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In March 2009, a tribute to Michel de M'Uzan, pillar of French psychoanalysis for more than 50 years, was organized by a research group at the University of Paris-Ouest-Nanterre. At the initiative of Professor Emeritus C. Baruch, the research group directed by Professor D. Cupa structured the conference as a dialogue between Michel de M'Uzan and several colleagues. Nouveaux Développements en Psychanalyse [Recent Developments in Psychoanalysis] brings together in a single volume the interventions of the conference, all of which were responses to M. de M'Uzan's opening intervention: ‘Reconsiderations and New Developments in Psychoanalysis’.
With elegance and concision, Michel de M'Uzan presents and then discusses, with several eminent colleagues, his current thinking, ‘reconsiderations’ regarding theory, clinical work and technique in psychoanalysis today.
Three factors provide the basis for Michel de M'Uzan's decision to reconsider psychoanalysis: theory, clinical work and technique. He opens his essay with a discussion of three theoretical propositions: the notion of instinctual movement [pulsion], and in particular the death instinct; Freud's abandonment of his ‘neurotica’ in 1897, that is, the theory of seduction; and finally, with regard to structural theory, which is called in French the second topographical theory, M. de M'Uzan ‘reconsiders’ Freud's second instinctual theory.
A firm adherent of the topographical theory, M. de M'Uzan argues that, if one is rigorous metapsychologically, an instinctual movement can only be psychosexual, given that it has a source, a pressure, an aim and an object. It would follow then that, strictly speaking, there is no self-preservation instinct. In Freud's first instinctual theory, sexual instincts attach themselves to vital “functions serving the purpose of self-preservation” (Freud, SE 7, p. 182) before proceeding towards auto-eroticism. De M'Uzan argues that these “vital-identity” functions belong to an essentially genetic prog