Psychoanalytic Perspectives

ISSN: 1551-806X (Print) 2163-6958 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uppe20

A Conversation with Elisabeth Roudinesco

Jill Choder-Goldman

To cite this article: Jill Choder-Goldman (2019) A Conversation with Elisabeth Roudinesco,
Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 16:1, 103-111, DOI: 10.1080/1551806X.2018.1554958

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1551806X.2018.1554958

Published online: 24 Jan 2019.

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Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 16: 103–111
Copyright © 2019 National Institute for the Psychotherapies
ISSN: 1551-806X (print) / 2163-6958 (online)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1551806X.2018.1554958

Global Perspectives

A CONVERSATION WITH ELISABETH ROUDINESCO

JILL CHODER-GOLDMAN, LCSW

In Global Perspectives, we bring you interviews with psychoanalysts from around the world in an effort
to explore the influence of culture, politics, and socioeconomics on psychoanalytic training, theory
development, clinical technique, and psychoanalytic practice in general.
Keywords: French psychoanalysis, Freud, historian, Lacan, literary criticism.

I left my hotel in the 6th arrondissement and strolled south to Elisabeth

Roudinesco’s apartment, passing through the famed Luxembourg Gardens. My
walk was a fitting prelude to our conversation; I experienced a wonderful cross-
section of the Parisian populace, a microcosm of the culture, if you will, in the
beautiful setting of this classic French park. Men playing boulles, children playing
football and tennis. Friends, young and old, were scattered about in garden
chairs, in small groups, in animated discussions, reading or just enjoying the
dappled sunlight of a late spring day.
Dr. Roudinesco is a historian. She is also a psychoanalyst, but history is where
her heart and passion lie. She was brought up with books, loves books, and when
you walk into her home, you immediately feel the impact of her love of books, for
it is filled from floor to ceiling with them: books on French history and philoso-
phy, as well as autobiographies and biographies of well-known French historians,
novelists, and psychoanalysts. The books are surrounded by plants of all sizes,
both in her living area and on her outdoor balcony. Gardening is another one of
her passions.
I looked around before we began, thinking about how much she has not only
read but written, for she is both a prolific reader and prolific writer, on topics
ranging from the situation of psychoanalysis worldwide to the history of the
French Revolution, perverts and perversion, Judaism and Auschwitz, and Lacan.
Her most recent book, a biography of Freud, was prominently displayed on its
own beautifully carved antique column. There was so much I wanted to talk

Address correspondence to Jill Choder-Goldman, LCSW, 250 West 57th Street #501, New York, NY 10024.
E-mail: jillchoder@gmail.com

103
104 Jill Choder-Goldman, LCSW

about, but in the interest of time I tried to focus yet still include as many of her
ideas as possible in our conversation. This was the first interview for Global
Perspectives in which language was a bit of a barrier, as Dr. Roudinesco speaks
only French, and unfortunately my French is good enough only to get directions
to the restroom and order a croissant and latte for breakfast. Nevertheless, we
had a wonderful interpreter, who was eloquent in both English and French, and
we managed to touch on a wide range of topics. Dr. Roudinesco’s deep knowl-
edge of history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis came through strongly.

JCG: Good afternoon, Elisabeth, and thank you for seeing me on this beautiful
weekend in Paris.
ER: Bonjour, Jill, et mon plaisir de la faire.
JCG: Perhaps we can start at the beginning. I know you were born in 1944 in what
was considered a newly liberated Paris at that time. Your parents were both
doctors, and you grew up surrounded by books.
ER: I come from an intellectual background with doctors, as you said, in a family
where books played a really important role. Both my father and my mother
read a great deal, and my father was a collector of books.
JCG: You studied literature at the Sorbonne, with a minor in linguistics, and
I read that at one point you wanted to become a novelist and really had
no intention of becoming a psychoanalyst. Can you tell me about your
journey to psychoanalysis from those beginnings?
ER: Yes, it’s true growing up I wanted to write novels, and I studied literature.
But when I was around 22 years old, I started studying history and
psychoanalysis.
JCG: Your mother was a renowned psychoanalyst and neuro-pediatrician, who
spent her whole life working mostly with very sick children. Was she in any
way an influence on you becoming a psychoanalyst?
ER: Yes, my mother, Jenny Aubry, was a great psychoanalyst. She was very much
drawn to psychoanalysis at first through the English school, through Anna
Freud and especially John Bowlby. She was a pioneer in the field in France
and worked with the Tavistock Clinic, so she did influence my interest in
that sense. She initially was a neurologist in a hospital, but she moved to
psychoanalysis after World War I. Being a doctor in a hospital at that time
was very prestigious, but it drew a wedge between my father and my mother
because my father really didn’t like psychoanalysis.
JCG: What did he not like about psychoanalysis?
ER: My father was a very 19th-century character and he held a rather old, end-of
-the-19th-century conception of psychoanalysis. To him it was nothing more
than a sexual doctrine and he thought that it wasn’t serious, that it wasn’t
medical enough. He felt that my mother had a brilliant medical career and
 Global Perspectives 105

that she was moving away from medicine and basically making a very bad
professional choice. My father was a very intelligent man, but he was not
very open to modernity.
JCG: I can imagine that it was difficult to be stuck between those two strong
influences. How did you navigate?
ER: When I was 18 years old, I got interested in art and cinema, American
cinema; at the time that was called being on the “aesthetic right.” I was
politically a leftist; I was embracing socialist values, but the aesthetic right
embraced the cult of the work of art for itself. At the same time, I had to
define myself in a household where I had two heavyweight parents,
a superbly intelligent father who was not very much in touch with his
time, and a very successful mother; both were extremely successful on
a social and an intellectual scale. I had literary aspirations. I didn’t want
to study medicine at the time. I was 18 and to me psychoanalysis was not
interesting. It was not culture. To me culture was cinema and literature.
JCG: So how did things start to shift?
ER: In France, psychoanalysis was very different from what it was in America and
England. It was a cultural thing, and the works of Lacan, Foucault, and
Derrida were introduced to the entire French academic world. It was 1966
when those authors were published simultaneously. Their psychoanalysis
was a philosophy; it was an implication that went beyond existentialism
and postexistentialism. It revolutionized the literary analysis that we had
been using so far.
Lacan was a big part of that, and it was easy for me to read Lacan because
I was already interested in linguistics. So, paradoxically, I started reading Lacan,
and there was a clear separation between Lacan, the analyst whom I knew
personally, and the works of Lacan I was discovering through reading him.
Lacan was considered to be a great thinker, and my mother, even though she
had a classical training in psychoanalysis, was very close to him. He represented
something new—a new energy in those years.

JCG: In your book, Lacan: In Spite of Everything, you stated that Lacan has been
portrayed by other analysts as anti-Semitic, incestuous, a charlatan and
a fraudulent Freud (2014, p. 2). These are some pretty harsh terms, but
you knew the man, you wrote several books on him—including a biography
—and he was a friend. How do you make sense of all of these accusations?
ER: My work as a historian, that of any historian, is to work on truth. The history
of psychoanalysis is a whole world of rumors, and those accusations are
ridiculous. What is said here about Lacan has been said basically of anyone
within the realm of psychoanalysis, Freud included.
JCG:
106 Jill Choder-Goldman, LCSW

So in your words, how would you describe the essence of Lacan?

ER: As a historian, here’s how I would summarize the essence of the contributions
of Lacan: He was a great thinker. He was a very talented and intelligent man,
and he managed to have a whole generation read Freud. Remember that in
France there was no equivalent to the British school or the American school of
psychoanalysis, and Lacan was the first great thinker in the field. He was the
only one among the great writers of psychoanalytic doctrine to have made
a philosophical reading of Freud’s work, thus bringing him a completely new
conceptuality. Also, he tore apart the biological model—and the Darwinian
evolutionary theory that was its fulcrum. While Sigmund Freud wanted his
discipline to be thought of as a natural science, Lacan entered into it through
the realm of the humanities, linguistics, and anthropology.
JCG: You knew him personally, you said?
ER: I knew him well. Lacan was a friend of my mother, who was a psychoanalyst
in the school of Lacan. It was 1966 and I remember saying to my mother, he
is absolutely fantastic! In those years, Lacan was considered to be a great
thinker, and my mother, even though she had a classical training in psycho-
analysis, was very close to him, and he represented something new—a new
energy. But bear in mind that when I started writing, he was dead. And, like
my mother, I was not analyzed by him. I was a member of his school, but
I did not idolize him the way a lot of people did.
JCG: You speak about being influenced by philosophers, political scientists, and
literary critics, but what about psychoanalysts other than Lacan? Were there
any other psychoanalytic thinkers who influenced you?
ER: Around 1968, I began going to lectures by Foucault. Those were exceptional
times and all of the French philosophers and psychoanalysts talked a lot about
Freud as a thinker of the philosophical culture in France, and that’s when
I started reading Freud, even though my mother had always had all the books at
home. But for the first time, I found myself interested in the history of psycho-
analysis for myself, because up until that time it had been my mother’s business.
That was a great moment for me. It was important for me to differentiate myself
from my mother—a founding member of the Freudian school of Paris, the
same generation and same age as Lacan. It was important for me to separate. In
1969, I joined the school as a member. In that period, they would bring in
young intellectuals who were not destined to be psychoanalysts or practitioners.
That’s when I began to really be interested in psychoanalysis.
JCG: I read that Lacan felt that stupidity and a lack of awareness were unanalyz-
able, which is a pretty strong opinion. What do you think he meant by that?
Do you share his view?
ER: What he said was actually very funny. I’ll try and translate it. He said,
“Psychoanalysis is a remedy for ignorance, but there’s nothing it can do
 Global Perspectives 107

against stupidity.” It’s a play on words, a pun, and it’s actually very funny
in French: “La psychanalyse est un remède contre l’ignorance. Elle est
sans effet sur la connerie.” (Lacan, J. 2006a; orig. 1971. Le Séminaire,
livre XVIII: D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant. Miller, J.A., ed.;
Paris: Seuil.)
JCG: Elisabeth, you were part of the Freudian school but didn’t want to be
a clinician. Why was that?
ER: Not at the beginning, no, I didn’t. I was only interested in psychoanalysis as
an intellectual path to self-discovery. I started my own analysis not for
clinical reasons, because I wasn’t suffering from any neuroses, but because
in those years in France there was quite a unique trait to that study, which
was that it was an adventure of the self. My generation entered into analysis
as if we were beginning a great intellectual adventure. Psychoanalysis felt
like a revolution. Naturally, this treatment helped me understand myself,
but I was initially drawn to the intellectual energy.

I did my analysis with a classical Freudian analyst. He was close to Lacan, and
we would work the usual three quarters of an hour. In France, being Lacanian
was the same as being Freudian.

JCG: What would you say to someone who was considering entering psychoana-
lytic treatment today?
ER: I never push anyone to enter into analysis. I am the daughter of
a psychoanalyst; I have been analyzed myself; and I practiced psychoanalysis.
To enter into analysis is a personal journey to be able to know oneself
better, but it is also to participate in a passionate adventure.
JCG: So what is the psychoanalytic perspective in France today?
ER: Catastrophic!
JCG: Catastrophic? That’s an interesting perspective! In what way is it
catastrophic?
ER: I’m talking of it being a catastrophe because today psychoanalysis has
moved away from any form of intellectual culture, so being a therapist
means either working as a social worker or working in the neurosciences.
You have those two trends: either mental health professionals are interested
in social psychology, or they’re interested in the brain. You still find good
practitioners in France, but they’ve all moved away from the intellectual
field. And I feel it’s the same in England, where they’re not interested in
intellectual questions anymore.
JCG: Can you say more about that?
ER: I’ll give an example. I went to London to the Freud Museum to present my book
on Freud. There were many people, it was a wonderful evening, but when
108 Jill Choder-Goldman, LCSW

I signed the book at the end I realized that everyone there came from Latin
America: Chile, Mexico, Argentina. British citizens, but coming from those
places, and there was not one member of the British Society there.
JCG: Then what would you say to someone wanting to train in psychoanalysis in
France today?
ER: Well, in short, the profession in itself is not catastrophic. What is catastrophic is
that today 90% of psychoanalysts are actually psychologists, which is a big pro-
blem because it’s not the same study, and it’s not the same rigorous, intellectual
frame of mind. Forty years ago, it was the other way around. Yet Freud in France is
still considered a great thinker, and, unlike in England, he’s taught in the fields of
philosophy and literature even if not as much a part of psychoanalytic study.
JCG: So is France a uniquely Freudian country?
ER: France is the only country where all spheres of society were so influenced by
Freud and psychoanalysis for 100 years: the literary world, philosophers,
psychiatrists, psychologists and educators. It is the only country where Freud
was considered a revolutionary and where his work is taught in the final year
of high school. But in contrast to that, it is also a country where the hatred
of Freud has always been pronounced.
JCG: In America today there are a lot of issues around insurance for mental
health. Here in France you have socialized medicine, but I was wondering if
that includes mental health, as well?
ER: No, it doesn’t. More and more psychiatrists choose to give medical drugs
instead of therapy, and so therapy is not covered. For instance, in psychiatric
hospitals, the link between psychology and psychoanalysis has been broken,
and today patients are cured almost exclusively using drugs.
JCG: And you have written critically about these quick fixes in your book, Why
Psychoanalysis? (2001; New York: Columbia University Press; Rachel Bowlby,
Trans.).
ER: I do, because I think it’s a reflection of the society, where we’re no longer
thinking long term. We think short term. And bear in mind that I wrote the
book Why Psychoanalysis? twenty years ago, so it’s even worse now.

I’m in favor of a revolutionized practice in psychoanalysis. I think it can no

longer be three times a week, lying down, interpreting the unconscious. But the
theory, the intellectual foundation, and philosophical questioning inherent in
Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis remain critical to the field.

JCG: So do you feel that analytic institutes in France address this problem and
educate candidates on the continuing value of psychoanalytic theory?
ER: The practice of psychoanalysis had to change, and it did change, but no one says
it; they don’t talk about it. They no longer do the three-times-a-week analysis.
 Global Perspectives 109

When I started I was 30 years old, and when people came to me at that time, they
wanted the experience of an analysis. Today, people come to us, they come to me,
because they are not doing well, and there are more cases of depression than
neurosis. And they want face-to-face, they want empathy, they want efficiency;
they don’t come to us with the idea of going through an analysis. They come to us
with symptoms that need to be cured. Most of them are on medication, and
rightly so, because otherwise maybe they wouldn’t even be able to talk. So this is
a problem for institutes that I think hasn’t been properly addressed—how to
continue to provide the theoretical foundations for psychoanalysis while addres-
sing the fact that culturally, psychoanalysis is not what is being sought.
JCG: I believe that the top psychoanalysts in America would probably agree with
you that thinking and practicing psychoanalysis does not only mean that it
has to be three times a week and on the couch. Clinical work has had to
change.
ER: Yes, I do agree. Freud had a great sense of what clinical work was, which was
to “know yourself.” And this can be accomplished in many ways.
JCG: So Elisabeth, this is a good segue to Freud. There have been so many
biographies of Freud over the years, including those by Ernst Jones, Peter
Gay, and Louis Breger. I was therefore wondering about your impetus for
writing this new biography. What did you want the world to know about
Freud that hadn’t already been said?
ER: The question is, why do we go back to biography after having studied the
history? It’s a great question that I asked a friend of mine who, sadly, passed
away. He was a historian, Jacques Le Goff, and he specialized in the Middle
Ages, and he wrote a biography of Saint Louis. I had written about France,
I had written a dictionary of psychoanalysis comparing psychoanalysis in
several countries, and suddenly I had the idea of going back to Freud. Why?
If I had had the answer to that question I would not have done it. The
biography that Peter Gay wrote was published 25 years ago. I knew [Gay],
I met him, I admired his work, but the Freud he talked about was not my
Freud. He talked of Freud as a British scholar, a Darwinian, not a man from
his time. My Freud was different. My Freud was a mix of a thinker of dark
enlightenments and an attraction to the irrational. Freud had two great
models: Faust and Mephistopheles. He talks about the struggle in the Bible
between Jacob and the Angel. My Freud is complex, he struggled against
himself, and he’s full of contradictions. And he also lived in a period that
was a terrible period of time for humanity. First, World War I, and then the
rise of Nazism and the destruction of Europe. So those were my inspirations
to write the book.
110 Jill Choder-Goldman, LCSW

JCG: Did you have a guiding question?

ER: The big question that I had as a historian was the question of the family.
I wanted to show Freud’s everyday life in his family. Jones did that a little bit,
but when I studied the archives, I realized that Freud was a man of his time,
and he spent his childhood observing the transformation of the Western
family. In my opinion, that’s what gave birth to psychoanalysis. He also gave
birth to a political movement with disciples and a global vision of his
doctrine.

Writing was a challenge for me because most serious historians of Freud

come from the US. (In fact, all of the Freud historiography is now located in the
US, and I had to do my research at the Library of Congress.) And the anti-
Freudian part of them said: he did not invent anything, he was incestuous, he was
horrendous, he was homophobic. All that is not true. I did not want to write
anything that was anything close to hagiography, but I was sick and tired of
reading this image of Freud coming from all over the world, but mostly from
the US. I wanted to change that. The question is, in the US, why are there so
many books entirely dedicated to the question of knowing if Freud slept with his
sister-in-law?

JCG: How was your biography received in France?

ER: I’ve had contact with every single psychoanalytic school in France and they
all have a hard time reading my book on Freud because they don’t have the
culture, historical or literary, to understand it. Well, I’m exaggerating a bit,
of course, but when you talk to them, they’re intelligent but they don’t know
where Vienna is, they don’t know the history of Freud. They only know his
clinical cases.
JCG: With all of the writing that you do, do you have time to have a clinical
practice as well?
ER: I am very fond of clinical work, but I really haven’t had a clinical practice in
a few years.
JCG: Why did you stop?
ER: I didn’t have the time to travel all over the world, to give lectures, and to
carry on a practice at the same time. And, as I said, the practice of psycho-
analysis has changed so much since I began 30 years ago. I still have two
patients and I’m a supervisor now. But my main activity, my main job, is
being a historian, and I also write a column in the newspaper Le Monde, so
that keeps me very busy.
JCG: Elisabeth, is there anything more that you’d like our audience to know about
you, or any other last thoughts or ideas you would like to communicate
about the world of psychoanalysis in France today?
 Global Perspectives 111

ER: This is what I want to impress upon your readers: Psychoanalysis in France is
also a cultural matter that extends beyond practitioners. Psychoanalysis is
a literary discipline that does not have to ape the sciences. It is not a hard
science, but a science of man.

Contributor

Jill Choder-Goldman, LCSW, is the interview editor of Psychoanalytic Perspectives and

a psychoanalyst/psychotherapist. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees
from NYU and her postgraduate psychoanalytic and supervisory training from the National
Institute for the Psychotherapies, where she is now a clinical supervisor and advisor. She also
has a private practice in New York City, treating individuals, couples, and groups.