EDITH KURZWEIL
41
d'ethnO'psychiatne,
and
Etudes freudiennes ,
among others.
While all these publications were full of philosophical and literary
excursions, they usually were meant to illuminate the therapy, and , except
for medicine and psychiatry, they were not sponsored by academic depart–
ments. The publications themselves exemplified the existing confusion, which
also was palpable at the many conferences set up by psychoanalysts who
hoped to organize this chaos. Thus the Association Fondation Rocinante, most
of whose members are South American Lacanians who moved to Paris to
escape repression in their countries, organized an international interdisci–
plinary conference on "Psychoanalysis under Terrorism." To judge from the
proceedings, edited by Heitor O ' Dwyer de Macedo (1988) , Lacanian lan–
guage was spoken by a lot of leftist analysts who seriousl y and eloquently
were calling for an end to terrorist governments.
Still, even if the members of the many small post-Lacanian factions
should manage to survive by sending each other patients, it appeared doubt–
ful that they would be able to institute a responsible means of training young
analysts. The conferences, to some extent, have taken the place of Lacan's
seminars: they draw up to a thousand people. And they are more demo–
cratic than Lacan's meetings insofar as they have a number of speakers and
encourage heated dialogue with a participating audience.
After Rene Major gave up his meetings around
Confrontation,
Alain de
Mijolla helped fill the gap. Starting in 1981 , he organized yearly meetings in
Aix-en-Provence, led by psychoanalysts and people from other disciplines,
around such themes as "Suffering, Pleasure and Thought," "Languages,"
"Metapsychology and Philosophy," and "Body and History" (1986). De Mi–
jolla also cofounded the International Freudian Society in 1985, and in the
same year started the International Association for the History of Psycho–
analysis. These meetings have served to heal wounds inflicted even before
the death of, and disillusion with, Lacan, and they have helped keep psycho–
analysis in the news. Just as everywhere else, Parisian psychoanalysts lived
by their reputations. But, because of the loose organizational structures and
the inherent anti-institutionalism, the French referral system is poor. Thus the
French are more dependent on a good show at a public meeting, or on an
interesting book than are their foreign colleagues. This need for visibility,
along with the acceptance of interdisciplinarity, not only has made for the
plethora of provocative readings of psychoanalytic subjects but has turned
many ofthese analysts into fantastic intellectual performers.
Paris between the 1950s and the early 1980s resembled Freud's Vi–
enna: psychoanalysts entered into political and intellectual debates and did not
hide behind their couches.
In
1974, for instance, Chasseguet-Smirgel edited a
collection of essays on the "path of anti-Oedipus. " Didier Anzieu, who had
