Freud's Discovery Research Articles

"It's a fight - the whole personality of the patient to win." The development of concepts of psychosis in the Jewish Hospital in Warsaw, 1898-1943.

This study investigates the development of concepts of psychosis in the Jewish Hospital in Warsaw, within the context of social and historical processes to which the hospital was the subject and a broader scope of European concepts of psychosis. In the years 1898-1909, the first chief physician of the psychiatric ward, Adam Wizel, focused mainly on hysteria. The interest in psychoses was initiated by Maurycy Bornsztajn, who started to promote psychoanalytic ideas. The second decade of the functioning of the Jewish Hospital's psychiatric ward was marked by issues concerning the classification of psychoses. In the third decade, after Poland regained independence, psychosis became the main focus of the hospital's staff. Newly appointed psychiatrists, Gustaw Bychowski and Władysław Matecki, contributed substantially to the psychoanalytic understanding of psychosis. Bornsztajn continued to develop his psychoanalytically based concept of psychosis. Wizel changed his attitude toward psychoanalysis and acknowledged the importance of Freud's discoveries. Władysław Sterling contributed to the biological understanding of schizophrenia. In the last period, 1931-1943, the Jewish Hospital in Warsaw struggled with the consequences of the economic crisis in Poland, Wizel's death, and Bychowski's departure, which resulted in the reduced number of publications in the field of psychosis. Nevertheless, Bornsztajn managed to further develop his concept of somatopsychic schizophrenia and Matecki introduced the category of pseudo-neurotic schizophrenia. The psychoanalytic approach developed by Wizel, Bornsztajn, Bychowski, and Matecki was supplemented with other influences, especially phenomenology. Wizel, Bychowski, and Matecki were advocates of the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of psychotic patients.

What Is Expressed in "Free-Association"? Theoretical Notes on the Erotic Poetics of freier Einfalle.

Despite the historical importance of free-association to psychoanalysis, there are theoretical tensions within the discipline as to how we think about what is expressed in free association and why it might be important to listen and become aware of ourselves free associatively. This method has usually been conceived of as a mode of speaking with the purpose of listening in order to hear and to arrive at the formulations of interpretation and insight. Rather than solely having this epistemological purpose, it can also be considered as an ontological freeing of subtle energies leading to greater aliveness. Pivotal to this way of approaching psychoanalytic processes are the "helpful notions" of psychic energy and of repression, with the latter being understood not as an eviction of representational forms from the domain of consciousness, but rather as the deformation of representations into traces of psychic energy that remain actively disruptive within us. The author suggests that, through free-associative processes, the patient and the psychoanalyst can become aware of movements of psychic energy that cannot be formulated in the representationality of self-consciousness. This unorthodox reading of Freud's discoveries leads to an interesting "ontoethical" appreciation of psychoanalytic processes as somatically grounded and erotically poetic.

Культура в психоаналітичній концепції Карен Горні

The purpose of the publication is to analyze views of American psychoanalytic Karen Horney on the relationship between culture and mental life. The main methodological principles of K. Horney are defined: rejection of causal relationship between childhood and mental processes in adult age; rejection of primacy of biological and physiological factors in mental life; rejection of attempts to create universal psychology of humankind. These changes in methodology are the main distinction between Horney's concepts and orthodox Freudianism that also had caused conflict between them. It is found that the main research guideline of K. Horney is the recognition of the influence of culture on the mental life of a person. Culture is understood by K. Horney as a set of values in society that form the demands for an individual. Contradictory demands become the main source of neurosis – repression out anxiety and suppression drives. K. Horney defines the central problem of modern society as competition, which implies aggressive achievement of success. Competition, according to K. Horney, contradicts the desire to gain affection, which is why the "neurotic personality of our time" is formed. Also analyzed are the discussions around whether Karen Horney's theory can be considered psychoanalytic. Despite the criticism of orthodox Freudians, Horney emphasized that her departure from classical psychoanalysis is possible only on the basis of Freud's discoveries. At the same time, whether her concept belongs to psychoanalysis depends on what to consider essential in it: following the dogmas formulated by Freud, or the study of unconscious processes of the human psyche. Since Horney herself adheres to the second thesis, from her point of view she remains a psychoanalyst, as evidenced by her founding of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis

Образ femme fatale в творчестве Достоевского сквозь призму структурного психоанализа Жака Лакана

The interest of psychoanalysis to Dostoevsky's work is due to the consonance of theoretical and literary discourses in the interpretation of unconscious motives that determine human behavior. The most vivid embodiment of Freud's ideas, which influenced modern philosophy, we find in Jacques Lacan, whose concepts of the subject absorbed in language and pleasure allow us to explicate the construction of femme fatale, which can describe a number of female characters of Dostoevsky. In fact, we can talk about Freud's discovery of a hysterical subject, which will later be described by Lacan no longer as a mental pathology, but as one of the structures of the psyche, along with psychotic and perverse. Removing the veneer of simplifying biologism from Freud's ideas, Lacan gives them a new sound in the light of structural linguistics, which fits them into the mainstream of the linguistic turn of philosophy. The interpretation of a number of female images of Dostoevsky carried out in this article through the prism of the Lacanian categorical apparatus allows, on the one hand, to explicate one of the constructs of his novels, and on the other - to draw parallels between the writer's intuitive insights and theoretical findings of the second half of the XX century. The phenomenon of femme fatale is considered on the material of two female characters of Dostoevsky (NastasiaFilippovna and Grushenka), whose obvious hysterical and narcissistic character traits most fully correspond to the image of femme fatale. In addition, the authors argue that femme fatale is primarily a phenomenon of language, that is, the more people talk about it, the more fatal it becomes in the eyes of others. Femme fatale realizes the enjoyment of speech and the capture of the subject by language. The authors consider the aspect of enjoying speech to be an obligatory structural component of this construction. Femme fatale is one of the faces of a Beautiful lady, who, as Lacan writes, is inaccessible to male desire, so the only pleasures that he can afford are fantasy and the enjoyment of speech. However, when he speaking about a woman, a man puts his subjectivity on the line, since the pleasure of the fullness or the pleasure of Another is outside the field of the imaginary and symbolic, and only in them can the subject exist. The desired meeting according to Lacan ends with madness or death, which Dostoevsky demonstrates to us with virtuosity in the scene after the murder of NastasiaFilippovna by Rogozhin. In his heroines, Dostoevsky, with the flair of a psychoanalyst, fixes the mechanism that triggers the utterance of a symptom and the enjoyment of speechwhich provoke the desire to possess and at the same time do not allow its realization, forcing the male heroes to circle around the object of desire in endless repetition and involving more and more victims in this circle. Signifiers cling to signifiers, finding the axis of rotation in the symbolic phallus - the femme fatale.

The hysterical 'truth strike' and the questions it addresses to the contemporary master

Today's hysteria, contemporary with its clinical disappearance from current nomenclatures relayed by neuroscience, is scattered in the 'catch-all' categories of conversion disorders, histrionic personality, etc. These approaches convey what Jacques Lacan called the foreclosure of the subject, or what amounts to saying, its rejection or oblivion, in particular in the relationship to knowledge and to the jouissance of the symptom. The Freudian discovery of the unconscious, and its studies on hysteria, which made hysterical conversion a message to be deciphered, is reduced in the contemporary clinic to the dimension of a disorder to be and no longer to be interpreted, because interpretation implies the subject, its word. Fortunately for the clinic, hysteria has other strings to its bow in which the subject ultimately finds his word.

Para além do Édipo: entre Deleuze-Guattari e Laplanche

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar as maneiras pelas quais o complexo de Édipo foi reelaborado nas formulações de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari, bem como de Jean Laplanche. Tentamos mostrar que as formulações laplancheanas permitem responder a algumas das críticas levantadas pelos autores de O anti-Édipo. Tanto para Laplanche quanto para Deleuze e Guattari, o que está em questão é retomar o que cada um considera como a originalidade da descoberta freudiana: a prioridade do Sexual, no caso do psicanalista, e a prioridade do sexo não humano, no caso dos esquizoanalistas. Após apresentar os principais fundamentos de cada corrente, promovemos uma reflexão sobre as ligações entre o Édipo e as questões de gênero a partir das obras desses autores. Recorrendo também às contribuições de Judith Butler para esse debate, levantamos a hipótese de que as normas de gênero, ao instituírem um sexo binário, servem como suporte para a repressão e o recalque do Sexual e do sexo não humano, que desprezam o binário normativo homem-mulher ou papai-mamãe. Como resultado, acreditamos apontar, com Laplanche e as contribuições da esquizoanálise, para a possibilidade de uma psicanálise pós-edipiana ou, até mesmo, não edipiana.

Le texte, un fantasme littéraire

ContextFor a long time, psychoanalysis has represented a means for literature to analyze the text through the lens of the author's, the reader's, or the characters' unconscious. Based on the works of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jean Bellemin-Noël, and Pierre Bayard, the elements of a literary text are proven to be founded on psychoanalysis. The author of a literary text has no right on his/her work because the latter functions in an unconscious dimension. However, nowadays, and even with the emergence of new perspectives in the field of literary studies, psychoanalysis seems to constitute the rear guard of the critical renewal. The analytic approach revealed by Freud's discoveries makes the reading process of a literary text a double operation of reading and rewriting as well as an intersection between the unconscious of the reader and of the author. ObjectiveThis article aims to study the psychoanalytic aspect of a literary text and to emphasize that any literary text serves to display the unconscious of the author and of the reader, as well as to fulfill a repressed desire. We question not only the function of the literary text, but also its nature and its relationship with the oneiric, the fantastic and the psychoanalytic. MethodThis article unfolds in four parts: (1) the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis; (2) the fusion between literary text and oneiric discourse; (3) the similarities between literary narrative and psychoanalytic discourse; and (4) the fantasmatization of the literary text with effects of desires. We also propose an analysis of a textual “case,” the autobiography of Lucien Jerphagnon. ResultsThe psychoanalysis of a literary text serves to provide the latter with a wide range of meanings, which remain latent at the time of writing. More specifically, the literary text possesses an unconscious, which is the author's, who creates it, and the reader's, who rewrites it. It is also rich with desires and fantasies, and seeks to fulfill them through the writing process and the reading-rewriting process, which transforms it into another text. DiscussionThe discussion, which calls on psychoanalytic references, questions the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis, between textual interpretation and psychoanalytic interpretation, between literature and dreams, and between psychoanalytic and literary discourses, as well as the foundation of the literary text on the fulfilment of a desire. ConclusionThe literary text is “the discourse of desire”. Like the fantasy, it functions through, expresses, and awakens a desire.

Translating the Unconscious: Aleramo's and Delmar's <em>A Woman</em>

Translating the Unconscious:Aleramo's and Delmar's A Woman Carol Mastrangelo Bové (bio) Sibilla Aleramo's novels, especially Una Donna, 1906 (A Woman), engage the reader in powerful modernist texts that anticipate some of Freud's discoveries in the same period, Virginia Woolf's novels by about ten years, and Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex by about forty (Ferme 1999). Una Donna, 1906 (A Woman), merits a re-examination of its relevance for a better understanding of psychoanalytic writing, feminism, and Translation Studies. My reading of this novel will focus on the unconscious desires and fears connected to sexuality and gender. I will refer to the Italian and English versions by the British feminist, Rosalind Delmar, originally published by Virago Limited in 1979, and, to a lesser extent, Maria Lansdale's translation by Putnam's Sons in 1908. Delmar's and Lansdale's translations of Aleramo enable one to better decipher the spirit of the original Italian by providing good but different interpretations to compare with one's own. This comparative, historical method is at the heart of recent developments in literary translation, which now emphasize a text as variable, changing with the mentality and resources of the translator and his or her formation. Internationally recognized scholars such as Emily Apter (Professor of French at NYU), Pascale Casanova (was Associated Researcher at the Center for Arts and Language and Literary Critic in Paris), and David Damrosch (Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University) have written cogently about the increasingly important and innovative role of translation in the study of literature and in the institutions that produce knowledge in the humanities. The emerging translation studies discipline is different from translation as it has been studied for instance, in the 1960s. At that time scholars often thought of a translated text as a literal and equal representation of the original and ignored for the most part the wide range of choices at the translator's disposal, choices that give different and often acceptable meanings to words that put into play a number of possibilities. Translation studies now understands more clearly that important texts in world literature rendered in another language [End Page 139] are different from the originals, manifesting the variety of cultural practices and the richness of linguistic, literary, and philosophical phenomena across linguistic and national borders. Literary translation is thus an interdiscipline drawing on the translator's formation and other historical, material conditions in which she or he lives. Based on the opposition "self/other," to the degree that one normally reproduces in one's own or target language an original or urtext from a foreign tongue, Translation Studies engages, for example, in psychology via psychoanalytic literary criticism—in fact, it has already done so in the work of Antoine Berman (1992) and others. Emily Apter, for instance, connects Translation Studies, in the context of psychoanalytic theory and group psychology, to foreign policy and efforts to promote world peace. She states that "mistranslation in the art of diplomacy thus comes to signal an intractable non-translatability between nations, a condition of catastrophic blocage that inspires paranoid projection and the moral calculus of the zero-sum game (in which whatever benefits one side is assumed to hurt the other). She gives a specific example of how mistranslation led to, if not the Franco-Prussian War, at least to a symptom of the "impossibility of dialogue constitutive of the truth of Franco-Prussian relations" (Apter 2006, 20-21). In this way, Berman's and Apter's work builds on the parallel established by Paul Ricoeur between the repression of fears and desires within the psyche, on the one hand, and censorship/banishment in groups or nations, on the other. Our contemporary period may be apparently more open to emotions considered taboo in the past, like the bisexual desire of Aleramo and her narrators. Yet increasing conflicts within individuals and between nations indicate, I would argue, as does Apter, a need to confront them. Scholars and non-academic readers in the United States and abroad often overlook Aleramo's seminal text in Italian and English, not to speak of the unconscious drives operating at the...

Advenimientos de lo real: psicoanálisis y política del síntoma

El propósito del trabajo es destacar el dispositivo analítico como un espacio político en acto para el tratamiento de lo real en la época. Podemos señalar, con Lacan, que lo real que adviene por efectos de la ciencia en su articulación con la economía de mercado introduce, por una vía política, sus consecuencias sobre la subjetividad. En la experiencia de la práctica analítica nos encontramos con la forma singular delsíntoma ante los advenimientos de lo real de la época; donde, en muchos casos, la precariedad del lazo social, la banalización de la palabra consumida en “packs” disfrazada de discurso y otra serie de manifestaciones redoblan la apuesta del psicoanalista: restituir el estatuto al sujeto del inconsciente. Es en ese acto ético y político donde el descubrimiento freudiano mantiene su vigencia, no sin redimensionar el lugar del analista en el malestar en la cultura. Produciendo de un advenimiento un acontecimiento que trastoca la posición del sujeto.

HISTORICIZING FREUD: AUTOPSY OR REINCARNATION?

The publication between 2014 and 2017 of four substantial historical biographies of Sigmund Freud raises a number of questions that should be of interest to intellectual and cultural historians. Both Freud's reputation as a pioneering empirical investigator and brilliant theorist of human subjectivity, and his influential role in framing public discussion of the unconscious dynamics and conscious expressions of the “psyche” or the “soul” have been declining for a number of decades. Apparently we have finally reached that point in time at which W. H. Auden's famous comment (in his 1939 elegy) that Freud was “a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives” no longer resonates.1 Unlike the last major historical Freud biography, Peter Gay's Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), which still worked assiduously to sustain the contemporary presence and thus cross-cultural and cross-temporal validity of Freud's discoveries as empirically grounded, universal rational truths, recent works by Frederick Crews, Joel Whitebook, Élisabeth Roudinesco, and Peter-André Alt attempt to historicize Freud's work in a more critical and fundamental fashion. The perspectives governing all of these studies are self-consciously “historical.” They build their interpretations of Freud's work and their judgements regarding its claims on investigations of the temporally situated, personal, sociocultural and theoretical contexts which conditioned and therefore limited or “relativized” its meaning and its truth. For three of the biographers (all except Crews) this also implies that Freud's work was not so much a completed articulation of an investigative method (either positivist or hermeneutical) that unveiled a singular interpretation or “discovery” of a general truth as the representation of an open-ended process of investigating and thinking through the problem of the origin, development and nature of the human “soul.” From this perspective the attempt to grasp Freud's work as a fully articulated truth or completed interpretation that can now be seen as historically limited or framed by specific cultural contexts is to read Freud's life and work within assumptions about closed cultural systems or temporally bounded climates of opinion, assumptions that have themselves become a part of the historical past.

Unconscious phantasy as a structural principle and organizer of mental life: The evolution of a concept from Freud to Klein and some of her successors

Starting with Freud's discovery of unconscious phantasy as a means of accessing his patients’ internal world, the author discusses the evolution of the concept in the work of Melanie Klein and some of her successors. Whereas Freud sees phantasy as a wish fulfilling imagination, dominated by primary process functioning and kept apart from reality testing, Klein understands phantasies as a structural function and organizer of mental life. From their very beginnings they involve object relations and gradually evolve from primitive body‐near experiences to images and symbolic representations. With her concept of projective identification in particular, Klein anticipates the communicative function of unconscious phantasies. They are at the basis of processes of symbolization, but may also be put into the service of complex defensive operations. The author traces the further evolution of the concept from the contributions of S. Isaacs, the theories of thinking proposed by W.R. Bion and R. Money‐Kyrle, Hanna Segal's ideas on symbolization and reparation all the way to the latest approaches by R. Britton, J. Steiner and others, including the understanding of transference and counter‐transference as a ‘total situation’. Points of contact with Freud are to be found particularly in connection with his concept of ‘primal phantasies’. In the author's view, the idea of the transmission and communicative potential of unconscious phantasies enabled these authors to overcome the solipsistic origins of drive theory in favour of a notion in which unconscious phantasies both set down the coordinates of the inner world and form and reflect the matrix of inter‐subjective relations.

Cognitive-Humanistic Psychodynamics: Sidney Blatt's Theoretical-Philosophical Legacy.

A number of broad-based, theoretical-philosophical tenets are to be gleaned from Sidney Blatt's voluminous, extensive, and unique scholarly work. Dominant themes in Blatt's life and work include (1) his fascination with cognition, particularly mental maps, or representations, of reality; (2) the influence of humanistic values (e.g., agency, need for growth, gestalts, need for balance, and an optimistic focus on resilience); and (3) a steadfast adherence to Freud's revolutionary discovery of the dynamic unconscious. Philosophically speaking, Blatt has left a unique, integrative, and vibrant legacy for the field, one that might be called cognitive-humanistic psychodynamics.

Screen Memories: a Neglected Freudian Discovery?

In 1899, Freud introduced the concept of screen memories. His insights were revolutionary: screen memories do not emerge into consciousness at the time of recall, he argued; they are formed at that time and, moreover, historical accuracy is not their prime concern. In this article, the author reviews two of Freud’s screen memories, as well as two screen memories from a completed analysis of one of his own patients. He argues that, if screen memories are formed, a concept such as screen work must be invoked as the agent of their formation. While screen memories may theoretically be formed at any stage of life, adolescence may be a prime time for their formation.

Perversion, religion, et économie libidinale : l'origine de « La Notion de dépense »

Most commentaries on Georges Bataille's famous article, “The Notion of Expenditure,” emphasize the direct influence of Marcel Mauss's theory of the gift. This article returns to the “origin” of Bataille's text, namely, the intellectual debates around the Communist journal La Critique sociale (1931–1934), in order to understand its various sources. We insist in particular on the impact of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's psychopathological developments and of Freud's first libidinal theories. Bataille's understanding of reality in the early 1930s, despite his initiation to Marxian premises, is hardly based on “historical materialism.” It corresponds more to “a succession of vicious excessive research” opposing all laws and conventions of humanity. How does Bataille's interest in Krafft-Ebing's writing on perversion and religion create immediately a controversy among his Marxist colleagues? How do Freud's discoveries of infantile sexuality and a pleasure “without purpose” help Bataille in turn to construct a positive pole of asocial impulses, that he would later call the “unproductive expenditure”? This article gives an overview of these exchanges and debates.

A Vocabulary and Its Vicissitudes: Notes towards a Memoir

A series of reflections on Laplanche and Pontalis's Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, one of the precursor volumes of the Dictionary of Untranslatables, and specifically on Laplanche's effort to glean the most important lessons to be culled from that speculative volume on the translation of German into French. Laplanche, in Vie et mort en psychanalyse, posits that, until one gauges the significance of the chiasmus structuring the evolution of Freud's metapsychology, the sense of Freud's discovery will not have been grasped. In this essay, the translator of Vie et mort uncovers the chiasmus that structures the evolution of Laplanche's own thought and reflects on the role which that figure has played in his own career as a critic.

BENVENISTE, LACAN E O ESTRUTURALISMO: SOBRE O SENTIDO ANTITÉTICO DAS PALAVRAS PRIMITIVAS

Este artigo pretende evidenciar determinados aspectos da leitura estruturalista de Benveniste sobre as fundamentações linguísticas encontradas em Freud, mais propriamente em seu texto “Sobre o sentido antitético das palavras primitivas”. Coloca-se em diálogo o artigo de Benveniste intitulado “Observações sobre a função da linguagem na descoberta freudiana” com as teorizações linguísticas apresentadas por Freud em seu texto supracitado. Busca-se, assim, uma interface entre os estudos linguísticos e psicanalíticos, problematizando a noção de língua primitiva trazida por Freud e confrontando-a com pressupostos da Linguística Estrutural defendida por Benveniste. A abordagem tecida é eminentemente teórica, buscando iluminar os pontos de divergência entre a concepção de linguagem na perspectiva de Freud e de Benveniste. Para atingir esse objetivo, buscou-se o estudo sobre a negação desenvolvida por Freud em seu texto “A negativa” e colocou-a em relação com as observações de Benveniste sobre o linguista Carl Abel, forte influência linguística no pensamento freudiano desenvolvido no texto “Sobre o sentido antitético das palavras primitivas”. Como conclusão, torna-se possível compreender que, se a língua é uma estrutura e um sistema, ela possui um caráter universal e a-histórico, o que contesta a tese freudiana sobre a existência de línguas primitivas.

Freud with Charcot: Freud's discovery and the question of diagnosis

Although Charcot's seminal role in influencing Freud is widely stated, although Freud's trip to Paris to study with Charcot is well recognized as pivotal in his shift from neurological to psychopathological work, a key fact of the Freudian heuristic remains largely underestimated: namely, that Freud's psychopathological breakthrough, which gave birth to psychoanalysis, cannot be separated from his ‘diagnostic preoccupation’, which is a crucial and at times the first organizing principle of his earliest writings. The purpose of this article is therefore to reopen the question of diagnosis by following its development along the path leading from Charcot to Freud. The authors demonstrate that Freud's careful attention to diagnostic distinctions follows strictly in the direction of Charcot's ‘nosological method’. More importantly, the article intends to identify the precise way in which his ideas operate in Freud's own work, in order to understand how Freud reinvests them to forge his own nosological system. If the authors trace the destiny of Charcot's lessons as they reach Freud's hands, it is the importance granted to mixed neuroses in Freud's psychopathology that allows them to pinpoint the role played by the diagnostic process in the rationality of psychoanalysis.

Significado de la obra de Freud

Es difícil poder apreciar hasta dónde alcanza hoy por hoy la influencia de los descubrimientos de Freud y de la mentalidad por ellos plasmada, y, más aun, qué proyecciones pueda tener en el futuro. Empero, es legítimo asegurar que ninguna adquisición de la ciencia contemporánea está llamada a juzgar un papel más importante en la cultura que la correspondiente al Psicoanálisis, ya que, al mismo tiempo, encarna una nueva esfera del saber y un nuevo medio de conocimiento, siendo aquella del dominio más importante de la naturaleza humana: el alma.

Infant observation and the French model

Psychoanalytic training in the French Societies belonging to the International Psychoanalytic Association does not grant any place to the observation of babies as it exists in certain societies of other countries. Infant observation is even the object of sharp critiques by eminent French theoreticians. The reasons given for condemning infant observation and refusing to give it any place in the training programme lie in theoretical positions concerning the very nature of the Freudian discovery and its interpretation, which is more idealistic than empirical. The author discusses these reasons while drawing attention to the frequent confusion between a reference to empiricism and a reference to the experimental. The fear of a psychologizing deviation of metapsychology and of a denial of psychic reality leads, in the French model, to placing the emphasis on personal analytic experience during the candidate’s psychoanalysis, prolonged by supervisions. It excludes any academic teaching of metapsychology or of related disciplines. The confusion between the empiricism of Esther Bick’s method and the recourse to experimental procedures in developmental research stands in the way of making a place for infant observation and of recognizing its training value, not so much for the acquisition of new knowledge or the validation of metapsychological models, as for its usefulness in developing a mode of psychoanalytic observation and an increase in the candidates’ containing capacities.

The Ambivalence of the Sacred in Julia Kristeva

Je vais te dire pourquoi le sacre, pour moi, c'est aussi cela, et peut-etre seulement cela: l'imaginaire. Le feminin et le sacre Julia Kristeva's early work La Revolution du Langage Poetique, frequently mistaken for her doctoral thesis,1 addresses from the beginning the author's epistemological project, which mainly concentrates, next to her linguistic and semiotic background, on a parallel, indeed intertwined study of literature and psychoanalysis. Kristeva's turn to psychoanalysis is conveyed by the idea that creative singularity is not accessible without resorting to the Freudian discovery of the unconscious, audible through a comprehension of language that is not limited to a code-object of linguistics but understood as a loving discourse, actualized through the transference/ counter-transference relationship during the psychoanalytic therapeutic process.2 With the introduction of some of the major concepts in her work (chora, semiotic, thetic), Kristeva expands her interrogation to the understanding of the sacred building upon anthropological researches related to the origins of religion. In her constant dialogue with the father of psychoanalysis, Kristeva not only discusses his major ideas but also recapitulates his methodology: following Freud's example, she integrates psychoanalysis with anthropological findings, using of course a more updated corpus compared to the one used by her predecessor. Diane Jonte-Pace deserves the credit for emphasizing Kristeva's rethinking of Freud's conception of religion in Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, and Civilization and its Discontents in her works Powers of Horror, In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, and Strangers to Ourselves.3 However, the importance of religion in Kristeva's work, repeatedly emphasized, is not to be reduced to methodological premises. She subscribes from the beginning to one of the most decisive Freudian discoveries, that the origins of subjectivity, society, and culture share intrinsically the same fantasies and fears. It is on the basis of the fundamental resemblance between the infancy of the individual and the one of the human race that the question of religion arises in Kristeva's thought. Thus, a concern with the sacred can be traced in all of Kristeva's work, revealing every time the imaginary as a structural element of the psyche and the culture. This intrinsic relationship between the sacred and the imaginary leads to the ultimate question of human creativity and more precisely to the art and literature. But it comes also as a response to the secular universe of modernity which inscribes transcendence in the immanence. I believed, thus I talked It is commonplace that scholars writing on Kristeva are almost always concerned with the clarification of the author's constitutive terms, as if it were necessary to summarize her entire theoretical system in order to discuss a specific issue it addresses. However, it is true that Kristeva is not content to introduce new concepts; she also borrows and redefines notions that have previously been articulated and somewhat established, starting with the Lacanian imaginary. It is thus needed to draw the archaeology of this concept and determine its place within the Kristevan theoretical system. In the first pages of La Revolution du Langage Poetique, Kristeva advances the hypothesis that the foundation of what she calls signifiance, considered in the primitive era as the sacred, is within the capitalist system either disguised into art or condemned as schizophrenia;4 that is, the loss of the symbolic function.5 Signifiance, which includes both the semiotic and the symbolic aspects of the signifying process, is to be found in marginalized, though most frequently collective phenomena witnessing to what the official discourse represses: the process that goes beyond the subject and its communicative structures. …