In Freud’s Tracks: Conversations from the Journal of European Psychoanalysis

249 Pages·2008·2.963 MB·English

by  Sergio Benvenuto, Anthony Molino

In Freud’s Tracks
New Imago: Series in Theoretical, Clinical, and Applied Psychoanalysis
Series Editor
Jon Mills, Canadian Psychological Association
New Imago: Series in Theoretical, Clinical, and Applied Psychoanalysis
is a scholarly and professional publishing imprint devoted to all aspects of
psychoanalytic inquiry and research in theoretical, clinical, philosophical,
and applied psychoanalysis. It is inclusive in focus, hence fostering a spirit
of plurality, respect, and tolerance across the psychoanalytic domain. The
series aspires to promote open and thoughtful dialogue across disciplinary
and interdisciplinary fields in mental health, the humanities, and the social
and behavioral sciences. It furthermore wishes to advance psychoanalytic
thought and extend its applications to serve greater society, diverse cultures,
and the public at large. The editorial board is comprised of the most noted and
celebrated analysts, scholars, and academics in the English speaking world
and is representative of every major school in the history of psychoanalytic
thought.
Titles in Series:
Desire, Self, Mind, and the Psychotherapies: Unifying Psychological Science
and Psychoanalysis, by R. Coleman Curtis.
In Freud’s Tracks: Conversations from the Journal of European Analysis,
edited by Sergio Benvenuto and Anthony Molino
In Freud’s Tracks
Conversations from the
Journal of European Psychoanalysis
edited by
Sergio Benvenuto and Anthony Molino
JASON ARONSON
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
A JASON ARONSON BOOK
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Copyright © 2009 by Jason Aronson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
In Freud’s tracks : conversations from the Journal of European Analysis / edited by Sergio
Benvenuto and Anthony Molino.
p. cm. — (New imago: series in theoretical, clinical, and applied psychoanalysis)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7657-0630-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7657-0630-X (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7657-0632-4 (electronic)
ISBN-10: 0-7657-0632-6 (electronic)
1. Psychoanalysis. 2. Psychoanalysts—Interviews. I. Benvenuto, Sergio. II. Molino,
Anthony, 1957– III. Journal of European Analysis.
BF173.I425 2009
150.19’5—dc22 2008034418
Printed in the United States of America
(cid:0)(cid:64) ™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
CONTENTS
Preface 7
Anthony Molino
Introduction 11
Sergio Benvenuto
I WINDOWS ON HISTORY 25
Life and Times, Values and Visions 27
Johannes Cremerius
Freudianism in France 47
Elisabeth Roudinesco
Psychoanalysis in America 61
Otto Kernberg
The ‘Impossible’ Training of Analysts 77
Elvio Fachinelli
Into Fiction, Through Catastrophe 95
Christopher Bollas
II PSYCHOANALYSIS, PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS 107
The Emergence of the Unconscious in Western Thought 109
Michel Henry
Freudian Models of Language 123
Julia Kristeva
Psychoanalysis and Sacrifice 139
René Girard
The Psychoanalyst’s Narcissistic Wound 159
Isabelle Stengers
Of Autonomy, Individualism and Psychoanalysis 169
Cornelius Castoriadis
6 In Freud’s Tracks
III CLINICAL PRACTICE AND SOCIETY 183
The Mirror’s Child 185
Françoise Dolto
Masochism and Sexuality 201
Jean Laplanche
Narcissim: The American Contribution 209
Otto Kernberg
Group Analysis Today 219
Diego Napolitani
Psychoanalysis and Homosexuality 227
Elisabeth Roudinesco
Contributors 245
About the Editors 247
PREFACE
Anthony Molino
‘Each clinical and theoretical development, each case presentation, is about
the survival and development of the analyst, though the detail of it is usually
kept secret, private, unacknowledged, unconscious… and this makes it hard
to know what we, readers and listeners, have heard or read, and who we are
in relation to it. But when we can exchange something of our autobiogra-
phies, and hold one another’s difficulty as we do with our patient, we have
some basis for a meeting, for some mutual understanding, and for possible
transformation through the immediacy of contact with another’s survival
and development’. So write Gershon Molad and Judith Vida in a paper
titled ‘The Autobiographical Dialogue between Analysts’ (See Relational
and Intersubjective Perspectives in Psychoanalysis. J. Mills, ed. Aronson,
2005). Readers familiar with my earlier collections of interviews, Freely
Associated and Culture, Subject, Psyche primarily, will easily fathom the
extent to which I share Molad and Vida’s appreciation for the transitional
spaces and objects, for the I-Thou bridges, that are evoked and established
in the temenos of the actual human encounter between any two ‘subjects of
analysis’ (Ogden).
When the subjects, however, that trace and inhabit that temenos are ana-
lysts themselves, or figures who have for a lifetime passionately engaged the
elusive restlessness of the unconscious, then that sacred space invites, and
indeed demands, a particular kind of respectful violation. (The Greek τεμενος
means field, estate, but also sacred ground, sanctuary, temple.) There is no
space for a reader’s reverence or adulation, no distance safely kept, no sense
– ultimately – to any transferential mystification of the parents or gods such
figures will summon. For any such outcome, any such approach, can only sig-
nify the failure of our encounter, as readers, with the pairs that inhabit books
like In Freud’s Tracks. A sublimated voyeurism, if you will, or, more simply,
the desire to know the other, to partake of the logics and vagaries of another’s
thinking and suffering, is essential to the destruction of the intimacy gener-
ated in the field of the temenos. Only then, with vertices joined, is a genuine
triangle – and thus a community – realized; only then is dyadic intimacy made
8 In Freud’s Tracks
fruitful. Only then, one might say, does that peculiar version of the Freudian
pair that is the autobiographical interview, or conversation, truly en/gender
and come to life.
* * *
Readers familiar with my earlier books will understand just how and why
the Journal of European Psychoanalysis came to appeal to me years ago.
As anyone who has ever attended an international congress will know, the
privileged link of psychoanalysis to spoken language does not necessarily
facilitate communication among analysts and psychotherapists of differ-
ent mother tongues. The Journal of European Psychoanalysis – published
since 1995 – has long sought to overcome these linguistic barriers. Tra-
ditionally, it has introduced English readers to important European au-
thors, as well as to authors of Latin American countries whose paradigms
are close to European ‘styles’. More importantly, however, freed of the
editorial and political constraints that often govern the ‘official’ organs of
schools and institutions, JEP has, for many years, regularly featured con-
versations with some of the most prominent and brilliant figures in con-
temporary psychoanalysis: highlighting debates and trends within psycho-
analysis and related fields while remaining ever-sensitive to the practical,
ethical, and theoretical implications of clinical practice. And while these
conversations were not always refulgent gems of style, their occasional
imperfections only added to the reasons for someone like myself – long
devoted to the genre, and a stickler for getting pleasurable texts to preserve
the memory of such precious encounters – to want to compile, smooth and
polish where possible the wealth of material known, in all likelihood, to
but a select few worldwide. For the Journal of European Psychoanalysis
has survived, until now, with hardly any distribution and thanks mostly to
the support of fervid friends and subscribers. But its resilience is attested
to by the vitality of the encounters here presented, most of them sought
and spurred over time by my co-editor Sergio Benvenuto, founder of the
journal and promoter of an enduring labor of love whose efforts, I hope,
will long spill over beyond these pages. And that vitality, I might add, is
even evidenced by the undying wisdom and inquisitive fire that issue still
from the conversations with colleagues no longer with us: analysts like
Françoise Dolto and Johannes Cremerius, Elvio Fachinelli and Cornelius
Castoriadis, whose blazing, lifetime commitments to the temenos of psy-
choanalysis have not yet ceased to impassion, educate and inspire. Indeed,
my bet in compiling In Freud’s Tracks is that their pedagogical impulse is
far from extinct. And with that bet comes the hope that while their writings
Preface 9
are practically unknown in English (as is the case with Cremerius, Dolto,
Fachinelli and others), their presence here will compel some daring trans-
lator or publisher to want to stake a bet of his own…
* * *
In Freud’s Tracks collects – across three balanced but, to some degree, in-
variably overlapping sections – some of the most engaging and provocative
of the conversations hosted over the past decade by the Journal of European
Psychoanalysis. These conversations manage, in my view, not only to trace
a recent history of psychoanalytic thought, but they do so while insisting
happily upon the discipline’s vital and vibrant connections with the fields of
politics and social policy, science and philosophy, cultural studies and the
social sciences. Here convened, in a longstanding international forum at the
frontiers of psychoanalytic inquiry, are thinkers and clinicians as esteemed
and diverse as Christopher Bollas, René Girard, the late Michel Henry,
Otto Kernberg, Julia Kristeva, Jean Laplanche, Diego Napolitani, Elisabeth
Roudinesco, Isabelle Stengers, together with the cited Castoriadis, Cremer-
ius, Dolto and Fachinelli: researchers whose controversial perspectives and
practices have looked to link and transform the contemporary proliferation
of partial understandings that all-too-often relegate psychoanalysis at the
margins of scientific discourse. It is my hope that in partaking of the same
independent spirit as Freely Associated, In Freud’s Tracks will likewise
celebrate, for years to come, the promise and freedom that inhere in any
genuine psychoanalytic enterprise.
* * *
In closing, my thanks to Trevor Brown (Free Association Books), Sergio
Benvenuto, Renato Parascandolo (RAI – Radiotelevisione Italiana), Marie-
Martine Serrano (Editions Payot & Rivages), Marion Colas (Presses Univer-
sitaires de France), Ilaria Angeli (FrancoAngeli Editore), Christopher Bollas,
Mihaela Farcas, Claudia Vaughn, all those interviewed and their estates (when
called upon), as well as the interviewers and translators who have helped
make possible both the Journal of European Psychoanalysis and In Freud’s
Tracks. Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to dedicate In Freud’s
Tracks to the memory of three formidable analysts and teachers – all three
great conversationalists – whose work never made it into the journal or the
book: to Armando B. Ferrari, who before he died gave a wonderful interview
to two Italian colleagues which I hope someday to translate into English; and
to Marie Coleman Nelson and Nina Coltart, two grand old ladies of psycho-