DE-LACANIZING BIOGRAPHIES: LACAN’S, FREUD’S AND ONE’S OWN. AN INTERVIEW WITH ÉLISABETH ROUDINESCO

Abstract

Logos interviewed the well-known psychoanalyst and historian of psychoanalysis on the occasion of the release of the Russian translation of her biography Freud: In His Time and Ours as a joint publication of the Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture and Ad Marginem Press. The interview begins with a review of her intellectual biography: her education, those who influenced her (Althusser, Canguilhem, de Certeau, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Michelle Perrot), studies of the history of psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan’s biography, the history of French psychoanalysis, the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, works on the “geopolitics” of psychoanalysis), and her debate with radical anti-Freudians (Onfray and American historians of psychoanalysis). When Roudinesco saw that there was no holistic and French approach to the figure of Freud, she undertook a study modelled on medievalist Jacques Le Goff ’s biography of Saint Louis (King Louis IX of France). That choice was deliberate because the history of modern subjectivity can be traced back to the Early Middle Ages when private confidential confession replaced the public admission of fault. Roudinesco felt that it was important to “de-Lacanize” Freud (just as Lacan himself had previously refused to treat his biography in terms of his own theory). A biography of Freud should be both familial and political (covering issues of emancipation and Jewish assimilation among others). One of the keys to his success was the elevation of individual clinical problems to a universal cultural-mythological level. Freud did not reveal the unconscious as the source of human behaviour. Instead, he converted the familial and political circumstances of his era into the unconscious. His errors and should be explained rather than charged against him. At the close of the interview, Roudinesco speaks out about current French and Russian political issues.