Sherry Turkle

Freud believed that psychoanalysis was so deeply subversive of people’s most cherished beliefs that only resistance to psychoanalytic ideas would reveal where they were being taken seriously. In 1914 he wrote that ‘the final decisive battle’ for psychoanalysis would be played out ‘where the greatest resistance has been displayed’. By that point it was already clear that it was in France, the country of Mesmer, Bernheim, Charcot, Bergson and Janet, France with its long literary tradition of exquisite sensitivity to the psychological, that resistance to psychoanalysis was greatest. ‘In Paris itself,’ reflected Freud, ‘the conviction seemed to reign … that everything good in psychoanalysis is a repetition of Janet’s views with insignificant modifications, and that everything else is bad.’ Despite early interest by the Surrealists, there was no French psychoanalytic society until 1926, and for over a quarter of a century it remained small, its members badly stigmatised by their medical peers. Before World War Two, the French had rejected psychoanalysis as a German inspiration; after the war it fared only a little bit better with a new image as an American import.

All his life Donald Winnicott took great pains to present himself as an orthodox Freudian. Yet few ‘Freudians’ have been more radical in their departures from orthodoxy. Winnicott’s central ideas about mothers and infants, about nurture and cure, about the authenticity of self, are evocative and powerful, but they are nonetheless heresy. Freud saw the triangle of Oedipal loves as a crucible for the development of personality; Winnicott focused on the earliest bonding of mother and child. Freud portrayed people driven by the contradictions of desire into frustrating and ambivalent attachments; Winnicott stressed that only in attachments can human beings find an authentic self. And Winnicott’s most important theoretical contributions, unlike Freud’s, are never described in terms of the differences between the sexes.

On 16 June 1953 an administrative session of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society passed a vote of no confidence in its President, Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s theory was at war with internationally-dominant trends in ego psychology. His short analytic sessions took liberties with practices that others saw as sacred. And in relations with colleagues, Lacan disturbed the peace by insisting that traditional psychoanalytic societies undermined psychoanalytic truths. With the no confidence vote, Lacan resigned his presidency, and the Paris Society split in two. During his lifetime, the French psychoanalytic movement would be torn by four such schisms. In each, analysts would be forced to make a choice for or against Lacan.