Carder: You were the recipient of a 1992 Sigourney Award. How did you learn that you bad won?
Anzieu: One evening in Paris, around the middle of November 1992, I received an overseas telephone call from Donald Meyers. He was calling to ask if I would accept one of the 1992 Sigourney Awards and come to New York to receive it on December 12. I was very surprised, for I knew nothing about the awards, and hesitated for a moment. But Dr. Meyers found a way of twisting my arm, telling me the Sigourney was a sort of Nobel Prize for psychoanalysis; this made me think how Americans always exaggerate, but I accepted. He also told me the names of the other honorees, whom I knew and greatly esteemed. So I felt in good company. Two days later I was sent information explaining the awards, which made me doubly happy.
Carder: Recieving the award places you among the best psychoanalysts of our time. How did that make you feel?
Anzieu: I was overjoyed—in German, Freude—to become a new Freud. I was also retracing the adventures of Christopher Columbus, who had discovered America five hundred years earlier. So my narcissistic and heroic identifications were being activated. I also thought that, through me, European psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Association of France were also being honored. Finally, I felt proud to have achieved this great award without having been a candidate. The esteem of my American colleagues allowed me to better esteem myself.
Carder: Tell us how you decided to become a psychoanalyst.
Anzieu: At the age of 20 I was a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, preparing a thesis on the philosophy of Pascal. I read Freud's Introductory Lectures in French, and the following year The Interpretation of Dreams. It was a revelation. I changed the subject of my thesis, which eventually became Freud's Self-Analysis. I finished my philosophical studies by turning to the study of psychology. At the age of 26 I began a training analysis with Jacques Lacan, who was then a member of the Psychoanalytic Society of Paris.
Carder: Who were your main influences?
Anzieu: Daniel Lagache and Juliette Favez-Boutonier advised and helped me. Lagache directed my thesis on self-analysis and chose me as his assistant at the Sorbonne. Favez-Boutonier then asked me to replace her as professor of psychology at the University of Strasbourg. Both of them were doctors of both philosophy and medicine; they were also the first psychoanalysts to hold teaching positions on a nonmedical faculty. I admired their ability to synthesize medicine and philosophy, and the interest they had in applying psychoanalysis in nonmedical domains. It was Lagache who introduced psychoanalytic social psychology into France—the small group, criminology—while Favez-Boutonier introduced psychoanalytic pedagogics. Following their example, I applied psychoanalysis to the study of groups, to psychodrama, and to the interpretation of social events like May '68, projective tests such as the Rorschach and the TAT, and literary texts.
Carder: Tell me a little about your practice and teaching.
Anzieu: When I was professor at Strasbourg and at the University of Paris 10 (Nanterre), I used to devote a third of my time to teaching, another third to analytic practice, and yet another to research and writing. Now that I am retired from university teaching, I read and write psychoanalytic books in the morning and in the afternoon see my patients. One evening a week is devoted to seminars for training analysts from my institute,
“The influence of Melanie Klein has been growing somewhat, but is still controversial. As for Bion, he and Winnicott are certainly the two anglophone authors most widely studied by my French colleagues.”
the Psychoanalytic Association of France. We for the most part study the texts of Freud. Then once a month I take part in a research group on psychoanalytic family therapy.
Carder: What advice do you have for young analysts?
Anzieu: I advise them to work with a wide range of patients—neurotic, borderline, psychotic, psychosomatic, children, groups, families. In this way they can get to know their capacity and their limits.
Carder: And what are your thoughts about the future of psychoanalysis?
Anzieu: Psychoanalysis will be in danger if it does not renew itself. It is being questioned by cognitivism, behavior therapies, body therapies, and neuroscience, and as a result it is losing a large part of its clientele. In twenty or thirty years' time, I foresee a small number of specialists, with long training behind them, carrying out difficult and thankless work, and a large number of more superficially trained psychotherapists working at a wider level. The latter will be working more in the fields of prevention, detection, and therapy of short duration. One of the problems is to know if these two categories will continue to call themselves psychoanalysts, or if that will be the exclusive right of the first group.
Carder: How does French psychoanalysis differ from American analysis, or from psychoanalysis in other countries?
Anzieu: In my opinion, there is no French psychoanalysis that would correspond to what you had in England with Kleinianism, for example, or to ego psychology in the United States. If there was one, it would have been Lacanianism. But Lacan left the international psychoanalytic community, namely the IPA, due to technical consequences that conflicted with his conceptions, particularly theoretical ones.
Carder: Some say the French, much more than other nations, tolerate or even encourage differences. Do you think that's true?
Anzieu: It is true that the French have had in every domain a great reputation for being individualistic. It is therefore understandable that they should tolerate differences between their various groups better than other countries might. As regards psychoanalysis, the two groups recognized by the IPA—the Psychoanalytic Society of Paris and the Psychoanalytic Association of France—have very few differences. The Fourth Group (Quatrième Groupe), which is not affiliated with the IPA, has marked differences. As for the splinter groups that follow Lacan, which have existed since his death, having arisen from the confused state of his Ecole freudienne de Paris, there are about a dozen of them, and I would be unable to distinguish them.
Carder: What is psychoanalytic education like in your group?
Anzieu: The difficulty lies in knowing what importance to place on practical training versus the more intellectual type of teaching. I have attended many pre-congresses concerning training, and we have never arrived at conclusive results or reached any overall agreement. It is a topic of endless discussion. However, it can be said that my group privileges training as against intellectual formation.
Carder: How does your group differ from the other French society?
Anzieu: As I have said, there is very little difference between the Psychoanalytic Association of France (APF) and the Psychoanalytic Society of Paris (SPP). You could perhaps say that the APF is more marked by a medical, academic, philosophical, and literary mentality, while the SPP is more strictly medical in outlook. But these are very slight differences. I would like to add that for a
long time, most notably under the influence of Lacan and Lacanianism, American psychoanalysis was held in derision.
Carder: Are there difficulties in France between physician psychoanalysts and psychologists?
Anzieu: There used to be, about twenty or thirty years ago. I myself took up an active position in these conflicts, as one of the founders of a union for psychoanalytic psychologists. The existence of this union, together with the progress made in medicine and psychotherapy, as well as in psychology, have all helped to attenuate this problem, so that at this moment in France there is not much serious conflict between medical and lay psychoanalysts.
Carder: I am particularly interested in how psychoanalytic understanding can help prevent mental health problems. From your perspective, what can psychoanalysis tell us about better parenting, about character development in adults and children, and about the prevention of mental illness?
Anzieu: Personally, the area of prevention has not been an interest of mine. I work more from the perspective of healing and the deferred effects of the cure. Prevention would entail a vast inquiry wherein one would examine people ten or fifteen years later—their having been treated in childhood or adolescence—in order to see if prevention has been effective. I know that a colleague of mine, Serge Lebovici, has taken on this task. But I am not involved in it. A person can't do everything.
Carder: Tell me about your writing. Freud's Self-Analysis was a major undertaking. How did it come about?
Anzieu: The book seems to me important for three reasons: (1) it brings out what I call the creative work of the psyche, which completes the dream-work and the work of mourning; (2) it casts light on the midlife crisis, so well described by Elliot Jaques; and (3) it shows how Freud's heroic-masochist identification with Goethe and other great figures (and, similarly, my identification with Freud) provides a basis for creativity. It is Daniel Lagache, my master, who gave me the idea for this subject for my doctoral thesis. My identification with Freud grew stronger with the writing of this book. Having finished it, I myself was able to become creative, modeling myself on Freud.
Carder: Who was your analyst, and how long is the usual analysis in your institute? Can you tell us of connections to Lacan? Bion? Klein?
Anzieu: I had two analysts. Lacan I have mentioned; the second was Georges Favez. The usual length of an analysis in my group is between five and eight years, though often sessions are held three times a week and not four, which lengthens the duration. As for Lacan, we have had powerful debates and two splits over his technique of short sessions, as well as his lack of interpretation. The influence of Melanie Klein has been growing somewhat, but is still controversial. As for Bion, he and Winnicott are certainly the two anglophone authors most widely studied by my French colleagues.
Carder: How has your wife, Annie Anzieu, influenced your work, and what can you tell us of your work relationship with her?
Anzieu: Well, it was she who led me to the ideas of Melanie Klein and who helped me discover and apply to group phenomena the persecutive and depressive processes Klein described in relation to the child and the individual adult. There is an interaction between our work, but we each have our own separate areas in order not to be constant rivals. Annie does a lot of child analysis, which I do not practice, whereas I have worked a lot on groups, a domain in which Annie has done relatively little.
Carder: You have focused your attention in recent years on the influence exerted by the “container” of psychic experience. You have written about the “skin ego,” a term alluding to the form of the mind's boundaries, and in a recent book on “psychic envelopes” addressed even more precisely the differing forms the psychic container can take. You have also applied some of these ideas to work with groups.
Anzieu: That is all very important, but it is difficult to speak of briefly, because it involves all that is most original in my work. The “skin ego” is a metaphor, but I think that in developing the notion of a psychic envelope I was moving from metaphor to concept, one that can ground a practice and be articulated with existing psychoanalytic theory. I am hesitant about retaining the notion of a formal signifier because that concerns only language, whereas here the concern is with the representation of space, or form in space, something completely different from linguistic signifiers. I would now speak rather of envelope representations and transformation representations, which would lie between what Freud theorized as thing-presentation and word-presentation. With borderline clients, these notions prove very useful, since if you speak concretely in terms of skin or containers, patients understand you better than if you used more traditional abstract terms. It is much more direct, and the relationship with the skin is experienced very intensely, even while remaining preconscious. Earlier I had conducted what I called “transitional analysis,” a technique developed out of what Winnicott did with children (the squiggle game, for example), and in collective work directed by René Kaës I elaborated its technique. I had not yet elaborated the notion of the skin ego, but was still in the process of working it out. Perhaps one day I will write a book synthesizing transitional analysis and the analysis of envelope and transformation representations. All of that concerns the structures of the ego, the weaknesses and faults that lie at the base of individual narcissism. The concepts I have developed build on those of Bion and Frances Tustin, Kohut and Winnicott, and have allowed us, I hope, to progress in the analysis of narcissistic neurosis and depression.
Carder: With that we will have to stop. I wish to thank you for taking the time to talk with us. It's always enlightening to speak with colleagues from abroad.