Hearing Them Speak: Voices in Bion, Muriel Spark and Penelope Fitzgerald

Abstract

Visiting London just as the fires celebrating VJ day had died down in September 1945 Lacan, writing in his report, ‘La psychiatre anglaise et la guerre’, describes something if not precisely like an appetite for democracy, then a taste for a democratization of hierarchies which he thinks he has discovered in war-torn Britain. In flight from what he calls the ‘irreality’ and ‘organized delirium’ of collective life in Vichy France, Lacan is quick to confess that his enthusiasm for what he sees in Britain has much to do with his own desires and disappointments. This war, he notes wearily towards the end of his paper, has demonstrated how ‘the dark powers of the super-ego can make alliances with the most cowardly abandonments of conscience’.3 But if the war in France seemed to confirm Freud’s bleakest prognosis about the perilous pleasures of a collective submission to tyranny, from Lacan’s perspective it also provided a unique opportunity, in Britain at least, for psychoanalysis to transform collective morale in such a way as to mobilize people to work together without calling up the dark powers of tyranny.