René Laforgue

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René Laforgue (ca 1930?)

René Laforgue (5 November 1894 – 6 March 1962) was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

Biography[edit]

Laforgue was born in Thann (then part of the German Empire) and died in Paris. He studied medicine in Berlin.

Nazi[edit]

His collaboration, like Georges Mauco, with the Nazis over the Aryanisation of the society in Paris during the Occupation in World War Two cast something of a shadow over his later career. He organized himself with the active Nazi Matthias Göring, cousin of Hermann Göring, who was the propagator of aryan psychotherapy and aryan psychoanalysis, Nazi-oriented.

He was convicted during a purge trial after the Second World War. René Laforgue went into exile in Morocco to be forgotten in Casablanca, where he expresses mysticism and racism.[1]

In the year of his death, 1962, he was removed from the roster of training analysts by the International Psychoanalytical Association.[2]

Psychoanalysis[edit]

In 1919, he wrote a thesis on "The Affects in Schizophrenia Patients from a Psychoanalytical Point of View".[3] As his interest in psychoanalysis developed, he underwent a training analysis and began a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. In 1926, along with Marie Bonaparte and eight others, he founded the Paris Psychoanalytic Society.[4]

With his pupil G.Mauco, he meets Freud in Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia.[5] [6]

Laforgue is the author of several books on psychoanalysis, albeit more popularising than original;[7] as well as of a variety of articles on subjects ranging from the eroticization of fear in gambling,[8] through the development of the sense of reality, to such defense mechanisms as psychological repression and isolation.[9]

According to Roudinesco, however, he remained as much indebted intellectually to the French tradition of Pierre Janet and Henri Claude as to Freud;[10] and the tensions implicit in his competing allegiances contributed to his debate with Freud over the French introduction of the term scotomization. Initially welcomed as a description of the blocking of unpleasant perceptions in hysteria by Freud, the latter swiftly turned against it, arguing that Laforgue himself maintained "that 'scotomization' is a term that arises from descriptions of dementia praecox, which does not arise from a carrying over of psychoanalytic concepts".[11]

Despite their theoretical disagreement, the two men remained on friendly terms, Laforgue visiting the Freuds on occasion in the 1920s: he would in the 1950s write a memoir of them, which offers a rare glimpse of Martha Freud as "a practical woman, marvellously skillful in creating an atmosphere of peace and joie de vivre".[12]

Bibliography[edit]

  • Clinical Aspects of Psycho-Analysis. Hogarth Press, 1938
  • The defeat of Baudelaire: A psycho-analytical study of the neurosis of Charles Baudelaire. Norwood Editions, 1978 (first edition - 1931 - in french)

Bibliography about him[edit]

  • Alain de Mijolla, Freud et la France, 1885–1945, Presses Universitaires de France, 2010 (ISBN 2130545157)
  • M.O. Poivet, René Laforgue. Sa place originale dans la naissance du mouvement psychanalytique français. (1978). dirigé par André Bourguignon (Université de Paris Val-de-Marne, Créteil).
  • Martine Lilamand, René Laforgue, fondateur du mouvement psychanalytique français. Sa vie, son œuvre. (1980). dirigé par André Bourguignon (Université de Paris Val-de-Marne, Créteil).
  • Jalil Bennani, La psychanalyse au pays des saints, Ed. Le Fennec, 1996
  • Annick Ohayon : Psychologie et psychanalyse en France. L'impossible rencontre 1919–1969, Ed. La Découverte, 2006, ISBN 2707147796

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Dominique Rougé Université Pédagogique de Cracovie, RENÉ LAFORGUE, LECTEUR DE BAUDELAIRE ET ROUSSEAU. UNE LECTURE AUTOBIOGRAPHIQUE ? Romanica Cracoviensia 2010/10, Jagiellonian University Press
  2. ^ E Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (1999) p. 154-5 and p. 258
  3. ^ J. Damousie, Psychoanalysis and Politics (2012) p. 36
  4. ^ E Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (1999) p. 17
  5. ^ "Fonds Georges Mauco (1914-1987)".
  6. ^ "FRAN_IR_003503 - Online reading room".
  7. ^ Rene Laforgue (fr)
  8. ^ J. Halliday ed., The Psychology of Gambling (1974) p. 26
  9. ^ O. Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946) p. 633-4
  10. ^ E Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (1999) p. 20-22
  11. ^ S. Freud, On Sexuality (PFL 7) p. 352
  12. ^ Quoted in P. Gay, Freud (1989) p. 61
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