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Every week, we invite you to explore a striking theme from a great psychoanalyst to reveal its depth and richness. These lapidary, often provocative formulas open up new perspectives on the intricacies of the human psyche. By deciphering these quotes with rigor and pedagogy, we invite you on a fascinating journey to the heart of psychoanalytic thought to better understand our desires, anxieties and relationships with others. Ready to dive into the deep waters of the unconscious?
In his book Introduction to Psychoanalysis, S. Freud recounts the following story: “A child, anxious about being alone without his mother in the dark, calls out to his aunt in the next room: ‘Aunt, speak to me; I’m scared. —What good will that do you? Since you can’t see me?’ To which the child replies: ‘It’s brighter when someone speaks to me.’”
With this anecdote, Freud illustrates the early fears and anxieties in children, which often arise in situations of darkness and solitude. These anxieties are frequently linked to the fear of separation from attachment figures, particularly the mother, and are composed of fears of abandonment and the loss of a sense of security. They may also result from unconscious sexual or aggressive desires towards the parents, thus creating internal psychic conflicts.
Françoise Dolto explains that when plunged into darkness, the child loses sight of his mother and fears that she may disappear forever. Russian writer Nina Berberova expresses this poignantly in a poem: “A separation is like a cruel tale; it begins with a night and never ends.” The child’s world tilts into a terrifying solitude and uncertainty. Deprived of his usual landmarks, he is thrown into a limitless space where anything can happen. Shadows become vague threats, sounds become ominous signs. The dark is a chasm that swallows all comforting contours and leaves the child in nameless distress. In La cause des enfants, Dolto emphasizes the importance of listening to the child’s words to help him overcome his nighttime anxieties.
Melanie Klein sees in it the projection of infantile aggressive impulses: the shadow becomes populated with vengeful “bad objects.” The child fears that his own destructive fantasies may turn against him. Every dark corner hides a potential persecutor. The monsters lurking under the bed or in the closet embody the fear of being punished or attacked because of forbidden impulses. The night awakens unconscious guilt and turns it against the ego in the form of external threats.
To soothe these nighttime anxieties, Donald W. Winnicott recommends creating a “good enough” environment, a stable and secure setting that gives the child the courage to explore the darkness. By maintaining a caring presence despite the separation, the maternal figure helps the child gradually tame solitude. Her consistency and predictability introduce continuity into the nocturnal chaos. They allow the dark to slowly transform from something frightening into a more tolerable obscurity, even conducive to rest and imagination.
In adulthood, nighttime fears often turn into insomnia, diffuse anxieties and anxious ruminations. The dark becomes the preferred stage for our worries and darkest fantasies. Cut off from the comforting landmarks of the day, we find ourselves gripped by an internal agitation that resists clarity. Everyday troubles mix with the distant echoes of ancient distresses, concrete problems intertwine with unresolved psychic conflicts. The night wears the mask of all our intimate demons, from the fear of failure to the anxiety of death, including the dread of loss and separation.
There are times when adult nighttime fears take on a more dramatic form, bordering on psychotic experiences: night terrors, sleep paralysis, hypnagogic hallucinations—phenomena that give shape to anxiety and blur the boundaries between reality and nightmare. The person feels utterly defenseless in the face of a hostile and unpredictable environment, thrown back into the abyssal solitude of their earliest days. The feeling of imminent threat takes hold, and no words can offer reassurance. It is the night of psychosis that resurfaces, the nameless distress from before the advent of language.
In our daily lives, everyone has, at some point in adulthood, felt a tightening of anxiety when faced with an overwhelming darkness or sudden silence. A power outage, a night in the countryside, waking up in an unfamiliar room… A brief disruption of our sensory landmarks is enough to awaken archaic fears. We are thrown back to the childhood terror of waiting desperately in the dark for the voice that will soothe us. Our intimate relationship with darkness reveals much about our deepest fears and anxieties, the core of primitive anxiety that sleeps within each of us.
This is where the psychoanalytic cure steps in as a remedy for these psychic shadows. By inviting the patient to articulate their ghostly anxieties, by welcoming their internal world through attentive listening, the analyst plays the same role as the familiar voice that reassures the child in the dark. Like a mother calming her child with her mere presence, the analyst offers a stable container for overwhelming emotions. The transference repeats and elaborates the relationship with a protective figure from early life. The couch or chair becomes a paradoxical place where one can confront darkness in the presence of a benevolent other. Psychoanalytic interpretation uncovers hidden meanings, repressed memories, and unspoken fantasies. By connecting emotions to representations and restoring meaning and continuity where there were gaps and ruptures, the exchanged words gradually dispel the darkness of the repressed.
Thus, the patient slowly learns to tame their own unconscious, like a child who, with the help of a caring adult, gradually dares to face the dark. They discover that the monsters haunting their nights were merely projections of their own fears and desires. The terrifying images of the past transform into more familiar shadows, into ghosts with whom dialogue becomes possible. The psychic night loses its enigmatic opacity and becomes inhabitable. The strange within becomes more familiar, and the shadowy areas begin to clear. This is the essence of the psychoanalytic journey: to learn to inhabit one’s own darkness without fleeing from or drowning in it.
In an age consumed by darkness, where crises and uncertainties awaken our oldest fears, this trust in the calming power of words is more precious than ever. Against the temptation to retreat into a fetal position or act out impulsively, psychoanalysis continues to offer this space for elaboration through words, where the shared experience of language illuminates and connects our solitary nights. In an era of emotional deserts, addictions and violence, it remains a rare place where we take the time to articulate and hear intimate suffering, far from the deafening noise of the world. By reinventing in each session the words that illuminate the night, it tirelessly revives the promise once made by Freud’s aunt to her anxious nephew: the promise of an ever-possible encounter, at the heart of darkness, between the subject’s distress and the voice that soothes it.
In his book The Night Will Be Calm, Romain Gary conducts a fictional interview with himself. He asks himself the following question:
—What was happiness?
—It was when I was lying down, listening, waiting, and then I would hear the key in the lock, the door closing, the sound of packages she (his mother) opened in the kitchen. She would call out to see if I was there. I wouldn’t say anything, I’d smile, I’d wait, I was happy, it hummed inside… I remember it well.
—And to conclude?
—The night will be calm. (…)
