Commentary on Pierre Marty's The Narcissistic Difficulties Presented to the Observer by the Psychosomatic Problem

I was asked by the Editors if I would comment on Pierre Marty's ‘key paper’ from the point of view of someone from ‘a different tradition.’ After reading The narcissistic difficulties presented to the observer by the psychosomatic problem, I readily assented for four reasons. First, because, despite the work of McDougall (1978, 1989) during the 1970s and 1980s, Oliner (1988), Aisenstein (2006, 2008), my own paper (Gottlieb, 2003), and a few others (e.g. Simpson, 2003, pp. 700, 706-7), the work of the locally influential Paris psychosomaticien school of psychoanalysts is still little known outside of France. Few works by the founders of this branch of psychosomatic theory and treatment have been published in English. Even the important early paper of Marty and de M'Uzan (1963) that established the importance of the concept of la pensée opératoire (a form of concrete, non-self-reflective, stimulus-bound thought) had never appeared in English, so that, when I was researching the subject in 2002, I had to prepare my own translation. In introducing his recent English translation of a paper of De M'Uzan (2003[1984]), Simpson attributed the relative lack of representation of this French school in the anglophone psychoanalytic world to “difficulties in translation, both linguistic and cultural” (Simpson, 2003, p. 699)

Secondly, the psychosomaticien school has by now been continuously around for more than 50 years and is well into its ‘second generation’ of theorists and clinicians. Moreover, like similar efforts in Germany and elsewhere — but not in the United States — psychoanalytic psychosomatics in France enjoys the financial support of the national government. The Pierre Marty Institute was founded in 1972. The Pierre Marty Hospital (an outpatient facility founded in 1978 as the Poternes-des-Peupliers Hospital and located in Paris) employs a large number of psychoanalysts who work within the theoretical framework of the psychosomaticien school. Government support has fac