Naming and Claiming
This article first appeared in the Minden Times in July 2024.
Celine Dion, in Adrienne Arsenault’s interview with her after Celine bared her soul and exposed the fine points of her illness in the in-depth documentary that is hitting the air waves now, says that the 17 years between when she knew something weird and not good was happening to her body, and receiving the diagnosis of Stiff Body Syndrome, were the toughest ever. She finds having a diagnosis, even one that is terminal and predicts a ghastly end, a relief. She finds comfort in naming and claiming.
That resounded strongly with me with respect to my husband’s sojourn with dementia, which was reluctantly diagnosed by the medical world three years before his death, twelve years after I’d put a name to what was making him different than the man I’d married. Once I’d named the interloper that was changing our relationship, I could deal with the reality. This is also what Celine is saying about her diagnosis.
I think a lot about the politics of naming. Paulo Freire, my philosophical guru, held that what differentiated humans from other sentient beings was their ability to name their world in order to change it. That simple fact can be used for good or evil. For good: encouraging people to name their reality differently is basic to all talk therapy. For bad: much political rhetoric – Canada is broke, the enemy are animals, refugees are rapists, gays are pedophiles, abortionists are murderers – seeds hatred and division that undermines community at all levels of organization, right up to the exercise of democracy.
What differentiates good from evil in the name game? It’s intent. The purpose for which one chooses a name for something reflects a moral choice. For example, someone different than you moves in next door. They can be ‘those people’. Or they can be ‘my new neighbours’. Or we can reference Celine’s choice: her diagnosis could be named ‘a horrible death’ or, as she chose, ‘an opportunity to prepare my children for how they will lose me’. The naming of her diagnosis, its inevitability, provided a certainty that allowed her to set goals, in her case helping her children live with her illness, and herself managing the illness sufficiently well that she can return to singing and again enjoy the energy her fans give her. We could call that closure.
Or we could call it agency, asserting an ‘I’ that can ‘do’, an energy that can direct that which is within our control, and accept that which is not (and, to round out the trilogy, develop the wisdom to know the difference). Agency is the name Freire gave to the human capacity to name the world to change it. Naming changes how you see the world, which creates the choices you perceive as available, allows you to consider relative strengths and weaknesses, and this analysis informs, some would say determines, behaviour. There’s no return policy with behaviour: it changes the world.
Agency implies intent and therefore responsibility. That’s the claiming part of the deal. Intent doesn’t – unfortunately – mean you always get it right. It means you have the opportunity to learn from mistakes. When you assume responsibility for the choices you make, you examine them for learning.
I call this the Freire two-step, and believe that it describes sparsely but adequately how life proceeds. First you act, and then you reflect on your actions, and based on how your view of reality changes as a consequence of your analysis, you choose the next action that you think will get you from where you are to where you want to be. Step by step – act, reflect, act, reflect -- you plot your path, create your life, change your world, change the world in which you exist, both internally and externally. Simple but elegant: don’t dismiss it until you’ve let it roll around in your mind for awhile.
The two-step is also a handy way to diagnose and deal with stuckness, but unpacking that is for another time. The two-step is a dance: this is is about learning to dance through life.
For seventeen years, Celine Dion posed symptoms as problems to be solved. Her grit and creativity was amazingly effective and hugely admirable. When she got a name for what was taking over her body, while the treatment probably didn’t change very much (I haven’t seen the full documentary), her attitude did. She delivered herself up to the intimate invasion of a documentary about her current life with grace and humility, using her agency to continue to change the world.
