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Malcolm's father was what many whites and blacks called an "uppity" preacher back in Africa. At the age when a child needs a parent's voice and touch to encourage autonomy and tolerate personal will, Malcolm's father was killed. The home lasted only a short time in the face of destitution and the destructive "gifts" of social assistance which undermined the mother's pride and accelerated her psychosis. Although Malcolm bore the brunt of many family frustrations, he managed to maintain some distance from the tension and aggression, and he learned early on that shouting in protest (an autonomous act) could accomplish things. (1). He does not seem to suffer from lack of self-esteem, as is the case with Luther, who is overly disciplined. In fact, after his mother entered the mental hospital and Malcolm was sent to a reformatory, he felt confident in his abilities to sniff out a situation and outwit others. In Death at an Early Age, Kozol points out that autonomy is often not the black child's stumbling block. Unlike the white middle-class child, he suffers from being deprived of normal juvenile dependency.

In a reformatory, at the age of 13, Malcolm is indeed the brightest student in the class, the "pink poodle" prize. However, at this particularly inopportune moment, a white professor figuratively castrated him, tainted him with racial guilt, and prevented him from cultivating his dreams of future roles. Malcolm made the mistake of confiding to Mr. Ostrowski that he wanted to become a lawyer. MO replied that Malcolm should "be realistic" and consider carpentry. In this way, the outside world confirmed Malcolm's deepest latent fears. Young Malcolm realized that his dreams - which had sustained and preserved him until now - could not penetrate the existing world. With heavy racial and moral overtones, he writes: “It was then that I began to change – inside.” (1)

I feel that up until this age of initiative against guilt, Malcolm has escaped remarkably unscathed. The following ages, however, would provide the most tortuous tests of all. After college, Malcolm moves to Boston, then Harlem, and, consistent with the guilt and submerged rage he must have felt, he seeks to feel like he belongs. But in his naivety as a local child, he defined his success by symbols lent to the black world by the white world. The most glorified avenue of learning available to the young black person encountering the tools and techniques of his generation was the “scam.” Malcolm indulged in scams in a masterly way - women, drugs; “everything in the world [was] a scam” to him. In his quest, he engaged in the most degrading initiation that a black person in search of fulfillment can indulge in: he burned his flesh and hair with lye, to wear this conk so white, and put on zoot-suits bought on credit, in order to integrate into an ironically anti-Black, but “cool” world. Addicted to cocaine, he flees the black maid Laura and commits an armed robbery with the white "goddess" Sophia. He is sentenced to ten years in prison, with the fatalistic feeling that his future has been determined by his "skin color rather than his value as an apprentice". But any rage he might have had was painfully etched in helplessness and ignorance.

The period between anticipation of worldly roles and their selection is called a moratorium. At that moment the great man is like a patient - sick without significant cause, without faith or direction, but too full of energy to submit to a negative identity or commitment to what one is. not. And Luther's mastery of silence in the monastery also has its counterpart in Malcolm, because during his first years in prison he silently observed, listened and learned his own opinions in a terrible limbo.

A man like Luther or Malcolm (6) It is when Ella and Reginald sow the first seeds of Islam and faith in Malcolm's hardened mind that he acquires the strength to master the tools of his time: literacy and 'public speaking. Relentlessly, compulsively, insatiably, he studied, learning to read, write and debate with exceptional dexterity. His lessons are his medicine, his work his medicine. Malcolm admits he is beginning to embrace Islam:

            I was going through the most difficult thing and

          the most difficult thing, but also the greatest for any human being: accepting what is already in you and around you.

            Accept what is already in you and around you.

The acceptance initiated by Malcolm's work was the recognition of a personal and social history, exaggerated neither in its understanding of achievement nor in that of failure, in the context of the existing world. While Malcolm could have returned to a mute or unethical existence, the very dangers he had sensed forced him to "mobilize his capacities to see and to speak, to dream and plan, to conceive and to build in a new way.

Confident in his commitment, he begins to realize his destiny in terms of black brotherhood and white enemy. Erikson mentions John Henry, who has enormous appetites and does not commit to a role that cannot satisfy him. Malcolm therefore learned that his destiny, or that of any successful black man, is not to be doomed to an “identity predetermined by the stigmata of his birth”. For the black man to flourish, he must break away from the confines of the white establishment ghetto and be true to his highest human aspirations. He recognized the devil incarnate in the white man, who rules a world full of spiritual diseases and moral indulgence, who challenges and defiles all that is black and virtuous. Emerging from his arduous identity crisis, Malcolm discovered a temporarily consoling world of black and white; but he had, through self-analysis, struggled so much with his personal ghosts and demons that the lines of his historical perspective may later soften into a revelatory humanitarianism.

Just as his new identity offered him a new faith – signifying both devotion and repudiation – it gave him the words to reach out to his fellow blacks suffering from the debasement of a caste-bound culture. He gave the suffering of the black man a significant form that he himself imposed, through various religious rigors and abstinences. Through these sacrifices, he encouraged a self-regenerating trust in Allah as a source of strength and empowerment for even the most desperate addict. For the black man to “stand up,” he told the story of black people, a glorious drama from which one can take racial pride. He proposed the Islamic definition of marriage, to give love its solidarity, mutuality and intimacy, as well as the value of daily industry, self-affirmation and revolution, if necessary, to convert the racial guilt of the black man in defiance of whites.

Not only did the great man's suffering sharpen his sensitivity to pain similar to that of his era, but it also encouraged the era's confidence in man. Just as Luther spoke of faith after emerging from the depths of religious doubt, Malcolm spoke of faith and activism after emerging from the depths of his own decadence and helplessness. A virtually "patient" society (8), which denigrates the dream of individual lives converging with the course of history, might well be moved when a man like Malcolm asserts: "Once he is motivated, no one can take charge more fully than the man who was at the bottom of the ladder. I consider myself the best example of this." (1).

It seems that the most poorly resolved age in young Malcolm and Martin has the most acute effect in the struggle of their identity crisis, and that it corresponds to the historical disposition of their times, as well as to its major spiritual and political conflict. Martin's development experienced the most critical delay in the transition from infancy to childhood, from faith to independence. The quest for personal faith and autonomous, internal individual union with a loyal Father can be seen as the central conflict of his identity crisis. Luther wrote:

I pondered night and day until I saw the connection between God's righteousness and the statement that God's righteousness is that righteousness whereby, by grace and pure mercy, God justifies us through faith. I then felt reborn. Likewise, Martin's Medieval Age had one foot in the dark ages of distrust and mysticism and another in the autonomous, anthropocentric Renaissance. And his particular society was ruthless in the cradle of a dissipated spirituality that prohibited any meaningful self-affirmation or rebirth, in order to satisfy the business of the Church.

I think Malcolm's development experienced the most critical obstacle in his transition from initiative to achieving a meaningful social role: during his con years. The quest for faith in the black man and his ability to use his strength industriously at all costs embodied the central conflict of his identity crisis. Likewise, its technological era (and ours) is marked by the trauma of "Who am I?", "What is my place in a society that is alienating or impoverished in roles?", "What can I do to bring quality and equality in the lives of men? (2) And Malcolm's particular society - black culture - was and is increasingly agitated by the chains of a white world which refuses to integrate the calendar of (black) organism in the structure of social institutions.(3) Erikson might view the black Muslim Malcolm, with his newly found identity, as a mere novice compared to the post-Mecca Malcolm, who articulated his racial concerns with so much art in a universal ethic. But I see the post-Mecca period as a second renaissance, occurring in the age of Malcolm where integrity, generativity, faith and the absorption of all history and of all men are the greatest. Malcolm may have been humiliated, but his individuality was not swamped by the system of Islam. It was from his chair as a black Muslim that the young great man began to make “an original contribution to a new emerging style of life”. (2).

It can be concluded that a great man's breakthrough is usually accompanied by suffering and conflict, as well as a surprisingly resilient will to overcome defeat - at any cost - in the service of personal fulfillment. The internal struggle is so important and so socially relevant that its resolution issues, through the tumult of an era, the defiant cry of new reverence. Erikson says that "if there is any chance, it is in tumultuous historical reality, at least ethically." I agree, and add that the true maintainers of the world are the loyal deviants who dare to extract an identity from the darkest mines of their time.

Is there training in the systemic approach for teachers to support cases of bullying at school? 

From February 2024, teachers, school professors and all those involved in the world of education (parents, psychologists, nurses, educators, association leaders, etc.) will be able to follow the new DU Strategic Systemic Approach for Education ( ASSED) set up by the University of Paris 8 and LACT. Delivered by specialists in the systemic approach in the education sector, this training allows you to acquire the tools of the systemic and strategic approach to solving psychological and relational problems. This approach is particularly effective in the fields of education and makes it possible to identify and stop the dysfunctional processes which often take place between the child and his environment (at school and/or at home), maintain or aggravate a situation that is often paralyzed within a rigid framework. It makes it possible to deal with problems such as school bullying, difficult situations with atypical children, to avoid dropping out of school and the onset of psychological disorders in the child but also in the accompanying person, who, faced with their inability to act, can lose confidence and sink into depression or burnout. This course addresses the management of conflict situations but also certain disorders such as attention disorders, DYS, hyper, ASD, ADHD, as well as disorders affecting teachers, depression, burnout, loss of self-confidence, etc.  

Who is the DU University Paris 8/Lact Strategic Systemic Approach to Education for?

This training is aimed at people wishing to strengthen and diversify their skills as stakeholders in the world of education (teachers, school leaders, parents of students, association leaders, sports association staff, school psychologists , guidance counselors, school mediators, doctors,

nurses, psychotherapists, educators, police officers, SPIP, justice assistants, child protection personnel, etc.).

Where to train in the systems approach to education

DU education with Paris 8 University

This training allows you to acquire the tools of the systemic and strategic approach which will allow the teacher or any support person to put the relationship at the heart of their support. A theoretical part on the fundamentals of the approach will be followed by practical sessions on specific teaching issues such as school bullying and difficult situations. Certain disorders are discussed such as attention disorders, “DYS” and “hyper”, as well as disorders affecting teachers, depression, burnout, loss of self-confidence, etc. The course is validated by a practical internship and collective and individual supervision. It will allow participants to discover the systemic and strategic approach, to identify dysfunctional relational processes and to block them to put the relationship at the heart of teaching.

Read also: 

• The indirect approach in schools: helping parents and teachers to help children
• the strategic systemic approach in the school environment
• "Authority and leadership": testimony from Etienne FARRELL, School Principal
• Harassment and strategic communication at school by Marie QUARTIER
• Dealing with resistance to change - THE CASE OF SCHOOL DIRECTORS by Claudette PORTELLI

Where to train in the systemic and strategic approach & hypnosis training

• Generalist systemic training
• DU in Relationship Clinic with the University of Paris 8
• Clinical Masters with specialization in psychopathology with Pr Nardone's CTS
• Online Ericksonian Hypnosis Training

Related article: 

• Hypnosis training and systemic therapy with Giorgio Nardone
• Hypnosis training: the basics
• online ericksonian hypnosis training
• Overcome fear and anxiety through hypnosis and self-hypnosis. Michele Ritterman.
• Hypnosis training: A hypnosis lesson with Milton Erickson
  
• Hypnosis training: the foundations of Ericksonian hypnosis, Interview with Michele Ritterman and Ph.D.By Michael Hoyt, Ph.D.
• Ritterman: human wickedness