Didier Anzieu

Didier Anzieu (born July 8, 1923 in Melun , † November 25, 1999 in Paris ) was a French psychoanalyst , who became known through a Pascal edition; by working on psychodrama and group dynamics ; through a study of Freud's self-analysis as well as through his theory of the “ skin self ”, which describes the formation of thought and personality through experience of touch. His critical distancing from Jacques Lacan became an important stage in the division of the psychoanalytic schools in France.

Life

Pascal edition. Education

While still a student in Melun, Anzieu began to work with one of his teachers, Zacharie Tourneur, on a new edition of the Blaise Pascals Pensées , which was to present the fragments preserved for the first time in the original arrangement. Anzieu published the edition in 1960, it is cited as the Tourneur-Anzieu edition .

In 1945 Anzieu began to study at the École normal supérieure , where he also heard Jacques Lacan . After studying philosophy , he went on to study psychology with Daniel Lagache, whose assistant he became in 1951. Anzieu did research in the field of clinical psychology and was quickly recognized as a specialist in psychodrama and projective methods .

Analysis at Lacan. His mother's story

In 1949 he had started a psychoanalysis with Jacques Lacan, initially without both of them knowing that Lacan had already treated Anzieu's mother: he knew her by her maiden name Marguerite Pantaine and had the case of his 1932 dissertation on paranoid psychosis and its relationships to personality , based on - and already written about Anzieu himself. Anzieu's mother left him soon after he was born, but initially kept in touch with him. Years later she was admitted to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric clinic in Paris, where Lacan worked at the time, after she assaulted actress Huguette Duflos. After years of psychiatric placement, she worked as a housekeeper for Lacan's father in 1952/53. In this situation Anzieu renewed contact and learned of her treatment by Lacan. He finished the analysis and kept a critical distance from Lacan.

University and political commitment

In 1954 Anzieu became a professor of clinical psychology in Strasbourg . In 1957 he submitted his dissertation, the two works Freud's self-analysis and the discovery of psychoanalysis and analytical psychodrama with children and adolescents .

Anzieu undertook a second psychoanalysis with Georges Favez. Initially a member of the Societé française de Psychanalyse (SFP) founded by Lacan , he contributed to the failure of the SFP's application for re-entry into the IPA from 1961 through his statements against Lacan before the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), which in 1964 with him led to the collapse of the SFP, and in 1963 was one of the founders of the Association Psychanalytique de France , of which he was for a long time Vice-President.

In 1963 Anzieu was appointed to the Sorbonne , from here to help found the University of Paris- Nanterre in the same year. He founded their faculty for psychology and educational sciences and also chaired it during the turbulence of May 1968 , where he was open and ready to communicate. Using a pseudonym, he wrote a description of the events out of the unrest, Ces idées qui ont ébranlé la France (“These ideas that have shaken France”).

Researches. The skin self

After 1972 Anzieu gradually withdrew from university operations in order to be able to devote himself to psychoanalytic research. On the one hand, he investigated group phenomena, for which he published Le groupe et l'inconscient ("The Group and the Unconscious ") in 1975 . On the other hand, he dealt with literary and artistic creativity , in 1975 he presented a revision of his book on Freud's self-analysis, in 1981 Le corps de l'oeuvre (“The body of the work”) and in 1992 Beckett et le psychanalyste .

His third and most original project was the development of the theory of the skin-ego, with which he tried to theoretically grasp the containers of these contents in view of the common talk of psychological contents . In his book Das Haut-Ich , published in 1985, he takes up Wilfred Bion's concept of containment and the drive to bond in John Bowlby , but also refers to Freud's early concept of contact barriers and Paul Federn's description of fluctuating ego boundaries.

According to Anzieu, unless the infant is overwhelmed by the desire to return to the womb, which leads to autism , the infant develops a fantasy of shared skin with the mother, a fantasy that later has to be resolved, possibly in a painful process. From the masochist z. B. it is experienced as violent tearing of the common skin. Anzieu differentiates between different functions of the skin: holding, containing, protection against irritation, individuation , integration of sensory perception, basis of sexual arousal, libidinal charging, entry of traces, self-destruction (he removed this last category from the list in the second edition in 1995), as well as various Types of envelopes: sound, warmth, smell, taste, muscle, pain and finally dream envelopes, to which he ascribes their respective meanings and pathologies . After all, he sees in touching oneself, in feeling oneself, the basis for the development of reflective thinking.

The reflections of Das Haut-Ich were continued in Une peau pour les pensées (“A skin for thoughts”, 1986), L'épiderme nomade et la peau psychique (“The nomadic epidermis and the psychic skin”, 1990) and other works.

Anzieu had been suffering from Parkinson's disease since around 1990 .

Fonts

• Analytical psychodrama with children and adolescents , Paderborn: Junfermann 1984
• Freud's self-analysis and the discovery of psychoanalysis , Munich: Verlag Internationale Psychoanalyse 1990 (translation of the 3rd, revised and updated French edition from 1988)
• Das Haut-Ich , Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1991

literature

• Anzieu, Marguerite , in: Élisabeth Roudinesco ; Michel Plon: Dictionary of Psychoanalysis: Names, Countries, Works, Terms . Translation from French. Vienna: Springer, 2004, ISBN 3-211-83748-5 , p. 46f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Didier Anzieu in the catalog of the German National Library
• Jean-Michel Petot: Didier Anzieu (detailed obituary by a colleague from the University of Paris X-Nanterre)
• Naomi Segal: Didier Anzieu - the story of a skin (derivation of the main topic from Anzieu's family history, with a description of life and work; PDF file; 65 kB)