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PARTISAN REVIEW
been analyzed by Lacan in 1949, left the Societe Psychanalytique de Paris
(SPP) in 1953 and joined
J.
B. Pontalis in starting the Societe Psychanalytique
Fran<;;aise in 1960; then he argued that Freud had undertaken his self–
analysis in order to overcome his psychotic anxieties and that he had for–
mulated his subsequent theories to establish successive defenses against de–
pression. In 1986, Anzieu, writing explicitly against Lacan, provided one of
the best descriptions of the plight of post-Lacanians. He was especially upset
by their clinical practices - the floating attention and the systematic silences
which were supposed to elicit the patient's infantile memories but usually did
not bring about the expected transformation. Anzieu questioned Lacanian
techniques, which assumed that interpreting "the letters" of an analysand's
language would penetrate his unconscious and "become a language game" -
often at the expense of the analysand. Thus he rejoined those classical ana–
lysts who, after treating patients who had been seeing Lacanians, either
found that language analysis had been counterproductive for a proper trans–
ference or that even when it had worked it had not been handled carefully
enough.
Fran<;;ois Perrier's transference, for instance, had occurred the instant he
met Lacan. Together with Serge Leclaire and Wladimir Granoff, Perrier
(1985) informed us, he had been part of Lacan's governing troika. But feel–
ing betrayed, he had turned on Lacan and wrote a humorous and incisive
commentary about his trips into
Translacanie,
describing the background of
the splits, the personal quarrels, and Lacan's wheelings, dealings, and
indiscretions. In fact, Perrier went beyond Fran<;;ois George, for whom Lacan
now was an intellectual crook - his former idol had clay feet.
These were only a few of the many "obituaries" of Lacan as psycho–
analysts of all stripes tried to come to grips with the inevitable changes in
their lives. Once more, the French were expecting to distill the best of psy–
choanalysis, as they had in the past each time they split and regrouped. All
French Freudians were rereading Freud, adding new wrinkles
to
the texts or
reinventing him altogether. In the process, the concerns of the SPP differed
more and more from those of its sister organizations in the International
Psychoanalytic Association.
Those German analysts who expected psychoanalysis
to
rid them of
the Nazi past championed Alexander Mitscherlich's social progressivism, al–
though some of them gradually limited themselves
to
seeing patients, leaving
politics to the politicians. But all German analysts had
to
come to grips with
the fact that there had been an intellectual vacuum between 1933 and 1945
and had to face what these years had done to their own psyches and their
ability
to
relate to others. In analytic terminology, they had a great deal
to
