Dr. Snyder interviewed Dr. Chasseguet-Smirgel during the meetings in New York in December 1987. Dr. Chasseguet-Smirgel is a significant contributor to the psychoanalytic scene, and has held the offices of Secretary, Vice-President and President of the Paris Society.
Dr. Elise W. Snyder: Many of our American readers, while they know your work, don't know much about you, your training, your background, and how you come to have such excellent English. So, please, tell me about yourself.
Dr. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel: My parents were immigrants from Russia and Poland. When they arrived in Paris they made a baby. I have always lived in France, even during the Second World War.
Dr. S.: Were you in hiding or living openly during the war?
Dr. C-S: In hiding. I was in 11 different schools, which shows that the hiding was a very serious matter. Sometimes I was with my parents and sometimes I was hidden separately in some school or convent. Almost all my family were murdered, by Hitler in Poland and by Stalin in Russia. In France I had a beloved aunt, a kind of a surrogate mother. She was taken to Auschwitz for two reasons: she was a Jew and she was in the Communist Resistance. She did not come back.
Dr. S.: Was your aunt in Paris before the war, or did she come later?
Dr. C-S: She was the first who came to Paris. There were nine children in my father's family. She was the eldest sister, the second child. She studied medicine in France, becoming a well known pulmonary specialist.
Dr. S.: So, there were women professionals in your family in generations preceding your own. Was either of your parents a physician?
Dr. C-S: No, the eldest brother of my father was a psychiatrist. He also studied medicine in France. He went back to Russia and then to Poland. I met him, I think, three times when I was a child. To my big surprise, five years ago I discovered that, in 1907, he had written an article about Freud in the Revue Francaise de Neurologie. I was amazed, because I really did not know him. It was as if it had magically reached me.
Dr. S.: That's a lovely story. Obviously, your schooling was broken up and not finished until after the war. How did you become interested in psychology or psychiatry? You are a Ph.D., right? In what?
Dr. C-S: In France there are several levels of doctorate. My first diploma is in Political Sciences from the University of Paris.
Dr. S.: How did you get interested in political science? Was that your major interest, or were you already interested in psychoanalysis at that time?
Dr. C-S: I was in a way interested at least in psychology. I began to study psychology at the same time that I was studying for my doctorate in political science. This was unusual. Most often, people who study political sciences get a diploma in law, and I was studying
psychology. Some of my professors in political science definitely told us that it was impossible to understand human phenomena if you didn't understand human psychology. Now, I am also a psychologist. I have a doctorate which is called Doctorat d'Etat in Literature and Human Sciences. The topic which I chose was connected with psychoanalysis. The Doctorat d'Etat is a high degree. It is necessary if you want to apply for a professorship at the University.
Dr. S.: Did you go right from your first degree to your second?
Dr. C-S: No, no. It was many years later.
Dr. S.: What did you do after your first degree, your Political Science degree?
Dr. C-S: After I completed my political science studies, I began my psychoanalysis. As you said, my studies were broken up by the war. If I had not been a bit late with my studies, I would certainly have tried to attend the Ecole Normale Superieure. But, it takes a long time and my parents had no money after the war. My father had had to stop working during the war and later, he was too old to get another job. That's why it took so long to get my second degree, long after I was analyzed and trained in psychoanalysis.
Dr. S.: What did you work at before you became an analyst?
Dr. C-S: I had several different unsatisfying kinds of jobs.
Dr. S.: Jobs to earn a living, you mean—and after that?
Dr. C-S: In 1953 I asked to change my analysis into a training analysis and was accepted. I was fortunate to have begun my analysis at a very early age, which is less and less common now in France. We have people who become candidates at 40 or even older.
Dr. S.: When you began your training, were there one or two training groups in Paris?
Dr. C-S: It was just in the middle of the turmoil about the split. Should I explain about that?
Dr. S.: Yes, please.
Dr. C-S: When I began my analysis I did not know anything about the political situation in French psychoanalysis. Being analyzed was my first concern. I was not a witness to the events because I was not involved. But what I know is that when Lacan and Lagache left the society (which was exactly when I began my analysis) they had not understood that by leaving the Paris Society they were leaving the IPA. That was a real surprise, especially for Lacan. Someone in the British Society told me that when he discovered he was no longer a member of the IPA, he spent a whole night pacing to and fro like a caged lion. One year after I began my analysis, the split had already occurred. While there were different points of view, there were already big problems with the Lacanian way of working—with the short sessions and so on. I know the IPA made an investigation and discovered that Lacan had about 40 people in analysis. He did the same thing with supervisions. I have a colleague who was in supervision with him. She testified at the IPA that her supervisory sessions were only five-minutes long.
Dr. S.: Have the Lacanians come back into the fold of your society, or are they still on the outside?
Dr. C-S: Most of them are on the outside, divided into at least seven or eight groups. There are probably thousands of them. They work in a totally anarchic way. There are some exceptions, people who seem to respect the patient and to understand the necessity of adhering to a classical psychoanalytic framework. They are grouped in an association called the 4eme Groupe. They are respectable people, both in their theoretical ideas and their practices.
Dr. S.: Lacan's way of working is very different from the way most of us work, but some of his ideas are interesting. During your analytic training were his ideas at all influential in the Paris Society?
Not in our seminars, but there were a lot of young people, and when you are young you are eager to know different things and you are also attracted by people who present themselves as being unconventional. So naturally, there were a number of especially young ones who went to his seminars. The atmosphere was sometimes unpleasant because inside the society there was a group very influenced by Lacan who despised everybody who did not follow him. I feel that contempt is an affect and an attitude which is very destructive.
Dr. S.: Of course, you know of Josine Muller's work. Did you know that when she died there was a book left with Muller-Braunschweig, an entire book on female psychology, to be published posthumously? About ten years ago I tried through his son to see if the book existed or if anyone knew what happened to it. It was never published and it had apparently vanished during the war.
Dr. C-S: That's really a pity. At a time when I really wanted to know what Freud and other authors had written about human sexuality, most of Freud's articles were not available in French. I had studied English at school and I had to read Freud's papers in English, along with other writers like Jeanne Lampl de Groot, Helene Deutsch and Ernest Jones. On the one hand, some dreadful things were written about women, not so much by Freud, but by female analysts who were plus royaliste que le roi. They carried Freud's ideas to the extreme like, for example, Lampl de Groot, for whom being a woman was almost like being a corpse, totally passive. On the other hand I discovered Klein, of course, but also, Jones who wrote very supportive articles. I was led to the conclusion that it is simplistic to think that it is women who are supportive of women and men who are prejudiced against them.
Dr. S.: When you began to write on female sexuality, it was, in a way, really a new topic. I once checked. From about 1936, until some of Greenacre's papers in the 1950's, there was nothing published on the psychology of women in the analytic literature.
Dr. C-S: Yes, I know. I did not realize when I got the idea of editing a book on female sexuality that it would be the kind of success it has been. The book has been translated into many languages. For some years I was considered the person interested in female sexuality and I was asked to lecture in different countries. But I was also interested in other topics.
Dr. S.: Tell me about some of your other interests.
Dr. C-S: I became interested in perversion. There is a book not translated, called in French, Ethics and Aesthetics of Perversion. It is a deeper and more scholarly book than Creativity and Perversion (the title was chosen by the publisher) which is a collection of my seminars and lectures at the University of London. It's as though I had taken some chapters from the French book to make the one in English, to make it simpler and more available. Now it is unlikely that the French work will be translated. I see at least two links between my interests in female psychology and in perversion. The first is that more men suffer from perversion than women. That's a commonplace observation. The second is related to the famous question about the awareness (at least unconscious) for boys as well as for girls of the female genitals from the beginning of life. I mean an awareness that women have an inner genital. This seems to me very important because all the ideas of Freud on perversion are based on the notion that boys and girls don't know anything about it.
Dr. S.: The other explanations are too simplistic. It is not that ours are so powerful, but the others set themselves too minimal a goal. It's my impression that in France (this may simply be the result of looking at it from the outside), psychoanalysis is much more interesting to other intellectuals than it is in America. In America, some literary critics are quite interested in psychoanalysis, but other intellectuals are not particularly interested. What is it really like in France? What is the relationship of psychoanalysis to the rest of French intellectual life?
Dr. C-S: I think you should not idealize the situation in France because it is very complicated. When people who have not been analyzed are interested in psychoanalysis, very often it is because of some misunderstanding. Anyway, I think that this interest is decreasing.
Dr. S.: How do you spend your time? How many hours a week do you practice?
Dr. C-S: A lot. In my society we have group supervision. Every week a whole evening is devoted to candidate case presentations. I supervise four candidates this way. Each presents his own case each week and can also follow the three others. Then I have administrative work as a member of the training and other committees and, of course, there are the scientific meetings. It takes a lot of time. In spite of this my husband and I are movie lovers and find time to go to the cinema. We are not members of any political party, but we are very interested in politics. Although he is a physician, my husband also has a diploma in political science. The war has left its mark on both of us. We are afraid of all kinds of extremist movements and fanaticism. Like the majority of French intellectuals at this time, our major concern is with the preservation of human rights. I am proud to have been invited by President Edgar Faure (a former Prime Minister who is in charge of arrangements for the celebration in 1989 of the bicentenary of the French Revolution) to be a founding member of the International Foundation for Human Rights. I will represent psychoanalysis. I am also very interested in art.
Dr. S.: Have you and your husband written together? Do you have any joint papers.?
Dr. C-S: We wrote that book, Freud or Reich which was published by Yale University Press. We exchange ideas to the point where we often don't know who said something first. We discuss our cases. We read to each other what we have written. In a way it is more or less common work that we are doing.
Dr. S.: With each of you taking slightly different approaches. How many candidates are there in your society?
Dr. C-S: You will be amazed. There are something like 400 candidates.
Dr. S.: It seems to me that your concerns primarily have to do with your clinical work and your teaching. That must make it difficult for you to be away for long periods of time.
Dr. C-S: It's impossible. I could accept the professorship in London only because I could commute.
Dr. S.: What have I neglected to ask you about? What else can you tell me about yourself and your interests?
Dr. C-S: My husband and I love to receive friends and to exchange ideas with them. Many of our friends are psychoanalysts. Some years ago, I was asked to write about some of my experiences as a psychoanalyst, particularly about my relationships with other colleagues. At that moment I was involved in certain very upsetting situations, and my reply was rather bitter. Since then, however, I have established many warm ties with colleagues throughout the world, including several lovely colleagues in the States. Now I think that there is nothing more helpful in this “impossible profession” than the exchange of ideas with intelligent and warm people over a good meal served with an old French wine. Did I tell you that I liked to cook?
Dr. S.: No, but I think I could have guessed. It's been a great pleasure speaking with you. I am very grateful that you gave me this time.
Dr. C-S: Thank you.
Dr. S.: It must have been very difficult for a student to navigate in the political shoals of their elders.
Dr. C-S: Yes, I found it difficult to be confronted with people who had this attitude of contempt, not especially toward me, but in general. This was something of a shock to my ideals, as I was coming from a totally innocent and naive background. I think that people who do not come to psychoanalysis from psychiatry tend to idealize psychoanalysis more intensely. So, it was shocking for me to see these attitudes, these quarrels, and so on. I was never really attracted to Lacan, first of all because of his ideas about femininity. I have found it strange to see how the feminists (in America especially) are influenced by Lacan, because both his theory and his attitude toward women were full of contempt. That was one of the main reasons that I was repelled by his theory. Those Lacanians within the society showed the same contempt toward women as they did toward those not Lacanians. My husband, Bela Grunberger, was a kind of outsider within the Paris society because of his theories on narcissism which were, at that time, entirely new, and also because he did not like the way the Paris Society and Institute were run. Lacan invited him to help form a new society. When my husband went to speak with Lacan about his invitation, Lacan's wife brought a bottle of champagne and two glasses into the room and immediately left. Lacan said with a shrug, “Oh these women.” That was really his attitude. My husband did not agree with his ideas and would not join him. Despite Lacan's stress on the father and the return to Freud, I think that his theory is deeply against the father as well as against the mother. Anyway it is strange that this theory has been viewed as being in favor of women. If you read Les Ecrits and you look through the bibliography, you find that the analyst quoted most often is Jones—and always to attack him. Jones was an analyst in favor of women.
Dr. S.: In what year did you start to see patients?
Dr. C-S: In 1955, I began to see patients in psychotherapy and to receive teaching at the biggest mental hospital in Paris. I consulted in psychosomatics
in the Department of Neurosurgery. The chief of the department was Marcel David. His son is Christian David, a well-known member of our society. Marcel David was a surgeon in neurology. His department saw many people who had headaches and very often, fortunately, there was no physiological basis for these headaches. So they were sent for psychosomatic consultation. So my first patients were people who had headaches. They were very rewarding to treat because headache is often a circumscribed symptom and the underlying conflict can be treated without going very deeply.
I was fascinated to see how these uneducated, poor, very simple people sometimes had a genuine contact with the unconscious. Some asked me to see them at home and, with the permission of the department, I began to see them privately for ridiculously low fees. But I wanted to work and to understand. In 1956, I was allowed to have someone on the couch. I remember a very intelligent woman who was a hairdresser. She looked at the couch and asked me if she could lie down on it. I asked, “Why not,” told her the fundamental rule, and we began an analysis. She discovered by herself what analysis was. It was a wonderful experience. Now we have very sophisticated patients.
Dr. S.: Who may not be so analyzable. So you continued your training, started to analyze patients, and supported yourself. Then what happened professionally? What year did you graduate?
Dr. C-S: At that time it went very quickly. Now it's terribly long and I don't think it's terribly better. I graduated in 1959. I had three supervisions, one more than necessary.
Dr. S.: When did you begin to publish psychoanalytic papers?
Dr. C-S: I think it was immediately. My first patient was referred to me by Dr. Marty, a training analyst who specialized in psychosomatics. The patient was psychotic, and I wrote my first paper about this experience. My next paper, on the role of anality in the body image, has never been published. In it, I gave examples from many patients and also examples from work by Samuel Beckett, who was not then that popular. I delivered my next paper, which is in the book of female sexuality, in 1963. I was told at that time that I could apply with this paper to become a training analyst. At that time the training was very short. I was very, very young.
Dr. S.: It's a wonderful book. Did your interest in femininity arise from your disagreements with Lacan, or did it have other origins?
Dr. C-S: Oh, other. Both with Lacanians and with those who followed Freud's views, I found that when they spoke of human sexuality, I recognized neither what I had experienced in my own analysis nor what I had seen in my patients. At that time the only book on female sexuality available in France was Marie Bonapart's book. Although she was an extremely bold person and had a lot of valuable intellectual and human qualities, the book is a kind of disaster.
Dr. S.: The most extraordinary thing about reading Freud is the total absence of any notion for either sex of the inner genital. I've always thought of it as Freud's not liking the idea that little boys really want to penetrate the mother, or that there is something there to be penetrated.
Dr. C-S: My main idea is that this ignorance of the female genitals, which in my opinion is the result of repression or even denial, is connected with the little boy's feeling of inadequacy because he is unable to fill and to fulfill his mother, to make a child with her. It is easier for him to deny that she has a vagina, and to believe that he is able to do with her what his father does. He avoids the knowledge that the father is really penetrating inside the mother. Both my interests in the psychology of women and perversion have to do with questions of whether or not the woman has a perception of her own genitals and whether or not the man has a perception, on a certain level, of the female genitals. That is the link between the two interests.
Dr. S.: Is that the area you are working in right now?
Dr. C-S: In my new book I put together an old article written in 1975, and some more recent ones. There are several which I presented when I was the Andre Ballard Lecturer at Columbia University in 1984. As it's a collection of papers, there is no definitive statement. However, they all deal with the importance and respective roles of father and mother in the mind. I am concerned with how the thought processes are structured. I want to extend these ideas beyond the sphere of clinical practice proper into several other fields. I know that there are analysts who are reluctant to do this.
Dr. S.: Would you tell me more about that?
Dr. C-S: First of all, I like to recall that Freud said in his postscript on lay analysis that his sadistic component was not so strong, that he only wanted to cure patients.
Dr. S.: That he didn't have to expend all his energies defending against his sadism.
Dr. C-S: Yes … and that what really interested him was to understand the riddles of the world. And, maybe it's a lack of modesty, but I follow him in that. Of course I am very concerned with my clinical work, but I have always had an immediate propensity to expand my repertoire. Even in this book on sexuality and mind there are articles which are direct extensions of my interest in clinical work. For instance, I am interested in extending my understanding of the mother's and father's role in the mind to certain aspects of Nazism. I have already done some of that in this book, but I would like to go even further. There are many analysts who are reluctant to do that themselves, although they are very interested when someone else does it. The huge room was full yesterday when Dr. Lifton spoke. I am pretty sure that psychoanalysis can't explain everything because we psychoanalysts also have our own resistances to understanding. But what other tools are there to understand some of these extremely puzzling phenomena? I don't think we can be satisfied with some Marxist or some sociological explanations. Neither begins to explain what happened in the human mind.
Dr. S.: I am amazed.
Dr. C-S: We are a big society. We have more than 400 members. As I said, my own training was short, which was common at that time. Now the training takes at least ten years. Many of our candidates have finished their training but have not yet applied for membership. That is why there are so many.
Dr. S.: What percentage of your candidates have medical degrees?
Dr. C-S: I think two or three out of four.
Dr. S.: What offices have you held in your society?
Dr. C-S: When Marty was President, I was Secretary. Then I became Vice President and then President. I am not
especially interested in administrative work, but I do have some ideas about it. In France we have experienced the difficulty of being open to new ideas and to new ways of understanding psychoanalysis while at the same time adhering to some rules. In my opinion, the rules have to be there so that the work and the patient can be respected. Otherwise, you enter into chaos and anarchy. You know, between an ossified society and a boneless society it is very difficult to find a balance, but that should be our aim.
Dr. S.: What have been your experiences in the International?
Dr. C-S: I have had the experience of working with two Presidents, Adam Limentani and Bob Wallerstein, and with two Secretaries, Moe Laufer from London, and Ed Weinshel. Although they are each quite different from each other, I was very pleased to work with all of them. If I had not had this enjoyable experience I would not have continued. Working within both Councils I found very lively people, people who were primarily interested in psychoanalysis and not so much in administration. I mean, they recognized the importance of the administrative field, but it was not their main interest. It is important to have persons in the administration of the IPA who are analysts first and politicians second, people who are sincere. As you know, you don't apply for office in the International. You are chosen. Of course, you have to accept or refuse. So I accepted.