Fernand Deligny

Fernand Deligny (born November 7, 1913 in Bergues (North), † September 18, 1996 in Monoblet , Canton Lasalle , Gard department) was a French social psychologist who worked in the field of psychiatry. He was a staunch opponent of the classic treatment and hospitalization of difficult to raise and autistic children. Since the early 1960s he lived with a group of autistic children far away from any institutions in the south of France, in the Cevennes . Because of his writings and films with which he accompanied his project, he is also known as an educator, educator, filmmaker, writer, artist, philosopher and poet of autism .

Life

Fernand Deligny is the son of Louise Laqueux and Camille Deligny. After his father's death during the First World War, Fernand lived in Bergerac, then near Lille. After graduating from high school with a focus on philosophy, he began the preparatory course ("khâgne") for the École normal supérieure (ENS). In the second year he dropped out of this course and attended seminars on psychology and philosophy at the university.

At this time (1934) he discovered the Armentières asylum . He did his military service and in 1936 became a primary school teacher in Paris. In 1938 he married Jo Saleil, the daughter of a teacher. He became a special education teacher in the Armentières psychiatric hospital. In 1939/1940 he was drafted into the French army. He said that during the "Exodus" (the escape from the Germans) in May-June 1940, some chronic mentally ill people left the hospital and were only found again after the war, fully integrated into a normal life without any psychiatric care. That should shape his critical view of the institutions.

In 1943 he became a technical advisor to ARSEAA (Association régionale pour la sauvegarde de l'enfant, de l'adolescent et de l'adulte). He attended the opening of a delinquency center in Lille.

In 1946 he was appointed delegate of the department of Travail et Culture .

Thanks to Henri Wallon , he was appointed to his laboratory for child psychology in Paris in 1948. This is where the meetings for the founding of La Grande Cordée took place, an experimental organization for free treatment of adolescents. This center was headed by Henri Wallon and the children were given medical and psychological care by Louis Le Guillant.

Further development

As a former teacher, Deligny began working with so-called "problem children" (mentally handicapped or delinquent). At that time he wrote some books that are still of interest today: Graine de crapule , Les vagabonds efficaces . Influenced by the new pedagogies, especially by the ideas of Célestin Freinet , he advocated pedagogical methods because he wanted to confront the institutionalized methods and the children with the reality of life.

Since the 1960s he worked at the Clinique de La Borde , and from there he left for Monoblet in the Cevennes to live with young autistic people. In their vicinity he began to speak of lignes d'erre (perhaps misleadingly translated as “random lines”, which represent the regular paths of children in their living space) and of chevêtres (junctions at which the paths of autistic children intersect). These random lines and junctions were drawn on “maps” reminiscent of works of modern art. In 1973 he shot the film Ce gamin, là with Renault Victor , which tells of life together with "Janmari", an autistic person who lived with him. This film shows the environment and the living conditions under which an alternative and libertarian approach to dealing with autistic children is conceivable.

It was certainly no coincidence that Deligny went to the Cevennes , at that time one of the poorest regions in France, where the rebellious spirit of the Albigensians and Cathars can still be felt. The attempts of earlier French kings to set up a sericulture there had failed miserably and led to the uprisings of the camisards . What remained were many half-ruined houses in which Deligny and his group could find a (or rather no) roof over their heads.

He mainly worked with the center created by Maud Mannoni in Bonneuil-sur-Marne . A very clear description of life with autistic children can be found in a book by his long-time colleague Jacques Lin. An informative article by Helmut Höge with the title "Antipsychiatry with audience" is available for this book .

Deligny is the author of many books and his project has been the subject of several films. In particular, Le Moindre Geste , which he shot with Josée Manenti, and Ce gamin, là show that the community life that he proposes to autistic children enables them to live better. Symptoms such as scratching your own blood or banging your head against the wall are becoming increasingly rare.

Fernand Deligny's work was also read very carefully outside the educational-psychiatric milieu, especially by Gilles Deleuze .

Fernand Deligny, poet and ethnologist

Deligny saw himself less as a social worker, but more as a poet and ethnologist. His texts are mostly written as aphorisms and are therefore reminiscent of certain writings by Nietzsche . When Deligny speaks of autistic people on a theoretical level, he is referring to cases in which those affected neither speak nor seem to understand language, whose agir (act) differs from the fair (do) ​​we speak. In doing so, he gives Ludwig Wittgenstein's verdict - what one cannot talk about, one must be silent about it - a different interpretation. Are there areas beyond language to which autistic people, like artists, have access? The 1970s, in which Deligny's most important texts were written, was the heyday of structuralism and of text-critical groups like Tel Quel , which influenced Deligny. But perhaps more important to him were the considerations of Jacques Lacan and the insights of ethnologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Clastres .

After May '68, when large parts of the protest movement organized themselves in rural communes and a glowing craze for Occitania broke out, Deligny's project became something of an alternative tourist destination (which did not always bring joy). After all, the increasing popularity of the project meant that the English rock band Pink Floyd , for example , supported it financially.

Fonts

• Pavilion 3 (1944), Éditions de l'Opéra
• Graine de crapule - Conseils aux éducateurs qui voudraient la cultiver (1945), Éditions Victor Michon
• Puissants personnages (1946), Éditions Victor Michon
• Les Vagabonds efficaces et autres textes (1947), Éditions Dunod
• Les Enfants ont des Oreilles (1949), Éditions du Chardon Rouge
• Adrien Lomme. Roman (1958), Gallimard
• A comme asile suivi de Nous et l'innocent (1975), Editions Dunod
• Les Enfants ont des oreilles (1976), Maspero
• Ces enfants autistes dont le projet nous échappe , Eres
• Les Enfants et le silence , Galilée
• Les détours de l'agir ou le moindre geste (1979), Hachette
• Singulière ethnicity: nature et pouvoir et natüre du pouvoir (1980), Hachette
• Essi et copeaux (2005), Le mot et le reste
• Lointain prochain ou Les deux mémoires , éditions Fario, Paris, 2012
• Oeuvres , ed. by Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, Éditions L'Arachnéen, Paris 2007 [1845 p.]
• L'Arachnéen et autres textes , Éditions L'Arachnéen, Paris 2008

German editions

• A raft in the mountains , Merve Verlag, Berlin 1980
• Provocateurs of happiness , Basis Verlag, Berlin 1984
• Random lines. Chronicle of an attempt , Verlag Peter Engstler, Ostheim / Rhön 2002
• Letters to a social worker , Verlag Peter Engstler, Ostheim / Rhön 2008
• Approaches to the picture , Verlag Peter Engstler, Ostheim / Rhön 2011
• A unique ethnic group. Nature and power and the power of nature , Verlag Peter Engstler, Ostheim / Rhön 2013
• Traces of being and shadow walls: Pest and Quecke , Verlag Peter Engstler, Ostheim / Rhön 2014
• The detours of action or the smallest gesture , Verlag Peter Engstler, Ostheim / Rhön 2016

Movies

Director:

• Le moindre geste - Directed by Josée Manenti and Jean-Pierre Daniel (1962–1971), Éditions Montparnasse

With Fernand Deligny:

• Ce gamin là - Director: Renaud Victor (1975), Éditions Montparnasse
• Fernand Deligny, à propos d'un film à faire - Director: Renaud Victor (1989), Éditions Montparnasse

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sandra Alvarez de Toledo: Pedagigique poétique de Fernand Deligny . In Pensée , Vol. 71, No. 71, 2001, p. 245.
2. ↑ Fernand Deligny: Les vagabonds efficaces , p. 52.
3. ↑ Olivier Bitoun: Le cinéma de Fernand Deligny . French. Online on dvdclassik.com February 21, 2008.
4. ↑ Jacques Lin: Life with the raft in the society of autistic children , Verlag Peter Engstler, Ostheim / Rhön 2004.
5. ^ Helmut Höge: Antipsychiatry with spectators . In: taz of July 17, 2004.
6. ↑ Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Tausend Plateaus , Merve Verlag, Berlin 1992, p. 425.
7. ↑ Jacques Lin, Life with the Raft , p. 104.