“Psychiatric diagnosis is an ongoing revolution today”

2024-07-21 09:00:08

Sigmund Freud in his London home. AKG-pictures

A professor of history at the New School for Social Research in New York, Eli Zaretsky studies the history of thought, family and capitalism in modern times. He has devoted several books to the history of psychoanalysis, as well The Secret of the Soul (Knopf, 2004), translated into French under the title Century of Freud. A social and cultural history of psychoanalysis (Albin Michel, 2008) and Political Freud: A History (Columbia University Press, 2017), not traduit.

It is written in The Century of Freud: “Psychology has irrevocably changed the way ordinary men and women throughout the world see and understand themselves. » What do you think this Freudian change consists of?

Psychoanalysis was truly a revolution. A very deep revolution, which still continues today. It allows people to understand themselves better, by encouraging them to notice their inner life, their own experience. We have always known this, of course, thanks mainly to literature, but science has been a way to expand our understanding of this inner world. Thanks to it, people are able to understand their responsibility well, but also where it stops, where it sees its limits within each individual. It is in this sense that I speak of a psychoanalytic transformation.

However, he insists on the fact that we understand nothing about the birth of psychoanalysis at the end of the 19th century if we separate it from the history of modern thought. It is from this perspective that he analyzes the relationship that science maintains with the concept of Enlightenment and it “Emancipatory promises”.

I think that psychoanalysis has complex relationships as well “promise” of the 18th century: the promise of individual autonomy, of democracy and of the emancipation of women. Psychoanalysis has deepened and complicated all these promises at the same time.

This article is taken from “Le Monde Special Issue – A life, a work: Sigmund Freud”July-August 2024, on sale in stores or online by visiting on our store website.

Take the example of individual freedom. For the men of the 18th century, an independent person was someone who thought and decided about his life freely, someone who freed himself from his background and his economic situation. Self-government is then understood as the moral freedom of the individual. However, psychoanalysis has shown that the victory of freedom is also a personal matter, in other words that everything is not at stake in the relationship between the individual and society, but more fundamentally in the relationship that each person maintains with himself.

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