Violence: The French View

French psychoanalysts are seeking to enlarge the Freudian heritage at a time when many other analysts consider Freud's formulations dated and applicable to an ever narrower range of problems. While around the world the majority of analysts tend either to supplant the old with new theories or consent to the curtailment of the domain to which psychoanalytic thinking applies, the French strive for an integration of more recent concerns with past formulations. I have discussed this difference between national groups previously in Cultivating Freud's Garden in France (Oliner 1988), when it concerned mainly the evolution of drive theory and theories of narcissism. In the present context, the difference involves the work of French analysts on violence and the negative, issues left unfinished in the classical literature. But despite their common concern for the synthesis between old and new theories, it is not fruitful to treat these writers as if they were part of a group. For instance, Jean Bergeret, an analyst from Lyons, uses the idea of fundamental violence based on the struggle for self-preservation, but his focus shares little else with that of Jean Laplanche, though both use Freud's concept of the instinct of self-preservation. In Laplanche's case it serves as the basis for a theory of sexuality, and the fact that both analysts use a concept that others have abandoned has not created many other commonalities.

Bergeret thinks that violence is inescapable and present from birth on: fundamental violence is biological in nature and defends life. He has elaborated his ideas in a number of illuminating books, Including La Violence Fondamentale (1984), La Violence et La Vie (1994), La Pathologic Narcissique (1996), and in numerous articles. The issue of how this instinctive fight for life, starting in infancy, becomes psychic is never broached by Bergeret, just as Freud never questioned the psychic status of the instinct of self-preservation. In this respect, Bergeret diffe