Chapter 14 France

The development of psychoanalysis in France has suffered from one specific difficulty since its inception, that of wanting to ‘translate’ it into French. The present authors suppose, as do others, that the difficulties contained in the (literal) translation of Sigmund Freud’s works were connected with the (ideological) problem of translating Freud’s thought. It is known that after Morichau-Beauchant in Poitiers in 1910, it was Regis and Hesnard of Bordeaux who, in 1914, published the first account in French of psychoanalytical theory (ed. Alcan). Freud did not really appreciate the criticisms of these authors, who appeared to him to have distorted his ideas. In 1915 Sándor Ferenczi took it upon himself to attack them in an article entitled ‘Psychoanalysis as seen by the Bordeaux Psychiatric School’. Regis and Hesnard insisted that if a theory (ed. Alcan) was to be accepted in France it should be ‘synthetical and clearly expressed’. The two authors omitted, however, to mention the unconscious in their definition of psychoanalysis, and supposed that psychoanalysis was ‘inspired by a vast system of interpretation’. For them, the notion of ‘pansexualism’ replaced that of infantile sexuality. They thus tried to differentiate the origin of a disorder from its cause, which is, perforce, organic and cerebral. They suggested that words such as ‘libido’, ‘sexuality’, etc., should be replaced by the word ‘affect’. In addition, the method was too ‘subjective’, and would it not be better to ‘reduce the complex to silence by an even greater intensification of repression, rather than uncovering it?’

This critical attitude undoubtedly influenced the following decades. We have seen how Eugenie Sokolnicka had found credit mainly with the writers of the Gallimard publishing house. ‘Did this craze really serve the cause of analysis?’ questioned Victor Smirnoff (1979) in an article about the origins of ‘psychoanalysis à la