The Freudian Thing

A woman of foreign origins, who had been living in France for several years, reported during a session a conversation that she had had with one of her female friends on the subject of her expatriation dating back many years. The friend was astonished by the fact that, by leaving her country, she had left behind her loved ones, and also that she had voluntarily cut herself off from the culture, language and environment in which she had grown up and to which she remained deeply attached. Although this woman returned regularly to her country of origin, she recognised that she continued to wonder why she had made this change. This no doubt explains the fact that she had noted and heard in a very particular way a remark that was quite innocuous. In the course of the session, she said that she shared her friend's thoughts and acknowledged the “deep pleasure” that the familiarity of one's native country and the intimacy of one's mother language represent for each one of us. On several occasions during the session, she spoke of the “deep pleasure” linked to early childhood, to her experience more than her recollections of it, from which it is not easy to cut oneself off, and of which it was astonishing that one would want to deprive oneself. At the same time, it seemed to her that this “deep pleasure” was not exempt from feelings of anxiety that accompanied it in a way that was as manifest as it was inexplicable.

The reasons that can drive a subject to leave, to alienate himself, to avoid what he loves above all raise questions for psychoanalysis. In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan (1997 [1986]) takes up Freud's considerations on the prohibition against incest: “Freud designates the prohibition of incest as the underlying principle of the primordial law, the law of which all other cultural developments are no more than the consequences and the ramifications. And at the same time he identifies incest as the fundamental desire” (p. 67). Starting from