Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985

Histoire de la psychanalyse en France : la bataille de cent ans #2

by Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jeffrey Mehlman (Translator)

"Roudinesco provides a finely drawn map of the intellectual debates within French psychoanalysis, especially under the influence of the German emigrés during the 1930s and 1940s. She is a good historian, in that she provides not only a narrative history but also extensive passages from Lacan's own oral-history interviews with the various figures, so that we have not only her commentary but some flavor of the original documentation. Many of the quotes are gems."—Sander I. Gilman, Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Genres: Psychoanalysis

788 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Élisabeth Roudinesco est la seule à avoir su, avec la précision de l'historienne et l'expérience de la praticienne, faire revivre en une fresque documentée les doctrines, les hommes et les femmes qui ont incarné en France cette révolution de l'âme.
La seule aussi à avoir mis en perspective les théories, les mouvements et les débats qui n'ont cessé d'animer le milieu psychanalytique français depuis 1885 : de l'arrivée à Paris de Freud, venu assister aux leçons de Charcot à la Salpêtrière, jusqu'à la récente mise en cause des thérapies psychanalytiques, en passant par l'extraordinaire aventure lacanienne.

Reviews

[Micah · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Lacan played false because he was speaking true, as though through the rigor of a voice perpetually on the verge of cracking, he was, like some ventriloquist, effecting the resurgence of the secret mirror of the unconscious, the symptom of a mastery endlessly on the brink of collapse. A sorcerer without magic, a guru without hypnosis, a prophet without god, he fascinated his audience in an admirable language effecting, in the margins of desire, the revival of a century of enlightenment."

It's striking that Freud categorized psychoanalysis as a movement, as though it were a kind of cultural or political avant-garde requiring the formation of militant groups. Certainly Freudian France took this seriously. I think this book must still be essential reading if you're interested in this kind of thing. How does one take democracy and the unconscious seriously at the same time when forming organizations? What, if anything, authorizes analysts, what does it mean to train or transmit? French analysts agonized over these questions and they famously produced dramatic institutional splits where Lacan loomed large.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A telescopic account of Freud's reception in France and the resultant internecine squabbling between the schools that emerge in its wake. Fascinating here is both the Surrealists' reception of psychoanalytic theory (including Breton's homophobia) and Freud's significantly less warm reaction to it, and the Soviet distinction drawn between Pavlovianism (deemed properly "materialist") and psychoanalysis (regarded with suspicion, including Trotsky's anti-psychoanalytic stance). Beyond that, we see the messiness that comes inherent to institutional organization, if not worsened by the specific ways in which people transfer onto the figure of Lacan (and the specific way in which he manages - or doesn't manage - the counter-transference).