You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
On the occasion of the homage paid to René Thom in Gif sur Yvette on his 70th birthday, we had the honour of being asked to make a psychoanalytic contribution.
One of René Thom's fields of research is the elucidation, starting with notions of continuity and discontinuity, of what ‘might constitute an a priori ultimate kernel of the biological individual, constituting his psyche’. Such research supposes an inevitable confrontation between Thom's thought and Freud's theory, something Michèle Porte (1994) had already attempted with pertinence in La dynamique qualitative en psychanalyse, an in-depth study of Thom's thinking. As far as we are concerned, we have found that we are in agreement with Thom's thinking on an unexpected issue, namely, the role of the negative in the constitution of the human psyche.
Our concern, then, has not been so much to establish a comparison between Thom and Freud as between Thom and contemporary psychoanalytic theory, in that it attaches major importance to the notion of the negative.
Let us take as our starting point the study carried out by Michèle Porte. She quite rightly points out that any attempt to establish a comparison between Freud and Thom must take into account the fact that Freud created an exceptional framework for thinking about psychic processes, whereas Thom, with his ontology of Prégnances et Saillances (Thom, 1988), created a conceptual framework which enables one to think about the events of reality and their psychic meaning. And it is precisely this articulation between psychic processes and events of reality that is at the centre of contemporary analytic theory, the latter being the fruit of an evolution in the Freudian conception, essentially intrapsychic, whereby its horizons have been broadened to take into account the role of the primary object and the environment in the development of the mind. In this general context, we are particularly interested in Thom's idea
concerning the experiences of the infant, that ‘s