British citizens, but coming from those places, and there was not one member of the British Society there. JCG: Then what would you say to someone wanting to train in psychoanalysis in France today?
ER: Well, in short, the profession in itself is not catastrophic. Forty years ago, it was the other way around. ER: France is the only country where all spheres of society were so influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis for years: the literary world, philosophers, psychiatrists, psychologists and educators.
It is the only country where Freud was considered a revolutionary and where his work is taught in the final year of high school. But in contrast to that, it is also a country where the hatred of Freud has always been pronounced.
JCG: In America today there are a lot of issues around insurance for mental health. Here in France you have socialized medicine, but I was wondering if that includes mental health, as well? More and more psychiatrists choose to give medical drugs instead of therapy, and so therapy is not covered.
For instance, in psychiatric hospitals, the link between psychology and psychoanalysis has been broken, and today patients are cured almost exclusively using drugs. We think short term. And bear in mind that I wrote the book Why Psychoanalysis? I think it can no longer be three times a week, lying down, interpreting the unconscious.
But the theory, the intellectual foundation, and philosophical questioning inherent in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis remain critical to the field. JCG: So do you feel that analytic institutes in France address this problem and educate candidates on the continuing value of psychoanalytic theory?
They no longer do the three-times-a-week analysis. Global Perspectives When I started I was 30 years old, and when people came to me at that time, they wanted the experience of an analysis. Today, people come to us, they come to me, because they are not doing well, and there are more cases of depression than neurosis.
They come to us with symptoms that need to be cured. JCG: I believe that the top psychoanalysts in America would probably agree with you that thinking and practicing psychoanalysis does not only mean that it has to be three times a week and on the couch. Clinical work has had to change. ER: Yes, I do agree. I was therefore wondering about your impetus for writing this new biography. ER: The question is, why do we go back to biography after having studied the history?
I had written about France, I had written a dictionary of psychoanalysis comparing psychoanalysis in several countries, and suddenly I had the idea of going back to Freud. If I had had the answer to that question I would not have done it. The biography that Peter Gay wrote was published 25 years ago. He talked of Freud as a British scholar, a Darwinian, not a man from his time.
My Freud was different. My Freud was a mix of a thinker of dark enlightenments and an attraction to the irrational. Freud had two great models: Faust and Mephistopheles. He talks about the struggle in the Bible between Jacob and the Angel. And he also lived in a period that was a terrible period of time for humanity. So those were my inspirations to write the book. ER: The big question that I had as a historian was the question of the family.
Jones did that a little bit, but when I studied the archives, I realized that Freud was a man of his time, and he spent his childhood observing the transformation of the Western family. He also gave birth to a political movement with disciples and a global vision of his doctrine. Writing was a challenge for me because most serious historians of Freud come from the US. In fact, all of the Freud historiography is now located in the US, and I had to do my research at the Library of Congress.
And the anti- Freudian part of them said: he did not invent anything, he was incestuous, he was horrendous, he was homophobic. All that is not true. I did not want to write anything that was anything close to hagiography, but I was sick and tired of reading this image of Freud coming from all over the world, but mostly from the US. I wanted to change that. The question is, in the US, why are there so many books entirely dedicated to the question of knowing if Freud slept with his sister-in-law?
JCG: How was your biography received in France? They only know his clinical cases. JCG: With all of the writing that you do, do you have time to have a clinical practice as well? JCG: Why did you stop? And, as I said, the practice of psycho- analysis has changed so much since I began 30 years ago. But my main activity, my main job, is being a historian, and I also write a column in the newspaper Le Monde, so that keeps me very busy. Global Perspectives ER: This is what I want to impress upon your readers: Psychoanalysis in France is also a cultural matter that extends beyond practitioners.
Psychoanalysis is a literary discipline that does not have to ape the sciences. It is not a hard science, but a science of man. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from NYU and her postgraduate psychoanalytic and supervisory training from the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, where she is now a clinical supervisor and advisor. She also has a private practice in New York City, treating individuals, couples, and groups.
Related Papers. By Dharamjeet Singh. It was inhabited mostly by lawyers, peo- ple living on modest private incomes, and traveling salesmen like Emile himself. Further along, at the corner of the rue Saint-Claude, stood what had been the home of the ill-fated adventurer Cagliostro, alias Giuseppe Balsamo.
Clowns cut capers on portable tres- tle stages, competing for attention with dwarfs, living skeletons, performing dogs, and ventriloquists.
The novelist Paul de Kock had lived nearby. But after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune the boulevard had changed.
In the name of law and order the victorious middle classes had crushed the suburban proletariat, hoping to destroy their egalitarian dreams. The open-air stages and ventriloquists were banished, and the bourgeoisie were left safe in their calculated comfort, smugly content with their indus- trious lives and their official art.
He left there full of resentment against his parents for denying him the warmth of family life. He was not much interested in culture and cared as much about his own sav- ings as about the financial interests of the business. With his portly figure and his mustache, he looked what he was—an ordinary belle epoque tradesman living in the shadow of an all-powerful father.
In about he met Emilie Philippine Marie Baudry. Her father had been a goldbeater but now lived off the income from his investments in real estate. At the age of twenty-three, Emilie too was very austere.
Slim, dark-eyed, always dressed in black, she seemed to be driven by an abstract kind of Christianity in sharp contrast to the simple provincial piety of the Dessaux family. Ten months later, at in the afternoon of April 13, she gave birth to her first child. He was named Jacques Marie Emile.
His father and both grandfathers registered the birth at the mairie town hall of the 3d Arrondissement. He was baptized at the church of Saint-Denis-du- Sacrement. Emilie Baudry-Lacan became pregnant again right away and in pro- duced another son, Raymond, who died two years later of hepatitis.
By April she was expecting another child, and this time it was a girl, Madeleine Marie Emmanuelle, born at A. Emilie was now twenty- seven. It was not until that she had her fourth child, Marc-Marie he later changed his name to Marc-Frangois , born on December 25, ten min- utes after midnight.
Emilie was exhausted after this last pregnancy, devel- oped abdominal pains, and had to have an operation. To all appearance the three children grew up in a home united by reli- gion. But in fact there were bitter quarrels between the two families living in the same apartment block on the boulevard Beaumarchais.
He was friendly and tactful and on excellent terms with the customers as well as wise in the ways of Parisian commerce.
The choice shows that, some years after the separation of church and state, the Lacan-Dessaux-Baudry clan were still steeped in clericalism and hostile to secular and republican values. He rented a comfortable house in Jouy-en-Josas, on the outskirts of Versailles, which they called the Villa Marco after the younger son. The Langlais young- sters liked to play ninepin bowls with their Uncle Alfred.
During the years that followed, the number of pupils at Stanislas rose to more than a thousand. Impressive traditions were built up too.
An academy of science and lib- eral arts was founded: members wore a gold-embroidered sash on ceremo- nial occasions. It became the custom to hold a banquet for the most suc- cessful classes on January 28, the feast of St. Charlemagne, patron saint of schools: the brightest pupils had to make a speech to their formmates on some literary or philosophical subject. But in July the whole situation was changed by a law making it necessary for the Marists to apply for official permission to teach.
Their application was refused. A great fund-raising campaign was launched imme- diately to circumvent this decision. Stanislas became a privately run Catholic school with a teaching staff of lay masters and secular clergy. Though Pautonnier had a degree in mathematics and was more at home solving equations than running a school, he devoted all his energies to his young charges. Several of the pre—First World War pupils went on to become famous. Charles de Gaulle was there from to , preparing for the entrance examination for the Saint-Cyr military academy.
One of his teachers at the seminary in Cahors had been Fernand Dalbus, a moral philosopher who had tried to reconcile the Anglican and Orthodox churches, and Calvet himself sounded like a cross between Bossuet and Confucius. After studying at the Sorbonne under Gustave Lanson and Emile Faguet, he had become a specialist in the French classics. Seventeenth-century authors predominated, with Pascal and Bossuet in first place, followed by Racine, Malherbe, and La Fontaine.
The eighteenth century, and by the same token the works of Ernest Renan, were passed over. In philosophy, Descartes enjoyed pride of place. In fact, throughout his schooldays in that elderly fortress of Christianity, the young Lacan was exposed to a classical culture almost untouched by Enlightenment values and closed off from modern thought. Instead, everything was focused on the Christian Cartesianism reflected in the school motto: French without fear, Christian without reproach.
Alfred was called up and made a sergeant in the commissariat, leaving Emilie to take over his work as agent for Dessaux.!? It might have been the sight of these men, with their missing limbs and dazed expressions, that made Jacques want to be a doctor. At that age, though, he seemed chiefly interested in himself and his efforts to make top of the class in every subject.
Fine eyes. Manner half serious, half mock- ing. Without seeming to do so he kept a distance between himself and the other boys. At recess, when the rest of us were chasing Red Indians, he never joined in. Yet in spite of what Robert de Saint Jean says, Lacan never actually made top of the class it was always Jacques Morane who did that nor won a first prize.
He was a very bright pupil, shining especially in religious studies and Latin translation, but in other subjects he had to be satisfied with a few honorable mentions. His best average was about fif- teen an A in the United States. The comments of his teachers in his reports for the academic year show him as rather eccentric, a bit con- ceited, occasionally tiresome, and in particular unable to organize his time properly and behave like the other boys.
He was often off sick or playing hooky and suffered from a kind of ennui, a mixture of listlessness and will- ful melancholy.! He acted as mentor too and used to hear Marco recite his Latin homework. I can still see the letters he wrote me, in beautiful script, all about cases and moods. He hung a diagram on the wall of his bedroom that depicted the structure of the Ethics with the aid of colored arrows.!
In the school year Lacan had the good fortune to be taught by Jean Baruzi, an exceptional man who later became a friend. John of the Cross.! For although church and state were now separated, it was necessary to ensure the survival of the subjects formerly taught under the heading of theology.
But religions must now be the object of scientific, historical, and comparative study. This new initiative came under attack on the one hand by the Catholics, who refused to separate the study of sacred texts from questions of faith and divine revelation, and on the other hand by the anticlerical Left, for whom religion was a superstition that had no place in a university.! They were not fighting either for or against Catholicism: they held that religious phenomena should be studied in a crit- ical spirit with the tools of pragmatic science.
Instead of the devout Cathol- icism practiced in his family, he encountered a scholarly, aristocratic Catholicism, one that might serve as a cultural substratum or critical instru- ment in the examination of things religious. Lacan admired her, and she introduced him to the writings of her father, Augustin Gazier, on the history of Jansenism.?! But in his teens his choice of a monastic life put an end to any prospects of sex and marriage.
She had nothing to do with my becoming a priest, but she was very happy about my decision, whereas my father was against it. It was at this period, when he was going through a bad attack of melancholy, that Jacques violently rejected the family and the Christian values he had been brought up in.
Though not anti-Semitic himself, he met Maurras sev- eral times and went to some meetings of the Action frangaise. He despised his origins, dressed like a dandy, and seemed to aspire to be another Rastignac.? Or why not politics? Charlemagne banquet. The text was an open challenge to the Stanislas authorities. It maintained that English philosophy was useless and contrasted it with the great German tradition.
The call came to him on May 13, as he was reading the Rule of St. He wrote down the word Benedictine, and the sight of it acted on him like a revelation. Jacques was furious when he heard of his brother's decision and advised him to wait and go on with his law studies. For a year Marc-Marie did so. Then he went to Saint-Cyr for six months and did his military service as a reserve officer. But in the autumn of Marc-Marie set out for the Abbaye de Hautecombe, a monument to a bygone age and an important center of the Benedictine order.
And now he blamed himself for not persuading him to be a tax inspector. On September 8, , Marc-Marie took his vows, chang- ing his second name to Francois in honor of St. Francis of Assisi. After that he never went to Hautecombe again. Meanwhile, Alfred and Emilie had left the apartment on the rue du Montparnasse and gone to live out at Boulogne-sur-Seine, where they had had a house built at 33, rue Gambetta.
On January 20, , Madeleine, their daughter, had married Jacques Houlon, a businessman from the other branch of the Lacan family.
The couple were to live for many years in Indochina. At the end of Madeleine fell ill with tuberculosis. She was in a sana- torium, about to have one lung collapsed, when Jacques came to see her. He angrily forbade the operation, saying she would recover naturally.
He was right. But psychoanalysis was being introduced into France by means of two coexist- ing but conflicting modes. But neither of the two approaches took the lead: they intersected; they contradicted one another; but they advanced with equal vigor.
He eliminated the idea of any sexual eti- ology, showing that hysteria affected men as well as women. Freud later rein- troduced the sexual etiology, though he transferred it from the uterus to the psyche.
He subsequently formulated the theory of transference, which allowed him to dispense with hypnosis and in to invent psychoanaly- sis. Lastly, in he revealed the workings of infantile sexuality. As to the intellectual approach to Freud in France and its ideological answer to the medical one, that was in the hands of certain writers and the literary reviews.
Writers and artists of all kinds saw dreams as the great adventure of the age: they wanted to use the omnipotence of desire to change mankind; they invented a utopia where the unconscious was free of all restraint; and they admired the courage of the dedicated scientist who had defied bourgeois convention and risked scandal and isolation in order to listen in to the most intimate urges of humanity.
The case was one of fixed gaze caused by hypertonicity, together with extrapyramidal syndrome and pseudobulbar disorders of the spinal cord.
He had a fixed stare and a respiratory tic, and the furrow between the nose and the chin was deeper on the left side of the face than on the right. When the patient bent his knees to sit, he remained poised for a moment above the chair before falling down onto the seat.
But the twenty-five-year-old Lacan still had a long way to go before he became a part of that honorable institution, now the longest-lasting and most influential of its kind. It would take him eight years to become a member and four more to be made a training analyst. Meanwhile his career followed a normal course, and he went on from neurology to psychiatry. There followed two years at the Henri Rousselle hospital, where the most advanced psychiatric research was carried out and Lacan qualified in forensic medicine.
In August he attended a two-month course at the famous Burghdlzi clinic, attached to the University of Zurich, where at the beginning of the century Auguste Forel, Carl Gustav Jung, and Eugen Bleuler had arrived at a new conception of madness, based not only on a sound nosography but also on the results of listening to patients talking.
But his father made him study medicine and sent him to France: first to Strasbourg and then to Paris, where he met Lacan when they were both interns. He affected a sort of aristocratic arrogance. The younger gener- ation dreamed about the October Revolution, proclaimed themselves sur- realists, and fancied they were thoroughly modern. It so happened that Henri Ey made me treasurer for some of his projects Naturally, this meant collecting contributions. The only person I never got a cent out of was Lacan The patient who helped in the staff room used, for a small fee, to keep us supplied with cigarettes.
Lacan often owed him money. But he was a fine clinician right from the start of his career. Although the work of Freud and Breuer had transformed the nosology of psychiatry, the mental asylums of the thirties had still not emerged from the age of incarceration. Patients had to wear uniforms; their mail was opened; and personal belongings were confiscated.
Women were registered under their maiden names and thus often robbed of their usual identities. Manic patients might be put in straitjackets, though that was only an ordi- nary humiliation. Violent cases were sometimes chained by the neck and left to sweat it out as they swooned in baths of hot water.
Senile patients were a particularly heartrending sight on their beds of sea- weed filthy with excreta. To discourage any- one who might have courted this torture for fun, hefty doses of castor oil were also poured down the funnel. Milder cases worked in the kitchens or the laundry, peeling vegetables in strange fits and starts or pushing heavy trolleys about like slaves. The subject was a woman from Brittany, a hysteric whose house had been destroyed by a shell in June Her peculiar gait and appearance, sometimes reminiscent of a dancing dervish, had made her a picturesque feature of the Paris hospital landscape.
She had been trapped by one leg in the shattered floorboards when her house collapsed and had suffered superficial injuries to the scalp, nose, and back.
She later added another step to her bizarre choreography, crossing one foot in front of the other as she went along. Hers was the only case of hysteria that Lacan put his name to during his psychiatric training. This meant he now regarded the case as one of hysteria in the Freudian sense. Neither of the authors of the account made any refer- ence to hysteria: the terminology they used was exclusively that of Babinski.
And we do so at the very moment when the concept of hysteria appears to have been completely dismantled. We therefore propose a new definition of hysteria as a more or less irreducible mental state characterized by the subversion of the links between the individual and the moral world to which he thinks he for all practical purposes belongs, quite apart from any kind of delusion.
Hysteria is not a pathological condition and may be considered in every respect a supreme means of expression. Psychiatry Teachers hree very different teachers of his prentice years left a deep impression on Lacan. Georges Dumas, a professor of psychopathology at the Sorbonne, was a friend of Pierre Janet and Charles Blondel and a doughty opponent of psy- choanalysis. He was always making fun of it, mocking what he called its jar- gon, not to mention its ideas about sex and its German connections.
He never prepared them, trusting instead to the physical spell he knew he could cast over his audience by the mobility of his mouth, twisted into a perpetually changing smile. So voice and face, though appealing to two different senses, both Conjured up the same rustic but incisive style, the style of the fourteenth-century humanists, the physicians and philosophers whose race he seemed to perpetuate in body and mind.
The second hour and sometimes the third too were devoted to the Presentation of cases, when the audience was treated to extraordinary performances got up between the wily practitioner and patients trained to this sort of thing by years in hospitals. And so a dynamic and organicist French school grew up around Claude, a group Henri Ey would later inherit.
Some of its investigative methods offend our delicacy when it comes to private emotions, and the more far-fetched examples of its symbolism seem to me to make some of its generalizations, though applicable perhaps to other races, unacceptable in Latin clinical practice. The crunch came in , with the founding of the Revue francaise de psychanalyse RFP , later to become the official organ of the spp, itself affiliated with the International Psycho- analytical Association 1PpA , founded by Freud in rg1o and bringing together all the psychoanalytic societies deriving from the Freudian movement.
But he was undoubtedly the most flamboyant and paradoxical figure in the early part of the saga of Lacan and French psychoanalysis. He was jealous of the influence wielded by Henri Claude, whom he dismissed as a mere neurologist. He spent the First World War making wooden figurines and dressing them in draperies; he kept them for the rest of his life. Dynamism abandoned the idea that psychosis could be constitutional, that is, have a basis in heredity. In his view the origin of the syndrome remained organic, though the resulting disor- ders seemed to attack the patient suddenly and from outside, as in the case of automatism.
But he rejected any reform in the matter of treatment. For him psychiatry necessarily involved a regime of incarceration and repres- sion. Lacan adopted a different attitude toward each of these very different masters. With Henri Claude, the successful but limited bourgeois with con- siderable powers of patronage and a name that might prove useful, he was just a deferential pupil. To Georges Dumas he was very respectful: he admired his clinical genius and was always trying to exercise his charm on him.
On the basis of his mental automatism syndrome he distinguished between hallucinatory psychoses and passional delusions. Among the latter he placed the illusion of being loved that is called erotomania, of which the chief source is immense sexual vanity. The story was always the same, resem- bling that of countless ill-fated heroines of romance.
The individual con- cerned thinks he or she is loved by the object of his or her chaste desires, usually some famous personage such as an actor,a king, or a member of the Academy. She resents his behavior, accuses him of infi- delity, and goes to England to catch him in the act.
When she gets back to Paris she assaults a policeman in the street and is brought to the office of the head of the Special Infirmary to be dealt with. This could be used to reveal a number of breaks in continuity: between normal psychology and pathology, to begin with, and then between the different kinds of delusion.
Lacan then distin- guished between the clinical and forensic points of view and divided para- noid psychoses into three types: those arising from a paranoid constitution; interpretation delusions; and passional delusions.
To describe the first of these types, he put forward, without criticizing them, the traditional explanations, setting out the four themes around which the paranoid constitution is organized: pathological overestimation of the self; suspiciousness; defective judgment; and social maladjustment.
Alienists, in their efforts to save criminal lunatics from the guillotine, used the term to suggest that the accused were not responsible for their crimes. In Genil-Perrin adopted the word invented by Gaultier and established a link between Bovaryism and paranoia.
He put forward the idea of a gradual transition from a normal to a morbid state and described the paranoid constitution as an extreme form of pathological Bovaryism. Just as in he had approached hysteria with the theoretical tools pro- vided by Babinski, so in Lacan, describing the structures of paranoia, made use of a conservative doctrine with which a year later he would com- pletely disagree.
But although he mentioned the theory of stages he immediately went on to defend the sacrosanct doctrine of constitutions. It was an awkward situation. He was also afraid of having his ideas stolen or copied. Taken aback by the ambiguity of this fulsome tribute, the head of the Special Infirmary promptly disowned his pupil. It caused a great stir. Lacan had a marvelous flair for publicity. According to traditional teach- ing, there were in such situations one inducing and one induced mania, the latter disappearing when the former was removed.
But in these particular cases no induction was involved. The patients were two mother-and-daugh- ter pairs in whom paranoid delusion was the most prominent feature. In Blanche, aged forty-four, it took a very peculiar form: She sees herself as a four-headed monster with green eyes. What made her realize this is that her blood is scented. In high temperatures her skin goes hard and turns into metal, then she is covered with pearls and sprouts pieces of jewelry. Her geni- tals are quite unique: she has a pistil, like a flower.
The patient admits to some very strange habits. She believed she was Joan of Arc and wanted to restore France to its former greatness. She thought what she wrote was revolution- ary. President of the assiduous Republic, I should like to know everything so as to give you the but mouse so of a coward and of a test cannon but it takes me much too long to guess.
From the unkind things done to other people one might guess that my five Vals geese are chickwee and you are the bowler hat of the Virgin Mary and test pardon. But one has to astonish people to be the accursed rascal of barbanella and of bedless one does some toalmerchantess. They were drawing on the surreal- ist experience rather than the model provided by traditional psychiatry. On the one hand he was linking the notion of paranoid structure with a con- stitutionalist view of psychosis, assuming a norm and a need to repress that which departed from it.
In the first quarter of the century these authors had studied the links between psychosis and anomalies in written and spoken lan- guage. But the most interesting ref- erence is to a work by Delacroix published in , because it is a valuable indication of what the young Lacan was reading at this period.!
Dali was putting forward a novel thesis on paranoia. Experiment in hypnotically induced sleep and automatic writing was a thing of the past; a new field of operations must be found in political action.
The old chimera of changing mankind must take concrete form; what was needed was a new technique for arriving at a knowledge of reality.? It was at this point that Dali made surrealism a present of his famous notion of paranoia-criticism.
In other words, delusion is already an interpretation of reality, and paranoia a creative activity depen- dent on logic. Dali expected his vis- itor to register some surprise, but he was disappointed. Lacan just sat and lis- tened quietly as Dali expounded his ideas. His translation was remarkable, following the syntax of the origi- nal very closely and remaining faithful to both its form and its content. His version also showed how completely he accepted the terminology then cur- rent in the French psychoanalytic movement.
Just like his contemporaries, he translated Trieb drive as instinct instinct , Trauer mourning as tristesse sorrow , and Regung motion as tendance tendency.
The year was a watershed for Lacan, for it was then that, starting from the basis of paranoia, he embarked on a synthesis of three areas of knowledge: clinical psychiatry, the teachings of Freud, and the second phase of surrealism. The intended victim was due to play the lead in Tout va bien Everything's fine , a play by Henri Jeanson that had opened three days earlier. The play, an undistinguished middle-class comedy about a sen- timental lady, her poor but carefree lover, and a rich but boring financier, was designed to show that in the France of the s, despite the economic crisis and the rise of the parties of the Far Right, all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Marguerite was overpowered and taken to the police station. On June 3, , she was confined in the Sainte-Anne asylum on the recommendation of Dr. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. A short summary of this paper. In her column in Le Monde, the historian E. Saturday, Feb. Psychotherapeutic schools continued to emerge during the 20th century under different designations: to throughout the world at any given time.
Among them, hypnotherapy, Gestalt therapy, relational therapy, behavioural and cognitive therapies BCT , personal development, meditation, etc. Psychology magazines regularly update the list. What these therapies have in common is that they promise happiness to those who are suffering. Today, there are 13 psychiatrists, 27 clinical psychologists and about 5 psychoanalysts in France; almost all of them have a diploma in clinical psychology.
Since these regulations do not apply to the title of psychoanalyst, only the psychoanalytic schools governed by the law can train psychoanalysts, qualified on the basis of having been analysed, and having received supervision from a training analyst.
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