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Notes
Denis Vasse,Un parmi d’autres (Paris: Seuil, 1978).
Cf. in particular Robert Castel,Le Psychanalysme (Paris: Maspero, 1973) and Jacques Donzelot, ThePolicing of Families (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
See amongst others: Jacques Lacan, “On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis,” inEcrits (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1977), p. 218, from which I take this sentence: “But what I do wish to insist on is that we should concern ourselves not only with the way in which the mother accommodates herself to the person of the father, but also with the way she takes his speech, the word(mot) let us say, of his authority, in other words, of the place that she reserves for the Name-of-the-Father in the promulgation of the law.” See also Maud Mannoni,L’enfant arriéré et sa mère (Paris: Seuil, 1964); Piera Aulagnier-Spairani, “Remarques sur la structure psychanalytique,” inLa Psychanalyse, no. 8, 1964; and Francoise Dolto,Le cas Dominique (Paris: Seuil, 1971).
Maud Mannoni,La théorie comme fiction (Paris: Seuil, 1979). In regards to foreclosure, I add several details. Psychoanalysis has included a discussion of a “psychotic structure” (just like a “hysterical structure” and an “obsessional structure”). It was defined essentially by the notion of foreclosure; if we regard the psychological function as based on signifiers, foreclosure would be the fact that one of the signifiers was not integrated into the unconscious of the subject, did not come about symbolically for him/her. There would then be aprimordial lack, and not therejection of anexisting element as in the case of repression. Many psychoanalysts speak ofholes, not in the psychotic structure (an abstract construction) but actually in the psychoticsubjects. This adds up to a hopeless prognosis. In constituting this “structural” concept of foreclosure, psychoanalysis thus would give psychiatry the idea of an irreducible fault, based on a desperate diagnosis and prognosis.
Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” inSexuality and The Psychology of Love (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 215.
Sigmund Freud, “Female Sexuality,” inSexuality and The Psychology of Love, pp. 195–196.
D.W. Winnicott, “Primary maternal preoccupation,” inCollected Papers: Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1958), p. 300.
Ibid, p. 302.
Ibid., p. 302.
Lacanian psychoanalysis opposes the registers of the Imaginary and the Symbolic (to which it is necessary to add the Real). The Imaginary designates the essentially alienating relations, because they are based on captation and lure. These are the relations of an individual with him/herself (narcissism) or to the other as the same (a “mirror” relation that is called “specular”). The best example is the mother-child relationship. In contrast, the Symbolic appears as astructuring dimension for die psychological process, giving it theMeaning without which it could not possibly function, because the Symbolic is an order inscribed in language, and it is language which constitutes the unconscious. The primordial Signifier of this structure is the Name-of-the-Father, which permits the accession of the Subject and its inscription in theLaw. The Symbolic order is primary and determining. There is an imaginary father and a symbolic Father, butthere is no symbolic Mother.
Vasse,Un parmi d’autres, pp. 7–8.
Ibid, pp. 47–48.
Ibid, p. 48.
Ibid., p. 48. It is clear, from this citation, that the mother is nonsocial, close to the animal, and that it is the Father alone who can give, as much to the mother as to the child, the status of being social. For the exposition of this ideology, cf. Nicole-Claude Mathieu, “Bio- logical paternity, social maternity,” inThe Sociology of the Family, eds. C.C. Harris et al. (London; Sociological Review Monograph, Keele, 1979).
Cf. for example, D.W. Winnicott,The Child, The Family, and the Outside World (New York: Penguin, 1964).
For the philosophical and political critique of this conception of the “subject” I would refer to the very good book by François George,L’effet ’Yau de poele de Lacan et des lacaniens (Paris: Hachette, 1979).
The Dolto phenomenon: Françoise Dolto is a very famous French psychoanalyst who speaks on the radio, (giving advice to parents over the phone on radio shows), works with social workers and teachers, and attempts to make psychoanalysis understandable to the general public. (Trans.)
Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” inCollected Papers, p. 238.
Winnicott, “Primary maternal preoccupation,” inCollected Papers, p. 304.
Piera Castoriadis-Aulagnier,La violence de l’interpretation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975), p. 36.
Jacques Lacan, “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I,” inEcrits, p. 2.
Here I denounce the representation, very common in the social sciences, of the “individual” as cornerstone, an entity closed in on itself and irreducible, which could submit in a second place to social conditioning and thus would become a “social being.” It is as if the human being was first an animal, later becoming social. But the state of “being social” is thereat the very first.
I think of the “Case of Bob,” analyzed by D.W. Winnicott inTherapeutic Consultations in Child Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
Robert Stoller,Sex and Gender (New York: Science House, 1968), p. 98.
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Plaza, M. The mother/the same: Hatred of the mother in psychoanalysis. Feminist Issues 2, 75–99 (1982). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02933967
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02933967