Se perdre à sa manière

Based on Anna Freud's text, ‘About losing and being lost’, Adam Phillips considers ‘being lost’ as a ‘negative capacity’ (Keats, 1818). At the confluence of Anna Freud's text and the notion of ‘dying in one's own way’ in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the author of this article envisages, with reference to various essays by Adam Phillips, a capacity to lose oneself in one's own way: both as a fantasy and as a capacity that, for a time, whether a period of life or treatment, suspends attraction to the object. The author suggests that Anna Freud invents/rediscovers the childhood experience of losing herself, without her father, while losing sight of the fact that she is the object of her father's desire, with the ‘inactivity of libidinal forces’ that she evokes in the work of mourning. This is contrasted with the movement towards the object that is cut short in her dreams. A clinical fragment is offered as an analogy. The capacity to lose oneself in one's own way – a deviation from the frantic movement towards the object, a diversion that tastes the absence of the object for a time and resists, for a while, the work to come – could take place in the treatment in the place of friction between associative speech and compulsive speech.