History of Aphasia Freud as an aphasiologist

Between 1891 and 1901, Sigmund Freud published both psychoanalytic and neurological works. This review analyses the interactions between Freud's On the interpretation of the aphasias (1891) and the development of psychoanalytic concepts, as well as Freud's theoretical views on brain–mind interrelations and his neurolinguistic theory. It is pointed out that in his aphasia book, Freud developed elements of a neurobiological theory of cognition and behaviour that became important for the theoretical foundation of psychoanalysis. Although Jackson, whom Freud regarded highly, had understood that people communicate by propositions, Freud followed Wernicke in that the word and the word concept were the basis of language. This assumption guided the interpretation of associations in psychoanalysis. For aphasiology, Freud is one proponent among others who criticised mechanistic localisationist theories. His major obstacle was the lack of linguistic theories. Freud's influence on aphasiology was rather limited, mainly because his book was hardly read, to his dismay.     

Freud et la dimension sonore du langage

Freud underwent medical training in a scientific milieu where the question of sound was repeatedly present via the angles of audition, voice and language. Freud's interest in sound may be found as early as his Contribution to the Conception of Aphasias, in the Project for a Scientific Psychology, and even in his inaugural work The Interpretation of Dreams. Thus, in the early years of Psychoanalysis a question that hinged on enunciation, and the division it entails and the loss (of the voice object) it instigates, was being constructed. Although this interest did not lead Freud to construct a theory of the voice as a drive object, it does designate a field that we find throughout the entire length of his work, and that we have chosen to dub the sound dimension of language in Freud. In this article we undertake to delineate the borders of the theoretical and clinical implications of this field of sound. Indeed the sound dimension of language is an important element in the dynamics of a psychoanalytic treatment, in particular via the opportunity it harbors to transform the language we think we possess into some surprising, alien even and, thereby, become aware that we are also, in a certain way, an effect of said language instead.     

“A Psychotherapy for the People”

The development of psychoanalytic technique can be traced in part to the dialogues between Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, dialogues that took place in the context of psychoanalysis's encounter with poverty and destitution in the wake of World War I. These dialogues, which served as precursors to contemporary, especially Relational, psychoanalysis, also inspired Freud's call for greater psychoanalytic engagement with the poorest and most vulnerable. This inspired the early psychoanalysts to “sharpen in all directions the sense of social justice” by engaging in political activism, experimenting with clinical technique, and by promoting short-term, more affordable treatments. The relevance of this history for clinical work with diverse populations will be discussed, and aspects of contemporary psychoanalysis (countertransference, enactment, new relational experience) will be understood in light of Freud and Ferenczi's responsiveness to the underprivileged.     

Pleasure in the Transitional Space: Intersubjectivity and Transformation

This article begins by reviewing psychoanalysis's conflicted relationship with pleasure as both a desired and feared goal. Freud implicitly changed his stance on pleasure as he elaborated the meaning of his grandson's fort-da game suggesting that pleasure is necessary for the mastery of loss and trauma. This article discusses several current theoretical aspects of pleasure including a phobic attitude towards pleasure and the experience of confusion and doubt within the transference–countertransference relationship that occurs as a result of shared moments of pleasure. I suggest that shared experiences of pleasure are inherent aspect of change in psychotherapy because they allow externalized disowned aspect of the self to become internalized as active, meaningful subjective experiences. A lengthy clinical illustration is presented in which songs are used as pleasurable and frightening transitional experiences that allow for the expression and symbolization of disowned aspects of the patient's self.     

Les destins de l’inceste

The clinic of patients, victims of incest in childhood, invites us to question the fate of such psychical trauma and working-through issues offered by psychoanalytical treatments. Differentiation and articulation between the registers of the act and the factual reality, and those of fantasies and psychical reality, are at the heart of the psychoanalytical approach of incest. But, despite the theoretical contributions of Ferenczi on early trauma and because of a misunderstanding of the “abandonment of Neurotica” by Freud, psychoanalysis, until recently, has been accused of ignoring the specific sexual trauma by favouring only the psychical reality. A reassessment of this theory precedes a reflection on various figures of incest worked through in psychoanalytic literature: if the father-daughter incest is considered relatively often, mother-child incest, which is more rare in its genital forms, is nevertheless common on the form of perverted care, and is just as psychologically harmful. The difficulties of counter-transference work under intense transference reactivation show that the psychotherapist is attacked in his mental capacity to contain and associate. The particular destructiveness of incest trauma lies in its attack of the œdipal organization and its structuring value.     

Psychoanalytic Intervention with Children

By taking a social psychological approach, this article seeks to offer an alternative perspective to the traditional psychoanalytic studies of Freud and Ferenczi's close personal and professional relationship, and the rift that occurred in the early 1930s. It is suggested that the socially constructed, divergent roles that these two men fulfilled in the psychoanalysis movement deeply influenced the dynamics of their relationship. It is further proposed that the ever-present, conflicted political interdependence that characterized Freud's and Ferenczi's home countries (Austria and Hungary, respectively) may have affected them differently, and contributed to their divergent attitudes towards power and other issues relevant to the development of psychoanalytic theory and technique, as well as how they related to one another personally.     

La Théorie de la Séduction Généralisée et son corollaire, la théorie de la traduction

It is in 1987 when, in the book “New foundations for the psychoanalysis”, Jean Laplanche developed his “theory of the generalized seduction” by taking back what Freud had abandoned in his neurotica of 1897. Laplanche, about the text of Ferenczi on the “Confusion” of the languages between the adults and the child considers that the term of translation would be more suited than that of confusion but also that Freud did not develop the effects of the premature communication and the message. Now it is from the interhuman communication between an adult and a child within the “Fundamental Anthropological Situation” that the author places the genesis of the psychic device and it, independently of any biological substratum. And so the enigmatic messages which – from the sexual unconscious of the other adult – ask for a work of translation of the infans, for work the not translatable unconscious rests of which will become that Jean Laplanche names the “objects-sources” of the drive at the origin of the repression. The child of the pregenital sexuality is the only one “herméneute”, who has to translate the enigmatic messages compromised with the unconscious of the other adult. From this point of view, the “theory of the generalized seduction” is also a theory of the afterward. We present two clinical cases which show how Jean Laplanche's theory allows us to welcome the clinical material by considering the work of the patient as a event of translation-symbolization from a reopening facilitated by the experiment of the psychoanalytical situation.     

Trauma et symbolisation chez Edvard Munch. Art et psychanalyse

This article examines the evolution of the concept of trauma from a psychoanalytic perspective and the psychic elaboration of the consequences of trauma through painting, taking as an example the life and work of Norwegian Edvard Munch. The traumatic experiences of artist's childhood find their place in his art and in his vision of the world. Art allows us to “psychically work out” the effects of these catastrophic childhood experiences. The representations of childhood trauma through painting are an opportunity to give a “figurability”, a meaningful representation to the traumatic experience. Thus, visual art, as a work of symbolization and psychic treatment of trauma, is a kind of bulwark against unbinding and destructiveness. With the famous painting “The Scream” by Edvard Munch, which bears the motif of repetition, we want to show the artist's ability to choose a “positive destiny” for his traumatic experience, where the “repetition of the same” takes the form of a “working-off mechanism” aimed at gradually eliminating tension and overexcitations of traumatic origin.     

« J’ai pensé qu’il fallait étudier les aliénés » : l’œuvre de Charles Darwin et la médecine mentale

Objectives

To help position the “evolutionist point of view” in psychopathology and psychiatry, given that the history of the influence of Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) theory of evolution in these areas remains unclear and a source of misunderstandings.

The “Voice” of Breakdown: On Facing the Unbearable Traumatic Experience in Psychoanalytic Work

This article weaves together three major contributions to the theory of trauma and repetition compulsion: Freud's (1920/1955b) reformulation in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” of his metapsychological theory regarding the notion of trauma and the compulsion to repeat traumatic experiences and traumatic dreams; Cathy Caruth's (1996) elaboration, based on a dramatic story in Freud's article, of “the voice that cries out, a voice that is released through the double wound”; and Winnicott's (1963/1986, 1965/1989a) unique ideas about the early unthinkable breakdown that has not yet been experienced and has to be relived and experienced in analysis.

The author explores the clinical implications of the intricate relation between knowing and not-knowing in facing trauma, which is simultaneously demanding and inaccessible, massively dissociated, and thus never and forever there. In particular, she relates to the profound difficulty of hearing the “voice” of breakdown that cries out from the belated “double wounding,” the critical importance of experiencing the unexperienced with the analyst; and the immensity of the terror and hope that is at the heart of reaching to the original unbearable traumatization in psychoanalytic work. Three detailed clinical illustrations from psychoanalytic writings and an autobiographical essay by Virginia Woolf are presented.     

Sándor Ferenczi. Notes on a house purchase. 1930, 2011

In 1983, just before his death, as the last official act of Pal Juhasz, the president of the Hungarian Psychiatric Association, placed a plaque to commemorate Sandor Ferenczi, the Hungarian psychiatrist and psychotherapist. In 2011 the Sándor Ferenczi Society, initiating an international collaboration, bought Sándor Ferenczi's original consulting office in his own villa, to establish a workplace, archive, and research centre there. The consulting office has been a significant station in the life work of the mature Ferenczi; his clinical and scientific work there had a significant influence on his colleagues and the development of modern psychoanalysis. We follow the vicissitudes of the purchase of the villa, the existential circumstances of the first psychoanalysts in their various historical phases, Ferenczi's invitations abroad, their impact on his relationships to Freud and colleagues. We follow Ferenczi's popularity in the International Psychoanalytic Association, in the light of his presidential candidacy, and the role of the villa in the fulfillment of Ferenczi's life work.     

Le bouleversement de la perception dans la modernité : Au-delà du principe de plaisir,l’armature théorique de l’essai sur Baudelaire de Walter Benjamin

ObjectiveWalter Benjamin was a great reader of Freud. In his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1938–1939), his rigorous and original reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle allowed him to structure the opposition, already present in his first works, between two categories of experience, Erfahrung and Erlebnis.MethodBenjamin showed that, from the 19th century onward, modernity has imposed an impoverishment of Erfahrung. Benjamin's analysis relies on Freud's hypothesis of the incompatibility between consciousness and memory, already present in The Interpretation of Dreams, and the economic conception of trauma exposed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.ResultsTo avoid or to reduce the potential traumatic effects of modernity in big cities, to avoid extensive ruptures of the protective shield, the perception-consciousness system has to be prepared by anxiety.DiscussionBut this defensive overinvestment of consciousness leads to diminished attention to the internal psychic world. The more consciousness will have to counter the constant shocks of the modern world, the more lived events will not be articulated in a living, mobilizable, and transmissible experience.ConclusionEven if trauma can be avoided, the individual and collective cost of overinvesting in the perception-consciousness system, in a world where shock has become the norm, is considerable and led, in Benjamin's eyes, to the catastrophes of the 20th century.     

Conscience et perception : contradictions de la théorie freudienne et perte d’un héritage philosophique

This paper uses the notion of consciousness as a starting point and a guideline for a theoretical discussion aiming to demonstrate the contradictions and impossibilities of the successive representations of the psychic apparatus that are the two Freudian topics, and justifying a change in the theory: splitting the notions of perception and consciousness and, consequently abandoning the Perception-Conscious system (Pcpt-Cs), which was the central element of Freud's thinking when evolving from his first to his second topic. Freud was unknowingly referring to and rephrasing one of Descartes’ postulates, which is incompatible as such with the concept of unconsciousness. From an epistemological standpoint, it is ironical that the philosophical school of thought, which proposed, after Leibniz and before Freud, the hypothesis of an unconscious life, sustainably defended, as the very basis of this hypothesis, the principle of a separation between perception and consciousness. This is something, which Freud never realized.     

The discovery of the bad mother: Abraham's contribution to the theory of depression

The origins of the psychoanalytic theory of depression will be discussed. First, it will be shown that in the 1890s Freud was intensely concerned with the problem of depression, but reached no firm conclusions about it. Then, the work of Freud and the first generation of his students on the aetiology of depression just after the turn of the century will be discussed. Following that, Abraham's first contribution to the theory of depression will be summarised. Abraham's concept of the bad mother was a new development in contrast to Freud's oedipal mother. Finally, it will be argued that the concept of the bad mother is the point of departure for development in psycho-analytic theory which focused on the socalled preoedipal mother and paved the way for the Kleinian school.     

L’idée qui absorba les facultés de l’entendement. Du syncrétisme des conceptions linguistiques de Philippe Pinel

ObjectiveThe historical literature has produced a dismemberment of the figure of Pinel and his posterity.The purpose of this article is first to confront Pinel with himself and with the paradoxes of his theoretical influences. In this, the approach of the theories of language represents one perspective among many on the conceptual foundations of alienism. The highlighting of a syncretism in the conceptions of the relation of thought to language mobilized by Pinel makes it possible to cast doubt on the theoretical influences that he most ostensibly claims as his own, and that are most stubbornly attributed to him.MethodsIn an attempt to discriminate between the different conceptions of the thought-language relationship in Pinel's work, we analyze the occurrences of the word “idea” when the latter is used in an effort to describe, or conceptualize, the thought of the insane. We base ourselves on a typology of the varied modes that can be mapped onto the relation between thought and language, which we have established from the theories of language that may have influenced Pinel's conceptions: that of Condillac, that of Locke, and that of the Germanic tradition (Herder).ResultsThe perspective of the thought-language relationship shows the extent to which Pinel had relied on divergent and sometimes contradictory theoretical views. Whether or not Pinel drew on Condillac's theories of language is of little importance. He necessarily got something out of them ; and his conception of the thought-language relationship on the basis of Condillac's theories of language comes into direct contradiction with other significant theoretical influences. This allows us to define the linguistic conceptions of the alienist as syncretic.DiscussionMichel Foucault explains what he calls the “isomorphism” of language and of reality by the preponderant influence of the philosophy of Condillac on the doctors of the beginning of the 19th century. That is to say, the predetermination of what is perceived by doctors as a symptom, and by the structure of the taxonomy, and therefore of the language, which is called upon to perceive it. This is the constitutive fragility of psychiatry.The concept of an anthropological syncretism of the conceptual foundations of psychiatry, which we present here, opens up a perspective according to which it would be a constitutive quality that does not weaken psychiatry but, conversely, consolidates it by matching theories to the syncretism of human practice.ConclusionThe epistemological notion of anthropological syncretism qualifies the conceptual foundations of psychiatry viewed from the angle of its progressive elaboration by the men and women who put something of themselves into their practice of it. Because more than simply humanist, psychiatry is a human practice.     

Si je vous dis « rouge », à quoi pensez-vous ?! Discussion autour d’une dynamique associative inconsciente

PurposesThis article aims to deepen a theoretical model of the psychic apparatus introduced in a previous work, in particular one of its main characteristics: the presence, at the center of its functioning, of an unconscious dynamic of perceptive association partly inherited from the primary process of the Freudian theory.MethodThe article first surveys Freud's writings about three psychic phenomena: dreams, slips of the tongue, and jokes. Analyzing these works suggests a theoretical difficulty concerning two processes (primary and secondary) considered to be opposites by Freud, and leads to an alternative applied by our model. The article then moves on to the famous experiments conducted by Alfred Binet with his hysterical patients at the end of the 19th century, in which the so-called phenomenon of “double consciousness” was put on display.ResultsIt appears that the unconscious dynamic of perceptive association is always a driver of psychic life, in both unconscious phenomena as well as in regular thinking. It typically operates when we facetiously ask the reader: “If I say ‘red’, what comes to mind?” This dynamic seems to bring to the natural mechanism of thinking some proprieties of condensation and displacement already identified by Freud, in a more intense form, in the making of dreams and attributed to his primary process. More precisely, thinking appears to be the product of this dynamic, given that it is supervised by the activity of the field of consciousness, simultaneously able to activate and channel it.DiscussionThe irruption of dreams possibly results from a kind of switching in the collaboration between consciousness and the unconscious system during sleep: the lowering of conscious activity then opens the way for the associative dynamic of the unconscious whereas, on the contrary, the former tightens its grips in the alert thinking. More generally, we can consider that thinking, in all its forms, always depends on the control exercised by the field of consciousness over the associative dynamic of the unconscious. A great freedom given to the latter would necessarily be a condition for artistic creation, for example.ConclusionOur reflections and model clearly borrow from Freudian theory, while also clearly departing from it in several respects. Starting from the dynamic of the unconscious system, this article highlights the importance of conscious activity when Freud instead tended to minimize it. From this perspective, our model would appear to occupy a middle ground between Freud's and Janet's.     

Psychosis as a Disorder of Reduced Cathectic Capacity: Freud's Analysis of the Schreber Case Revisited

Approximately 100 years ago, a prominent German public figure name Daniel Schreber wrote memoirs of his experiences in asylums. His case was diagnosed Dementia Praecox at times and Paranoia at others by his treaters. Freud analyzed Schreber''s memoirs from the perspective of his “libido” theory of developmentally organized mental “cathexes” or ideational/emotional investments in self and others. Revisiting Freud''s analysis of the Schreber case suggests that it may represent the first theoretical articulation that the pathophysiologic core of psychosis is one of deficit, i.e., of diminished (organic) cathectic capacity for normal mental and affective investments in life.     

La vérité de la clinique psychanalytique

ObjectiveThis article offers an examination of the notion of truth in psychoanalysis, specifically in the work of S. Freud and J. Lacan. Far from being linked to notions of accuracy, certainty, or objectivity, as it the case in the field of science, subjective truth offers itself for psychoanalysis from its own perspectives. By giving itself the goal of elucidating the truth of the subject and not the disappearance of symptoms, psychoanalysis also deviates from any reference to reality and its standards, and defines a field and criteria that are unique.MethodThis reflection is based on a chronological and thematic reading of the texts of S. Freud and J. Lacan; it does not claim to be exhaustive but makes it possible to trace the outlines of an elaboration where points of continuity and rupture are marked between the authors, but also within in one's elaboration.ResultsFor Freud, subjective truth is connected with the deciphering of the unconscious. Symptoms, dreams, and slips of the tongue are understood by opening up to an unintentional discourse, which is that of free association. The truth arises only by surprise, only manifests itself in fragments, only lets us grasp it after the fact. The work of psychoanalytic treatment leads to a reconstruction of the subject's story based less on accuracy than on plausibility, which earns the subject's conviction. For the Lacan of the 1950s, taking part in a re-reading of psychoanalysis based on linguistics, the dimension of truth is consubstantial with the dimension of language and therefore of the treatment: the subject cannot avoid confronting it from the moment s/he speaks. The speaking truth states a truth about which the subject would prefer to remain ignorant. The truth of the subject is that of a repressed desire, expressed in the field of the Other in the form of an inverted message. Rereading Epimenides's Paradox sheds light on the fact that truth belongs to the field of enunciation, the subject's own field.DiscussionWith Lacan, a second, more complex conception of truth emerges from the second half of the 1960s, when the possibilities conferred on speech and on the Symbolic recede in favor of a conception that recognizes an ever-expanding role of the Real and of the impossible. It is a truth designated as lying-truth, which can only be “half-said,” that of a truth recognized as horror, with the discovery of the unnamable thing, the objet-a, a part of the (speaking) body that is at once the most foreign and the most intimate.ConclusionThe subject's truth is not in itself, but in an object of a veiled nature: the objet-a that emerges in analytic discourse as impossible to say. This object is both the cause and the product of speech. The analyst's role is not to take pleasure in the truth of the analysand, which the former brings up as a question, without taking a position on the answer, which the analysand provides. At the end of a cure, the analysand can hope to have produced knowledge about her/his jouissance, irremediably of the order of fiction, which comes as close as possible to the impossibility of bearing witness to the Real.