Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel

Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel , occasionally Chasseguet-Smirguel (* 1928 in Paris ; † March 5, 2006 ibid) was a leading French psychoanalyst , training analyst and president of the Société Psychanalytique in Paris. From 1983 to 1989 she served as Vice President of the International Psychoanalytical Association . Chasseguet-Smirgel held the Freud Memorial Chair at University College London in 1982/83 and was Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychopathology at the Université Lille Nord de France from 1992 to 1996 .

life and work

Chasseguet-Smirgel came from a family of Eastern European Judaism that suffered numerous victims during the Second World War. For that reason alone, she was politically highly sensitive and committed. As an anti-fascist she had become a member of the (then Stalinist ) PCF , in which she also met her later husband, Béla Grunberger (1903-2005) , who came from Hungary . After the Red Army violently suppressed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, however, they and Grunberger broke with communism . When later, in the wake of the May riots in Paris, Marxist theory regained a high level of topicality, both wrote - under the pseudonym "André Stéphane" - a political campaign against it: L'Univers contestationnaire ou les nouveaux chrétiens (Paris 1969).

Janine Chasseguet- Smirgel had at the Sorbonne political science studies, but turned under the influence of Béla Grunberger, an also non-medical psychoanalyst , the mid-1950s of psychoanalysis to which they then lifetime dedicated to her work. Here she represented a strictly orthodox line, which can be seen most clearly in the work Freud ou Reich , which in turn was written together with Grunberger . Psychanalysis ou Illusion (1976) shows. While the 1968 movement promoted both Freud and Reich , the authors demonstrate that there is an irreconcilable antithesis between the two.

Chasseguet-Smirgel became known for her further development of Freud's theory about the ego and the id and the connection with narcissism , as well as for developing this theory into a comprehensive critique of utopian ideology. Her work is characterized by a special commitment to a psychoanalysis of literature and society, that is, to a psychoanalysis beyond medical treatment .

Her first creative period was devoted to the study of female sexuality, quite critical of Freud and the post-Freudians. Her interest in creativity - as a function for the restitution of narcissistic trauma - and her sensitivity to political currents and hidden violence characterize the second period. This is followed by an examination of the ego ideal and idealization .

From the mid-1970s, in their fourth creative phase, the focus was on the anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari . During this period she also deals intensively with the study of perversion and realizes that there is a so-called perverse core in every person that can be activated under certain conditions. The last phase of her work is characterized by increasing conservatism and difficult to classify. The topics are diverse, questions of analytical technique, ethics and culture predominate.

In 1988 she was awarded the Gay Lussac Humboldt Prize .

Publications (selection)

Author

• (avec Béla Grunberger; pseud. André Stéphane): L'Univers contestationnaire ou les nouveaux chrétiens. Paris 1969
• (avec Béla Grunberger) Freud ou Reich? Psychanalysis and Illusion . Paris: Claude Tchou 1976 (German: Freud or Reich? Psychoanalysis and Illusion. Translator: Gerhard Ahrens. Frankfurt / M ...: Ullstein 1979 ISBN 3-548-03583-3 )
• Pour une psychanalysis de l'art et de la créativité. Paris 1971 (German: art and creative personality. Applications of psychoanalysis in the non-therapeutic area. Munich, Vienna 1988)
• L'idéal du moi. Essai psychanalytique sur la “maladie d'idéaliser”. Paris 1975 (German: Das Ichideal. Psychoanalytical essay on the "illness of ideality". Frankfurt / M. 1987)
• Ethique et esthéthique de la perversion. Seyssel 1984 (German: The anatomy of human perversion. Stuttgart 1989; Gießen 2002)
• Les deux arbres du jardin. Essais psychanalytiques sur le rôle du père et de la mère dans la psyché. Paris 1988 (German: Two trees in the garden. On the psychological significance of father and mother images. Munich, Vienna 1988)
• Le corps comme mirroir du monde. Paris 2003

Editor

• Research psychanalytiques nouvelles sur la sexualité féminine. Paris 1964,
  • German edition: Psychoanalysis of female sexuality . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, 1974
• Ways of Anti-Oedipus . Syndikat Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1986

Secondary literature

• Peter Vorbach, “In memoriam Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. 1928-2006 “in: Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 54 (2007), pp. 205–209
• Angela Moré: Psyche between chaos and cosmos. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel's psychoanalytic theory. A critical reconstruction. Giessen, Psychosozial-Verlag, 2001.
• Angela Moré: (Unconscious) fantasies about the unconscious - using the example of Chasseguet-Smirgel's theory. texts. psychoanalysis, aesthetics, cultural criticism 24 (3), 2004, pp. 43–58.
• Angela Moré: [about:] Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (Hg): "Psychoanalysis of female sexuality", Frankfurt / Main 1974. In: Martina Löw, Bettina Mathes (Hg): Key works in women and gender research. Wiesbaden, VS Verl. F. Social Sciences, 2005, pp. 59–71.

Web links

• Literature by and about Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Bernd A. Laska : Wilhelm Reich. Reinbek: Rowohlt 1981, 6th edition 2008 (excerpts Sigmund Freud versus Wilhelm Reich )