Madame Figaro.
– Word, drive, desire… These three pillars of psychoanalysis are also those around which the MeToo movement was built.
How to understand this?
Elsa Godart.
-
Psychoanalysis is a talking cure.
This means that it is based on the importance of saying things.
Freud's revolution consisted precisely in freeing speech.
In other words, we began to assume our experiences, our feelings, what we desired, in the context of 19th century bourgeois society which did not allow this.
Freud also liberated desire and modified our relationship to sexuality.
From this point of view, psychoanalysis revolutionizes the Western world, it authorizes and makes banal, terribly human, beyond all morality, the field of sexuality and desire.
It is not incongruous to think that, in a certain way, the MeToo revolution, which is also a revolution of speech – that of women setting a threshold of “intolerability” and affirming the power of a desire –, is a consequence of what psychoanalysis made possible more than a century ago.
But with a limit: MeToo is a social and political revolution.
However, Freud, although he gave a conference on femininity in 1931, seems disarmed in the face of female sexuality.
He evokes it in the form of a “black continent” and advises: “If you want to know more about femininity, question your own experience, turn to poets, or wait until science is able to tell us. provide deeper and more coordinated information” (1).
And when Marie Bonaparte, friend of the psychoanalyst, asks him “
Was will das Weib?”
» – literally “What does the woman want?”
–, Freud would have replied that, despite his thirty years of study of the feminine subject, he could not resolve this enigma… There has always been a question regarding the feminine, the woman, for psychoanalysis.
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Also readElsa Godart: “We have difficulty living in 2023. We think about the meaning, the connection, and often, we are not happy”
Is your book your way of saying how psychoanalysis remains alive?
For more than twenty years now, I have been practicing psychoanalysis as a clinician, observing the world and asking myself: what in our contemporary society constitutes a symptom?
At the beginning of the 20th century, hysteria was important, but society has changed, and the term hysteria has disappeared from the
DSM-5.
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
.
Quite a symbol!
So you dig into the contemporary…
A few years ago, I published a
Psychopathology of Hypermodern Life (2)
, which was part of my university accreditation.
I currently have three doctoral students in psychology who are questioning the contemporary: for example, what about the adolescent clinic in the age of screens?
What about the analytical framework (couch, absence of glances between analyst and analysand) at the time of teleconsultations?
These clinical issues could not be posed by Freud.
If we have a duty to transmit what has been established by Freud, Lacan, Klein and others, we have an equally great duty to think of these contributions in relation to the suffering that we encounter on a daily basis in our patients.
The subject's clinic, specific to psychoanalysis, is today threatened by the cult of profitability, efficiency, speed, with injunctions of good health, balance, happiness.
However, psychoanalysis is the opposite of this, in that it says something irreducible about the subject: about the question of the unconscious that no AI will ever be able to reproduce.
You have visited
Lacan, the exhibition
.
What did you find there?
I must admit that I was surprised to find certain sometimes complex concepts, such as the question of enjoyment, at the foundation of Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, without the clinical dimension being mentioned.
I would have missed a self-criticism towards the Lacanian discourse.
If only questions, questions.
Nevertheless, I found that the choice of works was very relevant.
Perhaps we should have stuck to the sole issue of “Lacan and art”?
And insist on the symbolic dimension common to art and psychoanalysis.
For you, psychoanalyst, is there a Lacan heritage?
Lacan made part of the history of psychoanalysis.
He took part of Freudian theory and then went beyond it with his own vision.
“As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “I’m a Freudian.”
There is obviously a Lacan heritage.
Lacan's seminar was an exceptional place of intellectual excitement.
This seminar was oral, and if many people set out to transmit his words from the start, to what extent should these improvisations be taken literally?
Do an exegesis or a hermeneutics of Lacan, when we know that he often contradicts himself, that he loves provocation?
Reading
The Seminar
is complex, it is often obscure and confusing, and the younger generation of psychologists, psychiatrists or analysts can find themselves very far from it.
I have often defined psychoanalysis as this ability to bring out one's desire and transform it into freedom.
Elsa Godart
“Woman does not exist,” said Lacan. To hear how, in your opinion?
With this sentence, Lacan reminds us that there is no essence of woman.
He places the bar on the “the” to say that “of its essence it is not all”, and calls into question the universality of the article “the.”
Lacan does not deny the biological reality of sex, but he believes that, for the unconscious, the female sex does not exist as a signifier in the same way as the phallus.
For Freud, the woman is a subject of lack (penis envy, castration) and seeks compensation (a child).
Lacan does not refuse the Freudian position, but he adds that it is "not everything", there is a "plus", which is not to be found on the side of desire but on the side of enjoyment.
Now, what is this feminine enjoyment really about?
We would be right to ask ourselves: what do they know, absorbed by a phallocentric theory?
The moment requires us to turn to the side of female psychoanalysts who, from the beginning, have focused on female sexuality.
And to admit that this sentence, despite the provocation, the play with words, today, without having read Lacan, is inaudible: we must be careful with these speeches which resonate like slogans in the collective imagination.
Words always leave a trace.
In 2024, when women want to “meet their desire”, “find their place”, what can psychoanalysis answer?
I have often defined psychoanalysis as this ability to bring out one's desire and transform it into freedom.
But we still need to be able to see clearly beyond the desire of others, of parents, of education, of society... And, in the midst of these expectations and conditioning, ask ourselves: deep down what is what do I really want?
Then, immediately afterwards: what do I do with this desire?
Certainly, our society is a society of enjoyment.
Now, to enjoy is to “pschitt” in the moment.
This presupposes a relationship with time which is that of immediacy.
On the contrary, desire involves a long time and above all the question of lack.
Do we still have to learn, today, to deal with lack?
If we succeed, then everything is permitted... But the game is far from won for women, so that they can assume at any age, and I mean at any age, their desires;
claim these, impose them in society.
The suffering is still there, sometimes still hidden, silent, or inaudible.
The slap for poorly cooked steak that Marguerite Duras speaks of in
Libération
, in 1985, can take, in 2024, other forms, more insidious, more perverse.
However, you remain optimistic!
Women and psychoanalysis, this has always been obvious, although their discourses are erased behind those of the “masters.”
Many contemporary women work, write, practice and think about psychoanalysis.
I have spoken in several of my works about Marie Bonaparte, Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Helene Deutsch, Karen Horney, Françoise Dolto, Sabina Spielrein, Alice Miller to name just a few pioneers.
I simply wanted to reestablish accuracy, a word.
(1) Femininity,
Sigmund Freud, Ed.
Payot, 2016.
(2) Will Psychoanalysis disappear?
Psychopathology of hypermodern life,
Ed.
Albin Michel, 2018.
“3 Minutes to understand 50 key notions of psychoanalysis”, by Elsa Godart, Éditions Le Courrier du Livre, 178 p., €22.90.
Press photo