male fertility is obvious. All the scientific studies prove it. Published in March 2023 by the epidemiologist Hagai Levine, the latest recalls known data: the concentration of sperm in an ejaculate has collapsed in thirty years. An alarming finding that is getting worse year after year.
On a daily basis, in medically assisted procreation (MAP) services, the conclusion remains clear: the number of infertile men continues to increase. In France, today, one in four couples has difficulty having a child, and male infertility is the cause in 30% of cases.
A silent depression
So how is this male psychic pain that interests us so little expressed? By intense depressive symptoms. But the depression linked to infertility has a particularity that makes it undetectable: it is silent… Patients speak little, rarely complain. It’s as if they didn’t know they were hurting.
In psychopathology, we speak of “alexithymia”. to qualify these depressions without symptoms. This concept, invented by the psychiatrist Peter Emanuel Sifneos (1920-2008) in 1973, comes from the Greek privative prefix “a”, from lexos (“word”) and thymos (“mood”). He literally describes “one who cannot talk about his feelings”.
By extension, the term is used to designate the masked forms of depression that gnaw at the soul quietly. But appearances are deceptive. And it’s not always those who shout the loudest who suffer the most.
Beneath their wax faces, thousands of infertile men endure in silence.
The existential experience of the “creepy”
And for good reason, infertility arouses very demeaning feelings. For a man, being infertile is experienced as a form of powerlessness: powerlessness to impregnate, powerlessness to fulfill his partner, powerlessness to become a father. Known for its searing erotic descriptions, D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published in 1928, shows, through the character of Clifford Chatterley, to what extent impotence and infertility are self-sustaining: doubting one’s fertility is the royal road to fiasco. So much so that male infertility is a vicious circle from which patients come out painfully.
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