From Interiority to Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Radio in Twentieth-Century France

Abstract

From Interiority to Intimacy:Psychoanalysis and Radio in Twentieth-Century France Judith G. Coffin (bio) In 1967, Radio Luxembourg recruited Menie Grégoire, well known for her journalism, her expertise on “women’s” issues, and her keen interest in psychoanalysis, to host an audience write- and call-in program on the airwaves. Her radio-therapeutic conversations quickly displaced the advice-from-experts programs and family radio dramas that had been staples of Radio Luxembourg since the end of World War II. Radio Luxembourg was a privately owned “radio périphérique”; its shows were produced in Paris, cabled to Luxembourg, and broadcast out. The program reached deep back into France. By 1970, nearly 2.5 million listeners were tuning in to Grégoire, and thousands of them were writing and calling her program. With the systematizing ambition of a social scientist, Grégoire saved and classified the letters she received (nearly one hundred thousand over fifteen years) and took notes on the telephone calls (around sixteen thousand), aiming to create in the process something like a chart of her interlocutors—what one sociologist calls a “geography of the interior” (Ecrits et Cris de la vie, 6, 35; Maréchal, 218).1 Historians can mine Grégoire’s archive for testimony on countless subjects, from provincial culture to the reverberations of 1968 and the changing politics of sexuality. Her notorious 1971 confrontation with gay activists during a live broadcast from the Salle Pleyel in Paris became a French Stonewall, a flashpoint for gay liberation and the whole anti-psychiatric movement.2 But the program was above all a phenomenon of radio and radio’s history. Virtually all the aspects of Grégoire’s enter-prise—her psychoanalytic self-presentation, the audience-participation format, the letters from listeners, and the careful archiving of those letters in the name of sociology and audience research—represent a bundle of ambitions and projects that were central to radio for most of the [End Page 114] twentieth century. Examining even one part of it, as I do here, namely her conception of radio as a psychoanalytic “adventure into the interior,” reveals remarkably enduring conceptions of radio’s power and purpose and throws into relief the historical moments that reshaped those conceptions. It has been more than a decade since Vanessa Schwartz’s influential and compelling “Walter Benjamin for Historians” underscored the centrality of the image to Benjamin’s conception of modernity and summoned historians to turn toward the visual. As Schwartz herself points out, the transformations of culture, human perception, and experience that Benjamin pegged to modern times in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”—a felt collapsing of distance sensory vulnerability, new and more distracted forms of reception, the reconstitution of art as an “object for simultaneous collective experience” and a “change in the mode of participation” in culture—were attributed by many, including Benjamin, to audio as well as to visual media and technologies (1723; Benjamin, 222–23, 228–29).3 Moreover, the qualities that Benjamin’s contemporaries (for reasons we will discuss later) attributed to the auditory in particular—suggestiveness, vulnerability, and interiority—were no less central to the modern self or constitutive of modernity (Connor). Radio proved a powerful magnet to twentieth-century modernists. Radio studios drew in artists and writers from the French surrealists to Benjamin, Carpentier, and Beckett. The “new mental world created by radio” seized the imaginations of modernists in the social sciences, whether psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, or critical theory. The Princeton Radio Research Project, founded by Paul Lazarsfeld in 1937, attracted an eye-popping array of thinkers, including Hadley Cantril, Gordon Allport, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Rudolf Arnheim; the Radio Research Project is but one example of the multidisciplinary fascination with radio and the psychological, political, and commercial possibilities it presented. Not surprisingly, interpreting twentieth-century modernism’s interests in radio as well as, more broadly, communication, sound, hearing, and listening has proved an enormous project, and studying radio’s significance has helped to fuel what deserves to be called a “sonic boom” across the humanities and social sciences. I am interested here in Grégoire’s conception of radio as a distinctively...