Freud in French dress

Press, 19 April 1980, Page 17

Freud in French dress

Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud's French Revolution. By Sherry Turkle. Burnett Books, 1979. 267 pp. $22.70. (Reviewed by Ralf Unger) A fascinating study is here which displays how major theories of human nature, packed for export to another culture, become changed according to the pressures within that culture. The export of psychoanalysis many decades ago to America, by Freud himself, met a mixture of optimism, individualism and voluntarism, which accepted psychoanalytic therapy in the belief that people can change themselves by .their own efforts if they want to. In France psychoanalysis led to an emphasis on analytic understanding of all aspects of living, including politics, rather than to promises of any “cure.” In France psychoanalytic premises have become a common reference shared by Communist Party and nonparty Marxism, Utopians and Anarchists, as well as the radical antiMarxists, which burst forth in that country in 1977 under the name of the New Philosophy. • Freud was never popular, in France until the events of May and June, 1968, when students took over the universities and tore out the cobblestones of Paris to reach a symbolic “beach” underneath. The controversial leader of the psychoanalytic movement in France, Lacan, reinterpreted Freud to give views on Marxism, feminism and the anti-psychiatry movement. The events of 1968 broke down the apparent absolutes of French family traditions and rituals, prestige, religious faith and long-established institutions. It seemed that the psychoanalysts were the new experts for social problems; they had been around f;r a long time, but their voice had not been heeded. A different Freud was “invented,” who matched the national texture of the social, intellectual and political life. Lacan became a part of the political

upsurge, and it is claimed he even smuggled the student leader, Danie, Cohn-Bendit, in the back of his own Jaguar across the border into West Germany when the revolution finally petered out. Later, community treatment centres, under Lacan’s influence, were used as bases for a distinctly non-medical and antihierarchial psychoanalytic practice. Political alliances were made with the non-party Left and the psychoanalytic establishment, which was itself torn by constant argument and dissension on such issues as Lacan’s five minute therapeutic sessions. The critics now claim that psychoanalysis, as practised in France, has inherited the asylum’s role of social control more subtly and more repressively. It helps, they say, to describe • a whole spectrum of behaviour as pre-pathological, including behaviours that a given society at a given time finds bizarre, immoral or politically inconvenient.

For those who are familiar with the basic Viernese Freud, this is a most interesting look at how he has been transmuted, not only in France, but in the United States which has become his strongest advertiser but, it is sometimes forgotten, has developed aspects in his writings which fitted in to already prevalent thinking and has been adapted with the Americanisation of Freud’s unconscious. Even though he wrote impeccably, so many of his ideas lent ! themselves to reinterpretation by their very magnitude that inevitably these changes have taken place. This book interweaves political change and socio-economic evolution with the wide acceptance of other theories throughout the whole of French life, so that according to the author, books on psychoanalysis and related subjects now sell like hot cakes where before they yellowed on the shelves. It is well worth study by the professional psychologist, sociologist, and layman interested in the non-accidental nature of events in a nation’s history.