Psychoanalysis, Model or Truth

The case of the Controversial Discussions in the British Psychoanalytic Society is an example of a failure that has left two psychoanalytic schools of thought coexisting within the same Society without having elaborated their fundamental differences: the only accepted shared elements, being limited to the frequency and duration of sessions, were not clinico-theoretical. At the meetings of the British Society, many speakers, before intervening, announced their membership in this or that subgroup before announcing: “As a contemporary Freudian, I would say that … ” In many congresses and symposia, “the Controversies” persist in parallel presentations, in which one position is listened to by the other as an erroneous one justifying their own position.

In France, the antinomy between those groups subservient to Lacan and those French societies that belong to the IPA is intense. Behind the theoretical differences lurk accusations of malpractice. But I would wager that such implicit accusations are universal. Serge Lebovici told me that one day, when he was attending a meeting of the British Society, his neighbour, seeing Winnicott entering, said to him: “Here comes the assassin … ” Our attachment to theories that we consider “true” are partly ways to reassure ourselves, to allay feelings of guilt: “My patient is not progressing that well, but I have worked according to the proper procedures.”

The fact that the IPA has accepted a relative theoretical plurality among its constituent societies accentuated what Jorge Canestri and Jacqueline Amati-Mehler have called the “Babel of the Unconscious”. One can only negotiate if one speaks a common language, and we are seeing entrenchments within radical changes in the meaning of terms designating fundamental concepts and in the very conception of treatment. An example of this is the fact that the term “sublimation”, which classically describes a destiny of the sexual drives, which change object and are inhibited as to their aim, take