Political anthropology of psychoanalysis

How to talk about the effectiveness of speech in the cure ? As we know, Lévi-Strauss’s response refers to symbolic efficiency. A certain anthropological perspective, inspiring in particular the historical work of Henri Ellenberger, brings the psychotherapy closer to shamanism, which obviously raises the question of the belief of the layman towards the magical action of the therapist. The experience is indeed given on the mode of conversion and initiation, even of spiritual exercise. The current questioning of psychoanalysis-in an anti-Freudian controversial mode-notably points this dimension.

A cure named desire

Samuel Lézé, anthropologist of mental health, proposes in this work stimulating another reading of the foundations of the authority of psychoanalysts, starting from the questions once asked by Robert Castel. “” Show the social rationality of psychoanalysis, whatever one can think of its scientificity and its effectiveness “, This is the courageous guideline, and firmly held, from Lézé. It will therefore not be a question of talking about belief, but a regime of authority of French psychoanalysts by removing practice in its ecology and in the context of questioning this authority in the last decade. If the work of Jeanne Favret-Saada on the witchcraft of the bocage comes in note and in mind, the approach of the author is however different, because much less empathetic. At the start of his investigation in 1999, the anthropologist came up against a systematic questioning of his analyst interlocutors: “ What is your desire ? »Lézé leaves indeed from afar-for him, psychoanalysis is an ideology, a pseudo-science or a popular object subject of joke-and this distance is preserved at all costs, as evidenced by the reflections of his field journal: “” I want to show that anthropology can maintain an objectification relationship with psychoanalysis. »»

The social back and political champ of psychoanalysis

The anthropologist must work an exotic terrain. Here the provincial moves to Parisian and Lacaniens firms, but the essential lies rather in the extraterritoriality of psychoanalysis. A practice difficult to locate in social space, which is both omnipresent in the media and whose actors cultivate a form of invisibility, as evidenced by the imprecision of statistics (5,000 French practitioners ?). The local anthropologist nevertheless meets inhospitality, since he refuses to use the good “ passwords ». The investigation of the uninitiated patina. The anthropologist is exhausted in perpetually negotiating his place at the borders of the cure. Without going to the other side, the investigator finally changes status, potential patient to mediator, but the back world of psychoanalysis remains invisible. It is therefore in the social and political field that the anthropologist decides to move his gaze.

Freudian sovereignty on “ the jurisdiction of personal problems Rests, according to Lézé, on a deep intellectual legitimacy and on the concrete response provided by psychoanalysis in the fields of psychiatry, pediatrics or psychosomatics. Psychoanalysis has been received both as a critical intellectual discourse and as a source of individual emancipation. But, beyond these well-known foundations, it is the charismatic militant organization, it is the non-academic institution, which make it possible to preserve an authority both at the heart and on the fringes of social space. This “ dignity “Psychoanalysis that is reflected in patient-analyst asymmetry is based on a specific eloquence and presence that break with the usual conversation regime and support the individual: the” Good Psychoanalyst is a body and a voice. The analysand is ultimately affiliated with a social movement, his conversion also being a militant act at the service of the cause. In this device, the psychoanalytic treatment can be assimilated to a fact of political organization.

The authority of psychoanalysts

The sovereignty of psychoanalysis, according to Samuel Lézé, lost his evidence in the years 1997-2005, characterized by a sequence of interprofessional confrontations of behavioral psychologists and certain psychotherapists with psychoanalysis, then by a well-known media sequence-the share French of “ Freud Wars ». The rising health democracy which results in the increased intervention of associations of patients and families in the name of therapeutic transparency logically weakens this acquired analytical authority, any patient becoming an expert in equal professionals. The current pass of weapons on the question of the management of autism is only an exacerbated form of this questioning of the influence of psychoanalysis in the field of child psychiatry. For Lézé,

“” The questioning of Freudians in the intellectual field gives way to a questioning of Freudism. In the space of less than ten years, the evidence of the sovereignty of psychoanalysis has therefore disappeared (…) its modernity is no longer assured. It is likely to be more or less tolerated. From revolutionary, psychoanalytic discourse can indeed become reactionary if psychoanalysis does not largely revise its views of the family and patients who now form actors far more formidable than the simple criticisms launched by the representatives of Cognitivo behavioralism. »»

Far from the positions of the manifesto for democratic psychotherapy, and the posture of a Michel Onfray, the conclusions of this political anthropology formulate in the end a nuanced and contextualized assessment of psychoanalysis which, despite its weakening in these times of therapeutic rationalization , retains a dignity and a utility which bases its French vitality. The authority of psychoanalysts remains legitimately based on the defense of the subject’s clinic against its current reduction to dry rationalism ; It is in this a field of future for society as for the anthropologist.