René Major

René Major (born November 1, 1932 in Montréal ) is a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst of Canadian origin.

Life

Youth and Studies in Canada

He attended the Collège André-Grasset in Montréal and then studied medicine at the University of Montreal . During his studies he read Freud, but also psychoanalysts like Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Georg Groddeck , and decided to become a psychiatrist.

In 1958, Major was one of the first group of students who lived to work in the dormitory of the Albert Prévost Institute (now Département de psychiatrie des Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal), an institution that was innovative in the history of Canadian psychiatry Role played.

Paris

After two years at the Albert Prévost Institute, whose training program included psychoanalysis, Major took part in an exchange program that allowed him to study in France. He worked at the Saint-Anne psychiatric clinic in Paris (today Center hospitalier Sainte-Anne ) with Jean Delay and initially planned to return to Canada.

In 1960 there was a colloquium on the unconscious organized by the well-known psychiatrist Henri Ey . The Colloque de Bonneval was about to become famous. The psychoanalysts Serge Lebovici , René Diatkine, Conrad Stein, André Green , Serge Leclaire, François Perrier, Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, the philosophers Paul Ricœur , Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Henri Lefebvre , Alphonse de Waelhens and Jean Hyppolite , the psychiatrists Georges Lanteri-Laura, Claude Blanc, Sven Follin and Catherine Lairy, but also Eugène Minkowski, François Tosquelles and Jacques Lacan took part. The young major was very impressed and discovered a world that was very different from the Catholic Québec of his youth. He later organized numerous colloquiums himself.

Major had already applied to the SPP (Société Psychoanalytique de Paris) in Canada. In Paris he completed a training analysis with Béla Grunberger . In 1967 he became a guest member and in 1971 a full member of the Society. Major worked for several years at the Center médico-pédagogique Claude-Bernard and at the Center de traitements psychanalytiques of the Institut de psychanalyse, otherwise mostly in his own private practice.

Unlike most of his compatriots, Major did not return to Québec after his studies. He became an avid visitor to the Lacan seminary at the Hôpital Saint-Anne, and later at the École normal supérieure . He became friends with Lacan, but did not follow his invitation to join the École Freudienne , founded in 1964 .

Major was friends with the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török . In the sixties he met Jacques Derrida , who became a personal friend of Majors and who had a great influence on him. Derrida dealt intensively with psychoanalysis and gave his lecture Freud et la scène de l'écriture [Freud and the scene of writing] in March 1966 at the Institut de Psychanalyse.

Major became a training analyst in the early 1970s, and in 1972, under President André Green, he was appointed secretary of the Institut de psychanalyse de Paris . In 1973 he became director of the institute. During these years the SPP was the scene of intense internal clashes in which Major participated. Major's administration was made difficult by the fact that he was not a French citizen. He hoped to obtain citizenship quickly, but did not get it until 1983. Major was deposed in 1974 after only 15 months.

Confrontation

In 1973/74 Major, together with Dominique Geahchan, a Catholic from Lebanon, founded Confrontation , a place where psychoanalysts could meet across schools .

Elisabeth Roudinesco said in an interview with Jacques Derrida:

“At that time, [René Major], drawing inspiration from her work, 'deconstructed' the dogmas and rigidities of prevailing psychoanalytic thought by gathering the psychoanalytic youth of which I was a part in a room called Confrontation which did not have a suitable institution, which was confronted on the one hand with the bureaucracy of the societies of the International Psychoanalytic Association and on the other hand with the agony of the last great living master of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan. "

“In fact, Confrontation was a wonderful place for free speech, the only place where people from different institutions could enter into open dialogue with one another. In the tense atmosphere that prevailed at the time, Confrontation encounters were often very emotional, both in terms of disputes and reconciliations. "

- René Desgroseillers

Confrontation's approach was simple - one writer was invited to discuss his or her writings. More and more participants came and since 1976 the events no longer took place in the rooms of the Institut de Psychoanalysis, in 1977 an association was founded. Confrontation existed until 1983.

Major also founded the magazine Cahiers Confrontations . In 1977 Major became director of a new book series “La psychanalyse pris au mot” at the Aubier / Montaigne publishing house.

From 1983 to 1992 he was major directeur de program at the Collège international de philosophie .

Resignation from the IPA

In 1996 Major left the IPA. Major explained his decision in an open letter to President Horacio Etchegoyen . The background to this was a long-running controversy about the correct behavior of psychoanalysts in dictatorships. During the National Socialist era, the then IPV President Ernest Jones supported the adaptation course of non-Jewish German psychoanalysts (see Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy ). Major made this fact known for a long time in France.

In the 1970s it became known that Amilcar Lobo Moreira, a training candidate from the Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society, was present during torture. The Argentine psychoanalyst Marie Langer informed the then IPA President Serge Lebovici . He asked about the 'rumor'. Moreira's training analyst Leao Cabernite, who was also president of the Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society, told Lebovi when he asked that this 'rumor' was not true. In fact, after the end of the military dictatorship, it turned out that Moreira had actually been present during the torture; Moreira himself confirmed this without regretting his actions. In addition, during the military dictatorship, the psychoanalyst Helena Bessermann Vianna was identified as a 'denunciator' of Moreira's behavior on the basis of an expert opinion by a graphologist close to the dictatorship. She was persecuted herself as a result.

"René Major was particularly interested in two aspects of the question: the silence that surrounded these events, which remained more or less isolated, and their repercussions on the training of psychoanalysts in the play of transference and countertransference in the tradition of psychoanalysis. Indeed In addition to their historical and political significance, these events also have important implications for psychoanalysis itself. The decision to support the policy of 'saving' psychoanalysis in Germany, and then the subsequent denial of this decision, is closely related to the events that took place in thirty Years later played in Brazil.

René Major, who was sensitized to these questions through the work of his friend Nicolas Abraham, saw in it an example of the transmission of a trauma that had become the object of denial over several generations, a trauma that a new generation, in turn, saw is confronted with the “unthinkable”. Mainly for this reason, Major worked tenaciously to lift the veil on episodes of the past that had previously been masked by a heavy silence and an official version that distorted the facts. He interfered in this affair since 1981 and organized, as part of Confrontation, an international colloquium with Latin American groups on the politics of psychoanalysis in the face of torture, a topic that is rarely discussed. Jacques Derrida, his great companion of dissidence, read a text with the title 'Géopsychanalyse' (Derrida, 1981).

Estates General of Psychoanalysis

In July 2000, on Major's initiative, the "États Géneraux de la psychanalyse" took place in Paris, the preparation of which Major had been working on since 1997. The tradition of the États Géneraux goes back to the Ancien Regime, but the direct role model for Major was more likely the États Géneraux de la philosophie , which Derrida participated in 1979 in a situation in which philosophy lessons at French grammar schools were up for grabs. had taken place.

At the «États Géneraux de la psychanalyse», thousands of participants from around 30 countries discussed the crisis and the future of psychoanalysis.

Fonts (selection)

As an author

• Rêver l'autre , 1977
• L'Agonie du jour , 1979
• Discernement - La psychanalyse aux frontières du droit, de la biologie et de la philosophie , 1984
• De l'Élection - Freud face aux idéologies américaine, allemande et soviétique , 1986
• Lacan avec Derrida - Analysis désistancielle , 1991
• Au Commencement - La vie, la mort , 1999

As editor

• «État général de la psychanalyse, juillet 2000», Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 2003

Other literature

• Jacques Derrida (1981), “Géopsychanalyse” in: ders., Psyché. Inventions de l'autre , Paris: Galilée, 1987, pp. 327-352
• Jacques Derrida / Elisabeth Roudinesco (2001), De quoi demain… Dialogue, Paris: Fayard, dt. What will tomorrow be made of? A dialogue , Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2005
• Helena Besserman-Vianna (1998), Politique de la psychanalyse face à la dictature et à la torture: N'en parlez à personne… , (preface by René Major), Paris: L'Harmattan - Major took care of the French edition. In order to make the dossier as complete as possible, the book also contains a statement by former IPA President Serge Lebovici.

Awards

• 1986: Finalist at the Prix du Gouverneur général, Discernement - La psychanalyse aux frontières du droit, de la biologie et de la philosophie

Individual evidence

1. ↑ cf. Jacques Derrida, L'écriture et la difference , paperback edition Collection points, p. 437
2. ↑ Derrida / Roudinesco 2001, p. 270
3. ↑ ^{a b} En son nom propre. The carrière et l'oeuvre de René Major. ( Memento from May 13, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
4. ↑ Les années brunes. La psychanalysis sus le IIIeReich. Textes traduits et présenté par Jean-Luc Evard, Paris: Confrontation, 1984
5. ↑ cf. Besserman-Vianna 1998
6. ↑ Major's preparatory lectures are contained in the book "Au commencement ۚ". Derrida's lecture has also been published in German ( Seelenstands der Psychoanalyse. The impossible beyond a sovereign cruelty , Frankfurt am Main 2002)