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May 2, 1988. REFLECTIONS ON SOME THOUGHT DISORDERS IN NON-PSYCHOTIC PATIENTS: CERTAIN DISTURBANCES OF THINKING IN INDIVIDUALS AND GROUPS. Mme. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel.
In this paper, Mme. Chasseguet-Smirgel presented clinical material to support her concept that disturbances of thinking in non-psychotic individuals arise out of the perverse wish to eliminate the differences between the sexes and the generations. There is an "anal universe" in which all differences are abolished. Perverse thinking seeks to abolish all of reality, since reality imposes an awareness of differences and, in consequence, of separation and loss. The attack on reality can take many forms, according to Mme. Chasseguet-Smirgel, such as social movements which aim at the dissolution of the fundamental reality—the difference between the sexes. Developing ideas first elaborated in a 1984 lecture, "The Archaic Matrix of the Oedipus Complex," the author advanced the hypothesis of an archaic primary wish "to discover a universe without obstacles, without roughness or differences, entirely smooth, identified with a mother's belly stripped of its contents, an interior to which one has free access." To support this hypothesis, she presented clinical material from the analyses of several patients. After discussing religion, art, and ideology, she concluded that "thinking comes into being as a result of the encounter between the wish to return to the smooth maternal belly and the obstacles standing in the way of this wish." The attack on the obstacles will then inevitably produce disturbances of thinking.