The Crisis

This concept embraces different senses in Pierre Fédida's work, from the most ordinary − crises in the inner history of a life or moments of rupture in analysis − to the most complex, if we limit ourselves exclusively to the level of psychoanalytic theory. Here it is the transference that is a crisis, and the events that intersperse the sessions - slips of the tongue, bungled actions, forgetting, dreams, sudden idea - are to be thought of as a critical process, that is, as likely to induce a crisis in the ego or alternatively, as Fédida formulates it, in the occult theory that the subject has of himself.

In what respects is the transference a crisis? First and foremost because it evokes remembering and therefore dreams that constitute our true memory. For Fédida, it is the compulsion to remember induced by the transference that proves to be traumatic, much more than what is discovered. He breaks, therefore, following Freud, with the model of hypnotic remembering concerning the hysteric, and extends the considerations of “Remembering, repeating and working-through” (Freud, 1914a) in his article titled “Restes diurnes. Restes de vie” (Fédida, 2009d). There, he develops the idea that the psychoanalytic situation establishes a temporal crisis, and that a given event is always to be thought of historically in analysis as “to come”, even if it presents itself in the form of the concealing temporality of the present of the transference as causality of the past. A corollary of this is the fact that the analyst, by his presence, is in fact the author of it instead of being the recipient.

A man came for analysis because, ever since the death of his little sister when he was about three years old, he felt he had never emerged from a long sleep. He worked but did not really live or wash himself as he still felt so shocked that his death wishes, quite ordinary when all is said and done, may have caused a catastrophe. Only his animated language, almost animistic inasmuch as it show