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If it is true that ‘une histoire de la psychanalyse ne peut se passer d'une interprétation psychanalytique de l'histoire’ (‘a history of psychoanalysis cannot do without a psychoanalytic interpretation of history’), as Elisabeth Roudinesco, the author the monumental La Bataille de cent ans. Histoire de la psychanalyse en France 1885-1939, argued in 1986, in this instance it is the analyst's required neutrality that inspires the chronological approach
adopted by Alain de Mijolla in Freud et la France 1885-1945. Mijolla, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, a member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris since 1968 and founder of the Association internationale d'histoire de la psychanalyse (AIHP) in 1985, describes his work as that of a puppeteer, yet one who relinquishes control over facts, events and characters, in order to let selected documents ‘speak for themselves’ about Freud's relation to ‘France’, to scientific and literary French figures, and the richly complex reception of his ideas and his therapy in France until the end of World War II. Whether we think of Freud's work with Jean-Martin Charcot on the non-organic nature of hysteria, of his translation of Hyppolite Bernheim on hypnosis, of his quarrel with Pierre Janet over the ‘automatisme psychologique’, or of his intellectual exchanges with Romain Rolland, of which there are traces in Civilization and its Discontents , it is impossible to detach Freudian psychoanalysis from its relation to France.
Each chapter of the four parts into which Freud et la France is divided composes a day-novel in the manner of James Joyce's Ulysses (p. 2), which makes an ‘épisode de feuilleton’ (p. 3). Mijolla does not shy away from anecdotal history; on the contrary, he hopes that his book will form a ‘recueil de petites histoires de vies’ (‘a collection of “brief lives”’) (p. 4). Each ‘day-novel’ ends with extracts from the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis , concerning publications, events, foundations of psychoana