Freud's theory of unconscious mental functioning, and the therapeutic techniques that he developed on the basis of that theory, were slow to gain a following in France. For an extended period in 1885-6 Freud was an observer at Charcot's neurological clinic at La Salpêtrière. He was greatly impressed by Charcot's intellectual authority, his diagnostic powers, and the entire attitude of detachment and precision-seeking that he brought to the study of mental disorders. For Charcot, mental disorders had physical causes, and it was the neurologist's responsibility to discover these, localize them in human bodies, and so organize his results that a comprehensive map of human suffering could eventually be drawn. In Charcot's hands, La Salpêtrière had become a vast museum of living human subjects, a classificatory system built in stone. Freud was to base his analysis of mental suffering not upon organic lesions, but upon the disruptions caused by infantile sexual traumas. But throughout the 1890s, when Freud's researches were gradually bringing him closer to that psychology of the unconscious which was to remain his principal scientific concern, Charcot continued to represent in Freud's mind an ideal of scientific rigour.
Freud's debt to Charcot, his admiration for French literature, and his fond memories of Paris did not however oblige the French to do anything in return. Breton and the Surrealists were relatively isolated in their enthusiasm for his work. Die Traumdeutung (1900) did not appear in French until 1926 (as La Science des rêves, translated by I. Meyerson), and other major works followed haphazardly. The Société Psychanalytique de Paris was founded in 1926 by René Laforgue, Marie Bonaparte, Rodolphe Loewenstein, Édouard Pichon, and six others, and remained small until well after World War II. During the Occupation its activities were suppressed.
Three factors are especially important in explaining this slowness of response to psychoanalysis, both inside the medical profession and in French culture at large. First, psychiatry in France was ill prepared for the new doctrine. It had a strong tradition of research into the organic causes of mental illness, and possessed its own ‘new’ psychotherapist in the formidable person of Pierre Janet (1859-1947), a renegade pupil of Charcot's. Like Freud, he was seeking outside the physiological domain for modes of explanation which would give due weight to the emotional history of his patients and to their wishes for themselves. Although Janet took some account of sexuality, and made some play with the idea of the unconscious, he placed an emphasis in treatment on the role played by the patient's will and his or her power to make reasonable choices and pursue emotionally fulfilling activities. But there was enough general similarity between the range of problems tackled by the two thinkers to make them seem like competitors. And it clearly served the interests of aspiring junior members of the profession in France to acquiesce in the view that a world already containing a Janet could not possibly be in need of a Freud.
Secondly, in the absence of informed spokesmen and a full range of accurate translations, Freud's thought soon fell prey to scandalmongers and myth-making pamphleteers. He was regularly attacked as the purveyor of ideas which were newfangled and obscure, but which were all too clearly the products of a morbid and prurient interest in sex. For these writers, Freudianism was a moral disease rather than a therapeutic method.
Thirdly, intelligent critical voices were raised against Freud well before his ideas had received a full public hearing. Two of these voices are particularly impressive: those of Georges Politzer in Critique des fondements de la psychologie (1928) and Sartre in L' Être et le néant (1943). Although the two books are quite different in their aims and scope, both writers have the same general complaint to make against Freud: he seemed to promise, but failed to provide, a science of personality in which the deeds, motives, desires, intentions, and projects of the individual subject would retain their density and complexity; instead, he built a series of elaborate and conceptually insecure abstract models of the human mind. Politzer announced a ‘concrete psychology’ and Sartre an ‘existential psycho-analysis’, both of which were to do what Freud had failed to do.
From having been resistant to psychoanalysis earlier in the century, France became one of its principal intellectual centres from the early 1950s onwards. This change was brought about by a single original-minded and charismatic analytic practitioner: Lacan. For many years the institutional history of Lacanian psychoanalysis was a troubled one, marked by a series of expulsions, secessions, and splits. But Lacan's reformulation of Freud's theory had two profound effects. On the one hand, it encouraged numerous French scholars to return to the Freudian texts, to elucidate them, and to carry on working in directions that Freud himself had only begun to explore. Sometime pupils of Lacan like André Green, Serge Leclaire, Jean Laplanche, and J.-B. Pontalis comprised an energetic second generation of French theorists, and Laplanche and Pontalis's Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (1967) and the Laplanche essays collected as Problématiques (1981- ) are among the outstanding psychoanalytic works produced anywhere since the death of Freud.
On the other hand, Lacan's teaching, especially in the two decades following the publication of his Écrits (1966), gave psychoanalytic concepts an extraordinary general currency in France. Together with Marxism, semiology, and deconstruction, psychoanalysis became one of the main component languages of an entire metropolitan culture. It was by way of a creative and committed reaction to psychoanalysis that such ‘post- Beauvoir’ French feminists as Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva achieved their distinctive political and theoretical voices.
Lacanian psychoanalysis now has the makings of an international movement comparable in scope to that of the largely Anglo-American International Psychoanalytical Association. Its peculiar osmotic relationship with literature, and the new glamour that it seems to many to confer upon literary interpretation, have caused it to displace orthodox Freudian approaches and the brilliant, eccentric ‘psychocriticism’ of Charles Mauron in many of the humanities departments of Western universities.
[Malcolm Bowie]
