The French prison system: An allegory of our confinement

Little is known about the prison as an institution. Yet it constitutes on the social scale an astonishing mirror of our individual psyches. As projection of many of our representations on confinement, it speaks of our relationship to violence and evil, both in society and in each psyche. For realize this, we must bring out the representations and fantasies and update them in light of the reality of the prison system. Detention is an experience which marks the prisoners in their flesh and in their psyche. Beyond a simple detention, it violates their privacy, it attacks their autonomy and singularity. For what profit do we practice this institutional violence? This article questions two levels: how fears and the relationship to violence and confinement freezes collective functioning and how these collective objects shape our individual psychic structures and in particular the confinement of our shadow areas. How do we free ourselves from it?