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What Nazism Did to Psychoanalysis is the latest book by Laurence Kahn, a member of the Psychoanalytic Association of France (APF), which she chaired from 2008 to 2010. She is the author of several recent books: Cures d’enfance (Childhood Cures) (2004), Faire parler le destin (Making Destiny Speak) (2005), L’Écoute de l’analyste (The Analyst’s Attentiveness) (2012) and Le psychanalyste apathique et le patient postmoderne (The Apathetic Psychoanalyst and the Postmodern Patient) (2014).
To know my present, I look to my past.
Where does the present of psychoanalysis come from? And from which sources? We no longer study sufficient history in psychoanalysis, and we struggle to pinpoint ourselves in today’s realities. We generally also do not link the daily life of our practices, the concepts with which we work, to their origins and when they were first invented. We sometimes move forward without questioning the genealogy of our concepts, and soon we apply them without understanding; we repeat them without questioning.
Against this kind of defect, Laurence Kahn’s position is always rigorous, and acts as an antidote to theoretical deviations. Her aim in this book is to return to psychoanalysis as a movement crisscrossed by crises, especially those of contemporary history; her most recent titles – Le psychanalyste apathique et le patient postmoderne (The Apathetic Psychoanalyst and the Postmodern Patient) and Faire parler le destin (Making Destiny Speak) – have this aim too. Psychoanalysis belongs to the twentieth century and is tied to its destiny. We have not yet evaluated the consequences of this link, precisely because history and its writing are made of
conceptions, aporias, memories and latencies. If the history of psychoanalysis is marked by trends, advances and setbacks – from neuroses to traumatic pathologies – it is here a question of thinking about how these periods succeed one another, and what each owes to its founding culture.
Sometimes it takes time, and the ap