Le futur comme objet de désir

People today -especially, perhaps, in Europe-have the feeling that they are living in a world that is increasingly uncertain, unpredictable and threatening. As a result, they have a strong tendency to turn inwards and see themselves as victims. They reckon that they have little -and indeed less and less-room for manoeuvre in shaping a future that it is nevertheless their responsibility to build.
How can we shake off this feeling of “victimization” and restore a sense of desire as a creative force shaping the future? This is in essence what Chantal Lebrun is trying to explain here.
Using her experience as a psychoanalyst, Lebrun sets out to describe the perverse route by which we come to feel that we are slaves of the outside world and to look there for scapegoats for all our problems. She then tries to show how we can free ourselves from this view and instead revive a free and creative attitude, regaining the means to reshape the world and ourselves – in short, to take full responsibility once again for building a future that we have actively chosen.
Pointing out that, in periods of great upheaval, there are severe challenges to the primacy of reason, which must give way to the domain of the imagination, Chantal Lebrun stresses the need for us to change ourselves and to create for ourselves a vision of the future we actively want, and the desire to achieve it will then give us the strength to transform the impossible into the possible…