Introduction en anglais au livre Sigmund Freud au éditions OXUS
Is it the right time to be talking about
Freud?
Not a single evening goes by without someone
close to me sharing a bad joke about psychoanalysis or attacking Freud directly,
the man. I’ve become used to it, and I don’t pay attention anymore. Still, this
state of affairs hasn’t stopped. Forever repeating itself.
I’ve devoted my entire life to the work of
psychiatry and psychoanalysis both in my own private practice and in
institutional settings. That means hundreds and hundreds of children and adults
whom I’ve seen and accompanied as best I could. I think all families have
resorted to the kind of benevolent listening Freud proposed. Who hasn’t
accompanied their child to a session? Who hasn’t asked for help for themselves,
someone they love, an elderly parent?
That’s one of the reasons I still struggle to
understand the virulence of criticisms addressed to the “science of
the unconscious”. Can we imagine any other discipline whose competence and
efficiency might be thus attacked? Can we imagine other scientists thrown to
the press and media wolves, like psychoanalysts and psychiatrists were during
the recent polemic surrounding autism?
“It”, this state of things passes for normal,
and no one takes offence.
From a factual point of view, like many
teenagers my age at the time, I first encountered Freud in high school (the
French lycée) in philosophy class. And I remember it as a complete and
utter shock - the same I had experienced when reading Marx or Lenin.
It’s not the fact that these authors seem to
share a similar emancipatory view of humanity - especially not in light of
Freud’s pessimistic view of human nature. The shock I felt was more intimate,
more emotional. Simply stated, I think it was related to the light he shed on
sexuality. A young man of 17 or 18 is first and foremost concerned about his
entrance into sexual life - and it should be remembered that what Freud has to
say on the topic can neither be heard nor read anywhere else.
I devoured the translations available at the
time, and they seemed beautiful to me - even if I later found out they were in
fact quite approximative. Today’s erudite editions are of course far more
exacting, full of footnotes and references - but they lack the poetic and
violent breath I’d found in the earlier, so-called mediocre editions.
In addition to the inevitable and required
French literature imposed in the lycée, I delved into the great Russian
novels which my father adored and which, in their own way, speak of the soul
and of human passions - like those of the immense Tolstoy.
Still today, the encounter with Freud is often
an amazement, the emotion caused by a single sentence, a manner of speaking
much like a punch in the face that opens a breach, a question that won’t stop
returning. Speaking of his identity, Freud said: “My parents were Jewish,
myself I remained Jewish.” This single sentence, apparently trivial, has always
opened an abyss inside me, a kind of obviousness and complexity: I could have
said exactly the same thing.
What I experienced was not the assimilation
but rather the integration of Jewish family life into French culture: religion
did not hold a large place except for weddings and births, and the circumcision
of boys. We would gather every year for the great Jewish celebrations like Yom
Kippur or Pessah. For the past two generations, our family had been marked by a
genuine trend of laïcité (secularism, to put it briefly) and of social
aspiration which was rather typical of Polish Jews.
This division between the reminder of an
historical identity trait, and the the clear willingness to partake fully in
the ideals stemming from rationality seems very much present in Freud. His
article about religion “The Future of an Illusion” carries incredible clout for
a young person seeking back-up. Can we even imagine speaking so openly today
about religion.
I still see myself shifting incessantly from
one great book to another, books that touched upon fundamental philosophical
questions, or even the deeply affecting “Thoughts for the Times on War and
Death” and its eminently human questions, to texts that always brought me back
to the mysteries of sexuality and again the trembling encounter of words barely
acceptable, saturated as they are with clinical truth, like “civilised sexual
morality” - which really ought to be uttered at every wedding ceremony.
During the years that followed 1968,
we didn’t especially feel a sense of “communitarian belonging.” In my little
suburban lycée, my friends were from all ethnic and religious
backgrounds, and we often invited each other into our families without any
apparent obstacle. It’s hard to explain this current phenomenon we’re
witnessing of fierce identity stiffening among today’s youth. The media and
specialists accompany this trend as if it goes without saying by using terms
which I never used when i was a teenager: “the Jewish community” is so often
used nowadays - as if one knew what is being designated through that term. I
still don’t know what that means - and sometimes I feel like I’m the only one.
Interestingly, it’s that very same question which
my children have asked me over the years, especially my daughters: “Daddy,
ultimately why do you say you’re Jewish?” It is then and there that I retrieve
the Freudian inspiration that grabbed me so immediately during my schooling: I
carry this trait. It guides me; I don’t know why, nor towards what - but it
guides me.
It goes without saying that this questioning
fed hundreds of sessions of my own psychoanalytic cure. I examined every
possible torment, beginning of course with the exploration of repetition inside
my family - the power of the hidden signifier. Naturally, this question is very
divisive and thus in and of itself neither explanatory nor definitive - but
both of my parents were, during the war, what we call” hidden children”. One
was protected by a network of Gaullists near Lyon; the other by a Christian
network near Paris. There’s no question that these words and circumstances have
always marked my destiny. And it’s easy to see why what remains hidden, veiled,
dissimulated or even the trace of the child that marks the adult forever could
have interested me especially. This is the “stuff” of psychoanalysis, what
Freud calls “infantile neurosis”. But History with a capital H is not the whole
of the unconscious: beyond my family’s narration of the century’s major
tragedies (tragedies which, it must be said, remain to this day utterly
incomprehensible to me, despite all the reading I’ve done), my interest laid
elsewhere. That’s what Freud warns us about: for the child, boy or girl, the
encounter is first and foremost an encounter that sexualises life. Freud never
stops discussing this theme, to the point of being accused of pansexualism at
times.
And thus, my encounter with Freud during my
senior year of lycée probably could not have occurred if I hadn’t spent
every night dreaming about a girl in my school, a girl whose braids I dreamed
about pulling: by chance, in this small suburban lycée already stood out
a future famous actress who was already studying drama: Isabelle Adjani.
Freud says it over and over again - and
standing alone amongst all disciplines that form the humanities, psychoanalysis
says it: what we call reality, what we call the world, all of it can only be
read and recognised through a small, very simple window which Freud calls
“fantasy”. When I read Freud, I saw an
entire world opening up to me, a whole network of complexity and eventually a
profession - through this small, eroticised yet entirely innocent encounter,
since in fact I never even dared smile at this young high school student whose
beauty and talent were already so striking.
This is a way of underscoring that the words
of psychoanalysis which often seem so complicated are in effect neither
“theory” nor “concepts”. I just evoked identification and fantasy, in a rather
reductive manner in fact. But as we know, everything always plays and replays
itself over and over again. Everything is always re-summoned during one’s
lifetime - not just during adolescence.
As I mentioned, it was common at the time for
a young person from my social background to be interested in the ideal(s) of
emancipation. All my friends were “for” revolution. For all of us, Marxism was
a discipline in and of itself and we were especially studious in those classes.
In retrospect, I’m struck by the fact that the encounter between Freud and Marx
was not especially comfortable at the time. I remember so well that some
militant groups called themselves “Freudo-Marxists”, and they stood at the
forefront of feminist struggles in particular under the theme of sexual
alienation. But during my own militant career - when I started university - I
remember most people feeling great distance with psychoanalysis, even rejection
under the pretext that the demands of revolution could not afford self-centredness,
which seemed petty in comparison to those grandiose
stakes.
And yet, those same militant organisations
oozed with distress. Many young people uprooted themselves and dropped their
studies. But, as we would say at the time, our priorities were “Marx or die!”
(“Marx ou crève!”). Those who, like me, headed for psychoanalysis did so
in hiding, in secrecy, and were soon perceived as weaklings - so much so that
divorce became inevitable.
To state things simply, or brutally, I sometimes
wonder today if the way psychoanalysis is treated by the media and by
politicians isn’t linked to what I experienced when I was younger. Many of the
militant groups and student unions I knew as a young man occupy some of the
highest public offices today - which ironically demonstrates that the Marxist
dialectic was in fact the proper training ground to enter the senate or
congress, to become the head of political parties, government council or even
Secretary of State. This historical divorce between a Marxist interpretation of
society and psychoanalysis has left traces, and it is there that the seed of
cruelty with which some treat the old Freud was indeed sewn.
Without provoking a polemic, one must also add
the element of the “poorly problematised”
Anti-Zionism of Marxist organisations - a hard point to discuss swiftly. I can
still see my father explaining to the teenager I was why he had torn his union
card. He’d been invested in social justice for many years, until that day when
he found himself distributing a flyer against Israël. My father was never a Zionist
and was always very critical of Israël’s politics in regards to Palestine. But
honestly, what was being asked of him at that moment? He simply said “No, not
this.” Similarly, I’ve always been stunned when leftist organisations would
declare that the state of Israël had no legitimate basis for existing. I
hesitated to really understand and I was troubled by the fact that most leaders
had Jewish names. Did this then imply that the State itself need to be
eradicated?
Nowadays, we don’t discuss this much but the
same aberrations have been uttered, for instance, about the early Cambodian
situation. I can still remember this insane question: “Shouldn’t we always
support a “worker state” against American imperialism?” I regret throwing away
all the documents, internal bulletins etc, which showed in great detail this
period during which so-called revolutionary ideals actually hid a deep hatred.
I haven’t read much about this since, but if my memory is intact, many others
among the protagonists could discuss this.
Something about the way we deal with Freud
today just isn’t right: the reminiscence of a rejection that I owe myself to
compare to this poorly analysed Anti-Zionism.
Freud warns us about a limit he himself
experienced in a rather paroxysmal manner until his urgent departure for London
- although, let us not forget, he did leave part of his family at the hands of
the executioners. At the time, for a young man my age psychoanalysis appeared like a form
of accomplished atheism, and as Antonin Artaud famously said “To have done with
the judgement of God”. My own son rather adheres to this notion, uninterested
as he is in traditions, preferring instead the space of
Europe and the rest of the world opened to today’s youth.
Freud had already warned us about a difficulty
that perhaps, despite Lacan, psychoanalysis hasn’t yet been able
to overcome. When a person takes every possible measure to eradicate any
singular trait of their identity, when they declare themselves to belong to a
universal law, they soon realise that their wish is bound to meet an obstacle.
There are crossroads at the universal “juncture” - just like there were crossroads
during the Crusades - some want more than anything to make disappear any trace
of their singularity or particularism.
it should be remembered that this question
never actually found a solution in the history of Marxism.
The Bolshevik party, which held their first
meetings in the circle composed of Jewish workers (the Bund) quickly
demanded that any overly specific language disappear, thus, yiddish for
instance.
Freud hasn’t left us many written traces about
the way in which he was irrigated by Yiddish or Hebrew. Some historians
discussed this for him. What’s certain, however, is that he loved German.
In a family like mine, the Jewish letter
stopped being transmitted after my generation. I discovered it again with
difficulty and pleasure through psychoanalysis in the society of which I’m
still a member to this day.
The
place of languages for the unconscious is a crucial one when one encounters
Freud - but one only becomes really conscious of its place upon returning to
Freud through Lacan. It is thanks to Lacan that we become aware of the power of
different languages in/on the unconscious - by which I don’t mean simply
natural languages: other alphabets can be used and imagined - including, for
instance, the language of dreams.
This encounter with Freud led me to start my
own analysis relatively young, as soon as I started medical school.
Another courant was essential, another type of
encounter: that of insanity, of psychiatry. One simply can’t immediately
superpose psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Understanding this relationship
requires respect; and Freud was in fact respectful of psychiatry when he first
arrived in Paris, and attended Charcot’s patient presentations at the Salpêtrière.
Psychiatry has its own tradition, in
particular that of the grandes folies - in which the practitioner starts
from the madman’s utterances in order to understand our own lack of humanity.
This is a crucial and definitive experience for a trainee.
There is such a thing as French psychiatry,
the same way there used to be a pre-war German psychiatry. My
encounter with Freud coincided with a passion still intact today for the
“French” school of psychiatry. Freud discovered psychoanalysis by listening to
hysterics. His interpretive keyhole has
always been hysteria, whereas my generation followed in Lacan’s footsteps,
through the lens of psychoses, especially paranoïa.
Still today, when I am asked, I say that I am
a psychiatrist-psychoanalyst.
