Psychoanalysis in France

Psychoanalysis has always been animated by mysticism. This is particularly true in France, where a proclivity for verve in expression and design has long been taken as a sign of intellectual achievement, over and above the muddy and generally mundane world of fact—a little evidence goes a long way. What’s more, French psychoanalysis has evolved (devolved is perhaps better) a truly annoying proteanism, and become a rarified confection often sprinkled over philosophy, sociology, or literary studies, in order to make those pursuits more relevant. Of course, the result is often the inverse.

Jacques Lacan, peddling his synthesis of Freud and Saussure at the College de France and other public venues over decades, is the main culprit. Looking back at the heyday of French theory, including figures such as Satre, Merleau-Ponty, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Althusser, and Foucault, we find in all cases a strong dose of psychobabble masquerading as ontological insight. In a world composed of signs, the data painstakingly drawn together in the cognitive acts of social scientists becomes simply an afterthought. After all, does one really need to give reasons for the ad hoc associations that we make on a near constant basis? One thing follows another, just because it does, and its ostensible randomness is proof positive that beneath the dross of the quotidian lurks a deeper level of mind and symbol, the ineffable and unknowable. They should have read Wittgenstein, and remembered his famous closing of the Tractatus:

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

The worst thing, in my opinion, is that this trend has not abated. Derrida, after a series of highly intelligent commentaries on Husserl, set himself to worrying about Hegel’s schoolboy diaries and the evanescence of the Western tradition. At its most extreme, we have Deleuze and Guattari. I remember reading (trying to read) a Deleuze book on Leibniz, where he made the claim that ‘Alice (in Wonderland) clearly has teeth.’ Of course she does, and, for that matter, so do I.

It comes as a relief then, that the French government is attempting to set a new standard for regulating this culturally institutionalized form of witchcraft. Not, unfortunately, to the quiet opprobrium of practicing psychoanalysts. Here is a typical defense of their position, from Bernard-Henri Levy, a generic writer-philosopher-psychoanalyst-sage who enjoys tremendous popularity in France:

"When they speak of 'professionalizing' people whose business is human misery; when they speak of 'evaluating' needs and results; when they try to appoint 'super-prefects' of the soul, grand inquisitors of human sadness - it is to hard not to agree that psychoanalysis is in the firing line."

It is indeed on, if not yet in, the firing line, and if the French government is willing to assume the admirable role of intellectual executioner, we should urge these professors and pundits of the liminal soul to take just one more step forward.