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Why did Freud seek disciples—and why did the best of them so often end up repudiating him? What is the relationship between master and analyst in today's professional psychoanalytic associations?
These are the questions at the heart of Dire Mastery, published first in French in 1976. Roustang is a leading psychoanalyst and author who trained in Lacan's “séminaires.” In his search for answers, Roustang uses both historical accounts and detailed examination of contemporary French psychoanalytic associations. Going back to primary sources, he analyzes Freud's relationships with his disciples as well as Lacan's parallel relationships with his followers. As he focuses on the transference phenomenon, the author raises an issue of the incompatibility of psychoanalysis with society as he sees it and comes up with brilliant though occasionally disturbing paradoxes.
Roustang starts by scrutinizing the discussions between Freud and Abraham, Rank and Ferenczi around the foundation of the International Psychoanalytic Society. As Freud engaged in this project, Roustang notes, he became momentarily unaware that he was taking up the norms of the “artificial crowds” (the Army, the Church), whose structures he was later to analyze in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Roustang's readings of the relationship between Freud and “the savage horde” (Freud's own description in a letter to Groddeck cited on p. 7) is utterly skillful and convincing.