by John English
In many dreams, his father was strikingly present and was regarded fondly and rather sweetly, such as when “Papa, on his return from Europe, ordered a ‘frou-frou’ cake, but a ‘Canadien’ brought him a half ‘tarte’ with whipped cream.” In one session of free association with the doctor, he spoke of “great admiration” for his father but of impatience with certain of his mother’s characteristics. His brother, Tip, and sister, Suzette, appear often in the dreams, without particular comments, but Parcheminey told Trudeau, who agreed, that he envied their more settled state, especially the fact they were married. Throughout the sessions, Trudeau talked about his fear of choice and the conflict between his wishes to tour the world and to have a “place.” He saw a contention between his desire to be independent, which sometimes led to aggressiveness, and the contrary quality of caring about what other people think. Parcheminey told him it was a response to his timidity—a normal reaction when growing up.
On another occasion Trudeau described a dream in which he was walking along a beach with his mother when her brother Gordon appeared. Trudeau left them and went off with a young woman who was somewhat common and who told him he was good for nothing except skiing—a comment that pleased him. He then took a taxi, but the driver annoyed him by speaking English. He refused to pay him because he had not put on the meter. He concluded that this dream showed his dependency towards familial duty, his possessiveness towards money, and his sense of inferiority, which he manifested in his reaction to the skiing comment and his aggressiveness with the driver. In psychiatric terms, he wrote: “It is the combination of timidity and aggressiveness. I was not able to reveal myself openly in the genital phase because of restrictions. We saw, therefore, a regression towards the preceding phase, the anal phase. This frustration causes timidity and aggressiveness. [I show] possessiveness in the case of some things (money, adventures, and reputation, etc.) And these compensate for a genital phase that had not been achieved.” When Parcheminey heard this interpretation, he warned Trudeau not to make too much of his own analysis and to avoid so much self-criticism—surely good advice.
When Trudeau talked about the development of his religious convictions, Parcheminey explained that they had become a restraint made even stronger by the sense of duty instilled during his childhood. He said that he had not found any particular castration complex in Trudeau which had been traumatizing, though there was “a certain blockage at the doorstep to virility” that had created compensation mechanisms through regression. In one of Trudeau’s early dreams he leaves his friends to go in a car that has some beautiful women as passengers; another dream has him at a church, dressed in a bathing suit; and yet another has him finding a crucifix on a table and removing the linen that covers it. The psychiatrist explained that these dreams revealed how his religion conflicted with his “élan vital” and how he sublimated his strong sexual desires through his religious and intellectual activities as well as through sports and adventures. In the story of the cross, Parcheminey found a tendency to “asexuer le Christ.” The genitals in these dreams are “dirty, unacceptable things.”
Trudeau’s mind whirled with these different comments. At that moment, he received a letter from Thérèse, who was at a retreat and fasting for Lent. Psychoanalysis, she told him, helps an individual to understand the self but not to change the self.112 Pierre appeared to agree: after his many hesitations on the value of Thérèse’s own psychoanalysis, he now seemed to develop a belief that the process could be helpful in fathoming himself.
Despite the costs in money and time, Trudeau persisted in his frequent trips to the psychiatric couch, where, his notes indicate, he hoped to gain insight into his timidity, aggressiveness, and sexuality. Parcheminey and Trudeau talked about homosexuality (which the psychiatrist said was curable, unlike schizophrenia), and he assured Trudeau that his absence of sexual intercourse with women did not mean that he had homosexual tendencies. He agreed with Trudeau, to use Freudian terms, that he often “regressed” to the anal phase, with its characteristic timidity, possessiveness, and occasional aggressiveness. Still, in Parcheminey’s view, Trudeau’s sexuality, although he remained a virgin at twenty-seven, was “normal.” He had sublimated his strong sexual drive successfully because he was a believing Catholic, and marriage therefore had a special importance for him. In his own observations, Trudeau noted that abstinence and marital fidelity were much less common in France than in Quebec, even among believers.113
After a break at Easter, where patient and doctor agreed that Trudeau had no neurosis but that the sessions were nonetheless helpful, he returned for the final set that began in mid-May and ended on June 14, just before he left France. On his return, Trudeau said he wanted to focus on career and personal development, and both Parcheminey and Trudeau agreed that controlling his aggressiveness and impetuosity were important in that respect. They were, in the doctor’s view, perhaps the result of his timidity and his lack of “visibility.” The psychiatrist reassured him, after further discussion of a series of dreams, that there were mechanisms to cope: in Trudeau’s case, marriage. “One or two years of married life, where the vital spirits would be able to find expression, where your virility would find its expression in the responsibility of the marital home, the contact with feminine softness, and the satisfaction of your sexual appetite.”
After this discussion, the meetings continued for two more weeks, with marriage a central topic. Trudeau had a dream where a friend described a marriage gone bad, and another where his father confided in him how he had proposed to his mother. Parcheminey told Trudeau that it was probably true that his school and the strong moral authority of his home and his father were barriers to an “affirmation of self,” but, step by step, adolescence and adulthood would lead to the solution of his problem, especially when he finally had intercourse within marriage. And so, to end the sense of inferiority and to achieve his desired virility, he must become “a man with a wife.” The alternative was sublimation of his sexuality.
Parcheminey advised Trudeau that he considered the analysis ended. “One or two years after marriage, all should go well,” he said.114
It would not be so easy.
* The translation of this concluding sentence is by Professor Ramsay Cook. In the famous translation in Border Spears, ed., Wilderness in Canada (Toronto: Clarke Irwin, 1970), reprinted in Gérard Pelletier, ed., Against the Current: Selected Writings, 1939–1996 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996), 12, the nationalism vanishes: “I know a man whose school could never teach him patriotism, but who acquired the virtue when he felt in his bones the vastness of his land and the greatness of its founders.” Professors Ramsay and Eleanor Cook had translated the original French for the Spears book, but when it was published, “nationalism” became “patriotism” and the “patrie” vanished. The Prime Minister’s Office made the change, reflecting the Trudeau of the seventies, not of the fifties. Trudeau told Cook that he was the “man” who had not learned “nationalism” in school. Thanks to Ramsay Cook for this fascinating information.
* On one occasion Trudeau took issue with Carl Friedrich on a question of philosophical definition. Friedrich apparently dismissed his comments, but then asked to see him and apologized for his brusqueness. Trudeau, as he told Thérèse, appreciated the gesture. Trudeau to Thérèse Gouin, Feb. 14, 1946, TP, vol. 48, file 17.
* Trudeau was deeply troubled by another book, The Day of Reckoning (New York: Knopf, 1943), by Max Radin, a law professor, who had argued for international war-crimes courts. “Far from realizing its goal of making the trials for war criminals seem justified,” Trudeau argued, “it raises a great many doubts—if not on humane grounds—surely on legal ones. I think it certain that if the (hypothetical) accusation was of an individual crime-murder-the trial should have been before ordinary tribunals of the state where the crime was committed. Before an international court, you can only try international crimes, e.g., who caused the war? But such a question can only be answered by history. The cou
rt’s refusal of trial before German courts on grounds that it would take too much time is surely spurious.” Trudeau continued to hold these views as prime minister when he argued against “correcting” history by compensating Japanese Canadians and in favour of trials of war criminals in Canadian courts. TP, vol. 7, file 21.
* The remarkable collection of letters between Thérèse Gouin and Pierre Trudeau is an archival treasure that reveals brilliantly two extraordinary young people as they fall in love and debate their times, dreams, and future. When their relationship ended, Thérèse returned his letters to Pierre, and he kept them in his personal archive. Madame Gouin Décarie did not expect that these letters would become available to any researcher during her lifetime. Pierre promised her they would not when they met during the 1970s. At that time he told her he had recently re-read the letters, and his comments about the war in his memoirs suggest that he also read them again in the early 1990s.
When the Trudeau private archive was transferred to Library and Archives Canada, the Gouin-Trudeau correspondence formed part of the donation. Because I had full access to the papers, I was able to consult the correspondence. I immediately recognized that, for a Trudeau biographer, it was the most significant portion of the entire archive. Moreover, Madame Gouin Décarie was one of the two or three most important influences on the young Trudeau. When I met with her to discuss these letters and her relationship with Trudeau, she stated that she never expected that the letters would be read by anyone except Trudeau before her death. She had always refused to speak about her relationship with Pierre except with her husband, who admired Pierre. She said her reticence was, in part, a reflection of the agreement she had made with Pierre years before.
Once she became aware that her letters were in Library and Archives Canada, she travelled to Ottawa to read them. She wants them to remain private, but she recognizes the great significance of the correspondence for a biographer and has graciously allowed me to use the information I found in them. Her extraordinary generosity and warmth became evident as soon as I met her, and I immediately grasped why Pierre had become enthralled with this highly intelligent and sensitive woman. She and her husband, the distinguished philosopher Vianney Décarie, spoke freely of their enduring affection for “Pierre.” They laughed easily about his pranks, complexity, and zest for experience. Of course, the “break-up” between Thérèse and Pierre created initial distance, but, eventually, both Thérèse and Pierre came to recognize that her decision in 1947 was correct, even though they retained deep affection for each other. When the Gouin-Trudeau correspondence does become public, readers will understand well why they did.
* I deliberately chose not to read these notes in full until I reached this point in my story of Trudeau’s life, fearing they would influence the earlier chapters and sharing, I admit, some of Trudeau’s doubts about overdependence on Freudian psychoanalysis for understanding the formation of identity. Once I did read them, I decided that the notes have great value, particularly because they confirm much of what Trudeau’s teachers, school friends, and some scholars have surmised about him. But they also reveal subtle and even major amendments to the standard version of Trudeau presented in his own memoirs and in other studies of him. Still, there are problems with the document.
CHAPTER 4
COMING HOME
During the winter months, Pierre and Thérèse had begun to consider spending their lives together. Senator Léon-Mercier Gouin, Thérèse’s father, had even raised the question of a possible journalistic career for Trudeau in discussion with some publishers; and, in early March, Thérèse overcame her timidity in the presence of Grace Trudeau and attended a concert with her.1 It appeared that, in Parcheminey’s parting words, all would work out. And, sometimes, it seemed it would.
Thérèse finished her thesis, graduating summa cum laude and winning the major prize. Pierre rejected Gérard Pelletier’s tempting invitation to lead a Harvard summer school in Salzburg and instead made plans for the summer with Thérèse in Quebec.2 Yet jealousies stirred in Pierre, and doubts arose with Thérèse. Pierre went to dances in Paris; Thérèse, to concerts in Montreal. He yearned for her presence, but there were lapses in the letters and too many abject apologies. Although he complained about Thérèse’s many friends and what he termed her silences, his own life was filled with parties, dances, and some other women in the spring of 1947. “If I wanted to make you jealous,” he wrote to her in March, “I would tell you of a certain American or of Sylvia,* the daughter of the English writer [J.B.] Priestley.”3
Grace Trudeau met up with Pierre in Paris in April, and mother and son toured the French Riviera together, sometimes on his Harley-Davidson, with the grande dame of Outremont riding behind her daredevil son. They saw the Ballets russes at the Casino de Monaco during the Easter break. She remained in France until June 6, only a few days before Pierre himself embarked for Canada.4
In Montreal’s dreary spring, Thérèse dreamed that she, too, was in Paris, walking with Pierre along the Champs Élysées in the night, guided by the light of the fountains and the monuments while the fragrance of spring blossoms lingered in the air. As their hands softly embraced, she turned towards him, “his clear profile lost in the stars.” She told him that she loved him and, she whispered, “I believe that you, too, are stepping towards love.” In this letter, written shortly after Easter, she thanked Pierre for the chocolate rabbit he had sent but even more for his “love letter” and, above all, for his “great love.”5 On May 21 he told her of the romantic hotel where he dwelt and added: “If you would be my mistress, we would share the room together beneath the garret, between the dusty walls. The bed is low and rough, but your arms would be soft and your mouth welcoming … Every morning we would find a lost corner of Notre Dame and ask for pardon.”6 His desires were clear.
Yet tensions abounded. In his sessions with Parcheminey, Trudeau spoke surprisingly seldom about Thérèse but did have visions of other women, including Thérèse’s friend Andrée Desautels, or D.D., who herself came to Paris in the spring. The correspondence became intense yet less frequent, especially from Thérèse. He wrote to her on April 16, begging her to write more often, but before he sent the letter, he received one from her in which she yearned for his return, while promising to meet him wearing a hat of flowers when he arrived in July on the Empress of Canada. Soon they quarrelled again about psychoanalysis, and he protested strongly that she had revealed in Catholic confession that he was seeing a psychoanalyst: “a secret ought to remain a secret,” he bitterly complained.7 On June 1, 1947, the mood was different when he wrote to “My love Therese, my loveable child, my crazy wise virgin.” Still doubts persisted. He said that “D.D.” had spoken with difficulty about Thérèse. What did D.D.’s silences mean? Why should he learn about her academic success from others? A week later, after a bad dream about Thérèse and an odd dream about “D.D.,”8 he wrote an angry letter, addressing her ambivalently as “My foolish love.”9
My very difficult darling, I have to rebuke you for being so worried, for being so full of fear and anguish. I pray for you often, as you have asked; but God is not pleased with you. He has told me that you were somewhat idolatrous and that you now find yourself being punished for worshipping science above Him. You are playing God, and are becoming caught up in your own game. Beware that your game does not first trap you and, then, strangle you.
My love, continue with your analysis, pursue it seriously and honestly. But don’t take tragically that which should only be taken seriously. Believe me, Péguy’s advice is important for you. Out of love for me—if you still have any such love left—do not try to do too much good. Remember that the arrival of this letter precedes my own arrival by only three weeks; be tamer in those few days that remain. Your soul is peaceful; your spirit should be so as well. Do not fight, do not yell (I am using your own expressions). Do not inquire so persistently: you have not lost anything and you are not yet lost yourself. You are in my heart, I am holding your heart;
yet I cannot embrace your spirit; it should be a more calm and more loving one.
Believe me, out of love for me I ask you to believe me; can you do so out of love for me? Don’t take your analysis or [your analyst Father Noël] Mailloux so seriously in these few remaining days. You are so sad, and I hate myself because I am not there with you now. But give me only one half-moon, and I will be with you in Montreal. In the meantime, I urge you, at any cost, don’t finish the analysis. You will have all summer and all of next year, and your whole life to do what you wish. But right now, ask Mailloux for permission not to worry so much: perhaps you can go to Malbaie for a few days, and, then, maybe you will see my ship go by in the distance, past the whistling buoy.
Parch[eminey] often warns against needless fears, against unscientific inductions, and against generalizations and systematizations. One must be calm and patient. You shouldn’t believe in the bogeyman. Apparently, psychology students [like you] don’t heed such advice.
We must not destroy all that time has slowly created. Above all, we must not systematize. My friend, my friend, my love, I wish so dearly that you would not be so sad.
Pierre Me
P.S. I am leaving Paris on the 21st; you have time to send me a letter if you feel up to it.
Thérèse, I have just reread my letter, and I fear you will ignore all my words, instead choosing to portray me as ill-disposed towards psychoanalysis. You should not read my letter as such; I like your psychoanalysis, but I want you to do it better, in a way that is less caricatured. Either stop, or move forward “very cautiously.”
The letter arrived just before Pierre reached Montreal, not on the Empress of Canada to be greeted by Thérèse in her hat of flowers but by air from Paris at 6 a.m. on June 22. They met again nine days later, and their love affair began to end. Years later Thérèse reminisced that, in the spring of 1947, she had decided that “if she and Pierre were to marry, they would have endured marital misery of a monumental order, ‘un grand malheur.’”10 Perhaps. Certainly, if the two privileged and brilliant children of the francophone elite had wed, their lives together would have been very different from the lives they did in fact lead.11 Thérèse became an eminent psychologist.* Pierre would probably have become a university professor, a lawyer, or even a rich businessman. Again, perhaps.
