The Christian psychiatrist Paul Tournier (1898-1986) was a top five author of importance in my home. As a child, I never made it through any of his books, but the title of one forever haunted me — A Place for You.
The Swiss physician who founded what he called the medicine of the person, built a small but coherent body of theory, and A Place for You (English translation 1968) contains its center. The book haunts for a reason. Tournier lost his father at two months and his mother at six. He wrote for fifty years about what it is to lack a place, and the whole apparatus grows from that wound.
The Paul Tournier frame has four working parts.
First, place. Tournier argues that every person needs a place before he can become a person: a room, a family, a pew, a country, a profession, a body. Place is not achieved. It is granted, usually by other persons, and the man who never received one carries a deprivation that no later success repairs. This runs against the grain of Pierre Bourdieu’s work, where position is fought for and held with capital. For Tournier, place precedes competition. You cannot enter the field without it.
Second, the two movements. Tournier reads the Bible as counseling both attachment and detachment: God gives Israel a land, and God tells Abraham to leave his father’s house. The order is everything. A man must possess a place before he can renounce it. Preaching self-denial to a man who never had a place is cruelty dressed as piety, because you cannot give up what you never held. Support first, then surrender. This gives you a sharp diagnostic for religious figures, converts, exiles, and anyone whose biography turns on a departure: did he leave from a place, or did he flee placelessness? The two look alike from outside and produce different men.
Third, the person and the personage, from The Meaning of Persons (1957). The personage is the mask, the role, the constructed public self. The person appears only in dialogue, in moments of contact with another. Every man is both, and the gap between them is the site of analysis. This overlaps with Becker and Goffman but with a different valence: Tournier does not treat the mask as heroism against death, he treats it as a defense that dialogue can lower.
Fourth, the strong and the weak, from his 1948 book of that title. Tournier holds that all men are weak and differ only in their reactions. Strong reactions (domination, achievement, aggression, moralism) and weak reactions (withdrawal, illness, compliance) cover the same underlying fragility. The analyst asks: what weakness does this strong reaction conceal, and what did it cost?
Applied as a single frame, the questions become: Where did this man receive his first place, and who granted it? What was withheld? When he left, did he leave from possession or from want? Where does the personage split from the person, and before whom does the person appear, if anywhere? What place does he now build, offer, or deny to others?
My nationalism scholars need this frame: Anderson, Smith, Gellner, and Connor theorize the nation, and Tournier lets you ask what the nation is as a place, and what kind of man theorizes belonging from the outside. My populists need this frame. Bardella, Le Pen, Zemmour, and Farage sell place-restoration to voters who feel place-deprived, and Tournier gives you a vocabulary for that promise. He takes the hunger for place as a legitimate human need rather than a pathology, which lets you see populist voters without contempt while still asking whether the men selling the cure ever intend to deliver it.
Two cautions. Tournier is a clinician and essayist, not a systematic theorist. His books proceed by case and anecdote. Pastoral counseling cites him; sociology does not. So a Tournier essay adds warmth and a register of need that my other frames lack, and it will land with religious readers and general readers more than with academic gatekeepers. Second, his Christianity is his home. The grant of place is, for him, God’s grace.
On Aug. 27, 2020, I wrote: I just thought of a four-word phrase that sums up my approach to politics, sociology, recovery, self-help, spirituality, God and religion: “A place for you.”
We deserve a place to feel at home. Government policies should promote that. People should have freedom of association.
Spirituality, recovery, and self-help boil down to adrenaline management. People who feel at home usually can manage their adrenaline surges. Feeling at home calms down your central nervous system so you are less likely to act out.
A key part of feeling at home is that you know what the rules are.
Stanford University’s Fred Luskin says most Americans spend most of their waking hours trying to feel safe. So solutions to this problem that promote a feeling of safety are approaches to life that works. One way to tackle the problem of anxiety is to shut off things that can make us feel unsafe — such as our email and our phones and TV news. Another great way to feel safer in the world is to live in reality. When we accept that we can’t change the traffic around us, we live in reality. When we accept that we can’t change other people, we live in reality. When we reflect on how our selfishness has hurt everybody in our life, we live in reality. When we have an accurate sense of our bank account, our bills, and our earning, we live in reality. When we have at least three months of prudent reserve, we live in reality. When we are aware of how we spend our time, we live in reality. When we glide through life without frequent humiliation and intense conflict, we are in reality.
Forgiveness, happiness and health are largely about relaxing one’s defenses, notes Luskin. Generosity only comes from people who feel safe. To phrase this differently, people who feel safe tend to be generous. Alternatively, people who don’t feel safe are not generous.
People prefer to help people like themselves.
Pamela Moniz, the owner of a mattress store in #Kenosha that was burned to the ground, breaks down in tears telling @marthamaccallum about her 71-year-old employee who was seriously injured by rioters in a now viral video while defending the store.
"He did that for me." pic.twitter.com/wxCv9hDW4G
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 27, 2020
