Creolization and Ternderness

The clinical gaze is by nature multilingual: it observes systems of belief, embedded habits, life histories, unexpected events, linguistic acts, and the particular truths that compose every reality. Drawing on Coordinated Management of Meaning (Pearce, 1993/2013), we train students to adopt a pluralized perspective of understanding.

To creolize in therapy means to transform a blocked pathological system into a system capable of becoming other than itself.

Clinical work requires both intensity and horizontality. Intensity emerges where the therapeutic conversation welcomes respect and curiosity; meaning arises from the patient's significations, while the therapist introduces perturbations rather than instructions. Each session thus becomes a new experience of creolization.

Therapeutic hybridization occurs when the context takes on the quality of tenderness. As Shakespeare writes, "mercy seasons justice." The role of the therapist—physician or psychologist—is to produce tenderness through hospitality, distinguishing themselves from any judging function. Hospitality includes the defense of rights and inclusion, but also assistance to those who enact violence and cruelty. In prisons, the therapist listens to individuals with antisocial disorders, narcissistic or malignant hysterical structures, sadistic tendencies, and mortifying forms of enjoyment, transforming the fascination with evil into a fascination with good.

For this to happen, no miracles are needed — often dangerous ones — but rather the awareness that good is built in the details, in the "minute particulars," as William Blake writes. Healing, in an absolute sense, may be unattainable; what does exist are singular transformations generated through tender relationship and clinical encounter — transformations that can make a difference.