The Freud with which I am concerned is neither the name, which is sported like a ‘badge’ by the divergent psychoanalytic movements, nor, conversely, is it the individual, for whose biographies I have very little appetite, especially those which claim to be psychoanalytic. It is above all what he himself wanted to be: the Freud of the written and published oeuvre. This does not mean that I want to transform this oeuvre into a sacred text.
It is an oeuvre of debates, of second thoughts, of certainties but also of doubts. A text written in German, which (with an entire team: André Bourguignon, Pierre Cotet, Janine Altounian and François Robert) we gave ourselves the task of publishing in French in an Œuvres complètes as faithful as possible to the original. The fidelity of the translator: this means resisting unceasingly and to the greatest extent possible the adage according to which ‘every translator is a traitor’ and ‘every translation an interpretation’. On the basis of principles such as these, it becomes too easy to give up truly translating. I propose in contrast a form of translation which, far from imposing an interpretation, remains open to the most various, even the most offensive interpretations, on the part of the reader. ‘Doing justice’ to a great text, means not masking but restoring its contradictions, its weaknesses, its moments of hesitation and imprecision, and even its incoherences.
Freud the thinker is the man of a discovery, and I shall insist on this aspect first of all. Here we have a researcher between thirty and forty years old, highly cultured and endowed with solid scientific experience, moved by an unshakeable positivist rationalism and an equally unshakeable ambition—he sometimes sees himself in the role of a ‘conquistador’, a Christopher Columbus of psychopathology—who decides to put into practice the method of investigation developed by his elder colleague Joseph Breuer. A method which consists in inducing the patient to speak ‘freely’, by agreeing to reveal his most incongruous thoughts.
But at this point, the application of a simple ‘method’ will change everything: it ceases to be a matter of ameliorating the existing psychopathology with the aid of a new instrument. The method known as ‘free association’ suddenly opens onto a new object: that which Freud names the Unconscious. Not that this terra incognita can ever be charted, as was the America of the conquerors; but it does allow itself to be inferred, supposed and reconstructed on the basis of its effects: dreams, daydreams, parapraxes, slips, jokes… In order to refer to it, Freud employs strange terms which bear witness to its otherness: the unconscious acts within us like an ‘internal foreign body’ (one imagines a kind of implant, deposited by a neurosurgeon). The unconscious manifests itself in the neurotic as a ‘reminiscence’, that is to say as a memory which would remain forever cut off from its sources. Freud is also certain that the unconscious is bound to our earliest childhood, and that it is indissociable from ‘infantile sexuality’. A sexuality whose trail he picks up in each case he analyzes, a sexuality so different from our adult sexuality (which nowadays one speaks of as being liberated) that one would even hesitate to employ the same term to refer to it. This infantile anarchic, polymorphous ‘sexuality’, which seeks excitation more than satisfaction, is destined for (more or less total) repression within each of us.
One finds in Freud's texts the most varied genres and styles, from the most elegant and almost novelistic, through to weightiness of the ‘academic’ thinker trained in the discipline of the Germanic universities. Beyond this diversity, however, I want to stress that from the years 1880–1890 it is as though he is haunted by an exigency that is drawing him on. And this is imposed upon him not by his own thought, but by his very object, just as it imposes itself on any psychoanalyst who constrains himself to use the Freudian method.
I have sometimes employed the image of a mountaineer seeking to conquer a Himalayan summit which is almost inaccessible and lost among the clouds. Seeking the ‘right track’ is everything, but it is also inevitable that our man might take a wrong path leading to a ‘sheer drop’. Should we turn back and retrace our steps? Or should we get out the climbing pegs?
Speaking personally, it is these decisive junctions, these points of ‘going astray’ in the Freudian oeuvre which fascinate me, and I have set
myself the task of calling into question just what is at play in such moments: what then becomes of the exigency which magnetizes the entire movement of this strange body of thought? For me it is a matter of putting Freud back to work, of making his work ‘work’ (of making it creak perhaps) by working with it.
I shall cite only one example, that of a decisive moment: with the publication of his first analytic cases (the Studies on Hysteria), Freud simultaneously constructs an exceptionally audacious theory aimed at nothing less than explaining the origin of the unconscious in ‘the hysteric’ by means of the details and the metamorphoses of the complex interpersonal relationship between the infant and the adult who first opens it up to life, its first ‘other’, so to speak. Then abruptly, on September 21 1897, posing objections drawn from clinical work, from theory and also from simple common sense (but what ‘common sense’ applies to psychoanalysis?), he renounces this theory known as the ‘theory of seduction’. In a rather sheep-like fashion, most historians see in this a favourable announcement: of the future birth of the theory of ‘fantasy’ and the ‘Oedipus complex’. But the negative aspect of this volte-face goes unremarked: a hereditary theory of the prehistoric or ‘phylogenetic’ origins of the human psyche regains the entire ground. This is a path leading to impasses, which will not only recur throughout the oeuvre, affirming the acquisition and the genetic inscription of so-called lived scenes from prehistory, but which would be transmitted within the unconscious of every human being. This would be the case for the famous ‘murder of the father’, even though there is no evidence that it could be memorized and acquired during the prehistory of mankind.
It is therefore worthwhile thoroughly re-examining the difficulties of the ‘theory of seduction’ and to see whether more recent advances with respect to preverbal communication between the very small child and the adult would allow us to enlarge the bases of this supposedly obsolete theory.
Many are the points in Freud's oeuvre which call for re-examination and for a new ‘work’. I shall cite only that much debated idea of the ‘death drive’.
Is this oeuvre worth the effort? Well, isn't it a proof of its vitality that it is able to give rise to such debates? Freud's oeuvre is, for me at
least, the site of an unfaithful fidelity: fidelity of translation first of all, which alone permits the infidelity of discussion, for one can only discuss an author if one's understanding is based very closely on what he actually says. But fidelity also to the exigency of the object that our practice as psychoanalysts reveals: this object which keeps knocking at the door, this intruder, this other within us which we still refer to using the same word as Freud: ‘the Unconscious’.
First published in the weekly Le Point, April 20, 2006, no. 1753, and reprinted in Sexual: la sexualité élargie au sens freudien 2000–2006 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ). The original title of the article in Le Point and in the French edition of Sexual is ‘Freud tel que je le fréquente’. The English title used here has been proposed by the author.