Paris, 20 April 2000 {No.2000-36} - The psychoanalyst and writer Julia Kristeva, essayist and Canadian television journalist Denise Bombardier and the Brazilian psychiatrist and ethnologist Adalberto Barreto, who works in Brazil's shantytowns, debated sicknesses of the soul, outlook and prevention, at Organization Headquarters on April 18. The debate, the 12th in the series of UNESCO's 21st Century Talks, was held in the presence of Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura and was attended by 800 members of the public.

Mr Matsuura, in his opening address, stressed that "UNESCO's vocation is to be a future-oriented institution" and "is therefore essentially invested with the mission of promoting intellectual debate geared to prevention. Its forward-looking role, thus, determines the relevance and validity of its action". With this in mind, he praised the "great success" of the 21st Century Talks, an anthology of which will be published on May 19 by UNESCO and Editions du Seuil under the title: Les Clés du XXIe siècle.

In his introduction to the debate, the Director of UNESCO's Analysis and Forecasting Office, Jérôme Bindé, raised the question: Is the human soul under threat? He noted that over the last 20 or 30 years psychoanalysts have observed a staggering trend in "the decline or disappearance of interiority, of psychic life, of the symbolic space of subjects and their capacity to produce representations of conflict for both inner and outer use". He added that there are new patients, more and more cases of depression, as well as psychosomatic illness, narcissistic wounds, borderline states, acting out and image-addiction-related disorders. "Such conflict, not finding a place in language, articulates itself on the skin or body, or through physical violence," he observed.

Given society's modern crises, Julia Kristeva raised three main questions concerning the "discontents" of civilisation and the increasing number of "sicknesses of the soul". First question: pressured by stress and impatient to earn and spend as well as for pleasure and death, have our contemporaries lost their soul? Or is it that modern life tends to eradicate the soul or put it in jeopardy? The psychoanalyst would say "you are only truly living if you have a psychic existence". Second question: confronted with reduced psychic space can we still rebel? Julia Kristeva stressed that modern culture can no longer be founded on what is forbidden. This, while never removed, is negotiated and made supple when confronted with revolt, the decline of authority and the "crisis of values". The problem, though, goes deeper and concerns our psychic existence: what the psychoanalyst suggests is rebuilding the soul "not as a fortress but as a process of constant questioning" which maintains a "personal rebellion". Third question: why is psychoanalysis atheist? Because, Julia Kristeva stressed, it makes us discover the radical split in all human beings that makes absolutism impossible, and makes us discover our nature of being as one that has been "thrown into the world", into a universe which cannot be stable; though at the same time, the psychoanalyst, in awakening the potential for revolt, leads the patient to rebuilding ties within a creative experience.

Denise Bombardier notably emphasised the role of pathologies of time at the dawn of the 21st century and on the "sicknesses of the soul" these cause in societies dominated by the media, which continually shatter time. She also evoked the compression of time in industrial societies, as much in love as in death, and in the disappearance of waiting and consequent new symptoms, such as the "craze for the mobile phone", the decline in private life and "rites of passage". She concluded that the incidence of time-related pathologies as, for example, the increase in "channel-hopping", have had serious impact on the transmission of knowledge in schools and on relationships with others.

Adalberto Barreto cited his practical experience of working in Brazil's shantytowns, favelas, where an uprooted population of "souls in pain" live on subsistence level. He stressed that "sicknesses of the soul" in this marginalised population are made worse by feelings of abandonment, insecurity and loss of self-esteem. "The most dramatic thing in the shantytown is not the apparent and visible misery but the invisible and interiorised misery of the slum-dweller, the favelado", which plunges him into a feeling of helplessness and leads him to "self-boycott". Faced with these serious forms of social and psychic marginalisation, the community therapy Professor Barreto has developed throughout Brazil aims to promote collective programmes of awareness-raising and self-esteem within the group, using techniques adapted to local cultures, and to create places that can help in rebuilding caring and social ties in a participatory way. "Restoring the self-esteem of those excluded is the foundation stone in the fight against sicknesses of the soul in the 21st century," concluded Mr Barreto, who is founder of the Movement for the Integration of Community Mental Health which, with the help of bodies associated with Brazil's National Bishop's Conference, has already trained nearly 600 community leaders active in Brazil's shantytowns.

The next 21st Century Talks will take place at Headquarters on May 5th and will discuss the question: "What is the future of the universe?". The panel will be made up of three leading astrophysicists: Trinh Xuan Thuan, the author of La Mélodie secrète; André Brahic, author of Enfants du Soleil; and Nicolas Prantzos, author of Voyages dans le futur and Sommes-nous seuls dans l'univers?