Un exemple singulier d'adaptation à l'anxiété d'anticipation : les rituels conjuratoires dans la pratique de la corrida

The man who runs his life with killing bulls in the strictly way of practising bull fighting, in facing real death, mythic animal's one, has to confront himself with his own anxiety which deeply oversteps the bounds of his own death. Studies about the semiology of anxiety made from testimonies or accounts by “matadores”, in a litteral sense by “killers”, make obvious the preponderant use of obsessional defences that are borrowed from the obsessional register (superstitions, conjuring rituals). Beyond the anxiety felt by any artist or public intervenant which could be assimilated with stage-fright, there come some more specific and rationalized anxieties such at the fear of being wounded or of failing which is lived with affects of shame and also with some more unconscious anxiety: this “inner bull” is a still more threatening and more redoutable anxiety than the one that will happen in the ring and will be used as a projection shield against the inner anxiety. The specificity of bullfight could explain in a large way the passions it always breeds as well from its opposites as from the upholders of this using.