Abstract
The 17 interviews in this book were conducted by Rachel Boué-Widawsky with psychoanalysts working in French today, all of whom represent its ever-changing scene in terms of individual practice and the diversity of societies. What connects them, Boué-Widawsky remarks in her preface, is “an unmistakable vocational commitment to psychoanalysis through their private practice, their publications and institutional work” (p. xvi). Their personal journeys encapsulate the distinctiveness of their dedication as they recount the narrative that brought them to practice this therapeutic discipline. In this regard, Boué-Widawsky foregrounds their “singular encounter [with psychoanalysis] . . . between a biography, another modality of thinking and eventually, for some people, a vocation” (p. xvi). Psychoanalysis is unlike other professions insofar as it cannot be reduced to a mere acquired skill set but instead entails a personal journey of becoming and confrontation, making for a “truthful” (p. xvi) way of thinking, of being.
Here, she alludes to Roland Barthes’s (1980) understanding of tuché, glossed (although not quoted by Boué-Widawsky) as “the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its unfaltering expression” (p. 15). 1 Barthes himself is drawing on Lacan (1973/1964), who commented on the “function of the tuché” (“chance,” “fortune,” “hazard” in Aristotle) as “the real as encounter,” that is, “as it may be missed [manquée], as in essence it is the missed encounter” (p. 54). Manquée—“missed”—also means “unsuccessful,” or “deficient,” even “failed.” Thinking of an encounter, specifically, the transferential encounter, as such does not suggest that it is a failure in the ordinary sense; psychoanalytically, it is the sign of its very truthfulness, so long as the analyst recognizes that what is missing has an unconscious logic. Lacanian tuché, here relayed via Barthes, thus suggests that the real, as a missed encounter, is the precondition for emotional and intellectual growth. But these interviews lead us to see that the practitioner’s singular encounter with psychoanalysis, starting with an initial meeting and proceeding throughout life, is further a tuché, a potentially nourishing crucible for one’s own psychic transformation.
Rachel Boué-Widawsky’s instructive introduction provides a historical and conceptual framework for the “Here and Now,” that is, what is contemporary, in the book’s title. She points to five features contributing to the unique makeup of French psychoanalysis. First, its analytic culture grew out of “two inseparable legacies, those of Freud and Lacan” (p. xvii). This is a bold yet accurate assertion: if all French analytic culture is rooted in Freud’s thinking, certain analysts adhere firmly to Lacan’s teaching, while some vigorously reject it. Still others adopt a more nuanced view and value at least part of it, “whether it concerns the distinction between drives and instincts, desire and need, the notion of lack as a derivative of castration, the question of the intrapsychic Other, the symbolic role of the father or the notion of après-coup” (p. xvii).
Second, French psychoanalysis is distinguished by “its attention to language/representation at the levels of both metapsychology and history” (p. xvii). Rachel Boué-Widawsky is referring to the lack of consensus among French-speaking analysts as to how Freud’s works should be translated into French, which affords French analytic culture a particular richness due to the discussions this arouses. We recall in this connection that since 1953, the year Lacan resigned his presidency of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society and gave his Rome discourse, speech and language have been inseparable for French analysts. Even those who oppose Lacan hold that the psychoanalytic process is predicated in large measure, if not exclusively, on the analysand’s speech as enunciated within the transference.
Third, writing is viewed as a generative means of transmitting psychoanalysis. The complexity of certain French psychoanalytic texts reflects psychic complexity: “Meaning is therefore essentially a matter of construction or interpretation. It emerges from the gap between signifier and signified” (p. xviii).
Fourth, philosophical reflection undergirds the thinking of many predominant postwar analysts. Pierre Fédida, for example, drew on phenomenology for his conceptualization of crisis and countertransference, as did André Green on Hegel for “the work of the negative” (p. 16), while Jean Laplanche had studied with Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty and J.-B. Pontalis had studied with Sartre as far back as high school.
The fifth feature concerns training. The self experience of personal analysis of candidates in French International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) component societies is dissociated from training; once admitted, candidates undertake supervision and freely choose to participate in different seminars and study groups. Training in Lacanian societies likewise centers on the candidate’s analysis, supervision, and one configuration or another of collective discussion of fundamental texts, although extensive study of Lacan’s work is a characteristic feature.
The interviews critically indicate that the decisive difference lies in the analytic method. IPA analysts respect a fixed session hour, while for Lacanians, the length is variable. When Lacan was excluded from the IPA in 1963 for maintaining the teaching and practice of the scansion, a group of younger analysts who had followed him until then founded their own society the following year, the Psychoanalytical Association of France, part of the IPA. They included Laplanche and Pontalis (1985), who, in that year, published their work on primal fantasy, retrospectively described as an “act of rupture” (p. 7) with Lacan. Just how a psychoanalyst carries out psychoanalysis is thus a reliable indicator of the community to which they belong.
The rift between non-Lacanians and Lacanians is reflected by the attitude the analyst adapts regarding Lacan’s thinking, as in these two remarks included in Boué-Widawsky’s interviews: “What I particularly recall of Lacan,” says Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, “was his phenomenal energy in understanding the unconscious, the interplay of illusions and ideals; and I observed, like everyone else at the time, the seductive and absurd clinical deviation that has wreaked havoc on our contemporaries” (p. 11). By contrast, Clotilde Leguil recalls,
It was the question of symbolic heritage that led me to analysis—the question of the obscure legacy (“legs” (Lacan 2021, 75)) left by the words, the misunderstandings, the aborted desires, the “censored chapter” (Lacan 2006/1953, 215) of history, the “mumbling” (Lacan 2021, 75) of our ancestors. This ordeal of life—experienced as a moment when there is a “trespassing of death on life” as Lacan (1992/1986, 194) says—was transmuted into a desire to speak, a desire to experience speech in analysis. (pp. 117–118)
To my mind, such differences do not in principle preordain a breakdown in dialogue, but rather contain the seeds of fruitful, clarifying debate.
Beyond this conflictual polarity, Rachel Boué-Widawsky highlights how French psychoanalysis has
endeavoured to theorize and explore in greater depth its understanding of the primary processes in the formation of the psychical apparatus. It has thus chosen to preserve what it considers to be the essence of psychoanalysis, namely the unconscious and the role of sexuality and drives in psychic life. (p. xix)
The latter point seems especially important because it has not always found favor in certain analytic quarters in North America and the United Kingdom. Alluding to it highlights a further subject of possible debate across regions.
Analysts trained and working in France additionally see representation as “a highly complex unconscious, or even pre-psychic, process that governs the primordial organization of the psyche” (p. xx). They affirm that infantile developmental periods are not entirely surpassed by later ones but survive throughout life in the guise of a preverbal yet maternally inflected infans: “This infans in the adult does not correspond to a distinct entity (ego or self), nor to an identity or object, but is the matrix of a psycho-instinctual drive history developed in the aura of the maternal realm” (p. xxi).
After a summary of the principal axes of each interviewed analyst’s research and practice comes the set of questions, followed by their replies. Here I have reproduced not only the questions asked but also a handful of individual replies—none of which can, by definition, speak for the entirety of the cohort:
“What is the intellectual and personal journey that led you [Danièle Brun] to psychoanalysis?” (p. 22) “I was led to psychoanalysis by chance, need and desire, like a triad that does not need to be given any precise order in order to grasp how these three elements are intertwined.” (p. 22) “Could you [René Kaës] comment on any opportune encounters you had in training?” “It was a rhizome-like development in several spaces of knowledge. I was curious about everything and each discipline brought me its own questions and those it could not answer.” (p. 78) “What are your [Laurie Laufer] views on the transmission of psychoanalysis?” (p. 112) “It is undoubtedly through the invention of a certain style that escapes all normalization that psychoanalysis can find the paths of its transmission.” (Laufer alluding to Lacan’s view that psychoanalysis is untransmissible; p. 112) “What is the cornerstone of your [Laurence Kahn] theoretical and clinical work?” (p. 88) “Any departure from the principle of reserve will nourish the patient’s unconscious fantasy without allowing for its elaboration” (Kahn commenting on Freudian Indifferenz; p. 89). “[T]he cornerstone is undoubtedly the pair hallucinatory fulfilment/distortion . . . [which] implies referring to the drive as the motor of the psychic act and according a fundamental place to transference as repetition.” (p. 90) “What is your [Catherine Chabert] theoretical approach to psychoanalytic practice (the couch, frequency, setting, teletherapy, interpretation, silence)?” (p. 34) “Only the real presence of the analyst and the response that it elicits in the initial and massive forms of the transference allow this movement to inaugurate the process.” (p. 34) “What, in your [Dominique Scarfone] view, are the points of divergence between French psychoanalysis and English-speaking psychoanalysis?” (p. 142) On the question of language, it seems to me that English-speaking analysts—at least those who have not been “contaminated” by French thought—tend to see it only as a means of communication, whereas French psychoanalysis sees it as psychic matter itself, the field where the effects of the unconscious are observed in analysis. . . . This goes hand in hand . . . with the importance given to metapsychology, which, precisely, allows us to hear and take into account the effects of the unconscious (of the repressed) on language and interhuman communication. (p. 142) “What is your [Nicolas Evzonas] psychoanalytic approach to the societal debates on racial, gender identities or/and on the new forms of reproduction and parenting?” (p. 65) In my view, the emphasis placed on the solipsistic model of endogenous drives does not leave space for the environment, which should be conceived not only in the Winnicottian sense of the primordial other but also in the sense of power relations in the social field. . . . This unthought environment also explains why intersectional experiences of sexuality, gender, class, religion and race are conspicuously absent from the French psychoanalytic literature. (p. 66)
We could very well see these interviews as material gathered by an accidental ethnographer in the course of her fieldwork as she positions herself as a participant-observer in relation to her subject, today’s French psychoanalytic culture, which is, in fact, made up of micro-cultures. Yet each is also as unique as any psychoanalytic case report. They remind me of Winnicott’s (1969) remark that “one case proves nothing, but it may illustrate much, and may illustrate phenomena that, though significant, do not show up in conventional scientific investigations” (p. 369). In reading them, we thereby amply acquire a sophisticated picture of the object of study.
This collection is a rewarding testament to the profuse and vibrant eclecticism of contemporary psychoanalytic culture in France. It does not, however, demonstrate the relationships between the multifarious currents that make up the whole. This task is left to the reader, which is perhaps just as well because great pleasure is procured from engaging in one’s own mental conversation with the interviewees and debating and discussing questions they raise as they shed light on one’s own “singular encounter” with psychoanalysis.
