Elsa Godart. “Freud spoke of female sexuality in the form of a ‘dark continent'”

Madame Figaro. – Speech, drive, desire… These three pillars of psychoanalysis are also around which the MeToo movement was built. How to understand this?
Elsa Godart. – Psychoanalysis is a talking therapy. This means that it is based on the importance of saying things. Freud’s revolution was precisely in freedom of speech. That is, in the context of the bourgeois society of the 19th century, we began to take responsibility for our experiences, our feelings, what we want.^e century, which did not allow it. Freud also freed desire and changed our relationship with sexuality. From this point of view, psychoanalysis revolutionizes the Western world, empowers it and makes it key, terribly human, above all morality, the field of sexuality and desire. It is not inconsistent to think that somehow the MeToo revolution, which is also a revolution of speech, by women defining the threshold of “intolerance” and affirming the power of desire, is the result of psychoanalysis. became possible more than a century ago. But with a limitation. MeToo is a social and political revolution. However, Freud, although he gave a conference on femininity in 1931, seems disarmed in the face of female sexuality. He evokes it in the form of a “black continent” and advises. “If you want to know more about femininity, interrogate your own experience, turn to poets, or wait until science can tell us. provide more in-depth and systematic information. “(1). And when the psychoanalyst’s friend Marie Bonaparte asks him: Was the will das Weib? – literally “What does a woman want?” – Freud would reply that despite his thirty years of study of the feminine subject, he could not solve this riddle… For psychoanalysis there has always been a question about the feminine, the woman.

Is your book your way of telling how psychoanalysis stays alive?
For more than twenty years now, I have been practicing psychoanalysis as a clinician, observing the world and asking myself: What is a symptom in our modern society? In the early 20’s^e century, hysteria was important, but society has changed and the term hysteria has disappeared DSM-5. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Quite a symbol!

So you dig the modern…
A few years ago I published a Psychopathology of hypermodern life (2), which was part of my university’s accreditation. I now have three doctoral students in psychology who are questioning the modern; for example, how about an adolescent clinic in the age of screens? What about the analytic frame (couch, lack of eye contact between analyst and analysand) during telecounseling? Freud could not pose these clinical problems. If we have an obligation to convey what has been established by Freud, Lacan, Klein and others, we have an equally great obligation to think about those investments with the suffering that we face every day in our patients. The subject clinic, specific to psychoanalysis, is today threatened by the cult of profitability, efficiency, speed, with instructions for good health, balance, happiness. However, psychoanalysis is the opposite of this because it says something irreparable about the subject; about the question of the unconscious that no AI will ever be able to reproduce.

You have visited Lacan, exhibition . What did you find there?
I must admit that I was surprised to find some sometimes complex concepts at the heart of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, such as the question of pleasure, without a clinical dimension. I would miss the self-criticism of the laconic discourse. If only questions, questions. However, I found the selection of works to be very appropriate. Perhaps we should have stuck to the question of Lacan and art alone. And insist on a common symbolic dimension for art and psychoanalysis.

Is there a legacy for you, a psychoanalyst?
Lacan became part of the history of psychoanalysis. He took some of the Freudian theory and then went beyond it with his own vision. “As for me,” he said, “I am a Freudian.” Clearly, there is a legacy. Lacan’s seminar was an exceptional place of intellectual excitement. This seminar was oral, and if many initially set out to convey his words, how much should these improvisations be taken literally? Lacan’s explanation or hermeneutics, when we know that he often contradicts himself, loves provocation. Read on The seminar is complex, often obscure and confusing, and the younger generation of psychologists, psychiatrists or analysts may find themselves very far from it.

I have often defined psychoanalysis as the ability to lift one’s own desire and transform it into freedom.

Elsa Godard

“Woman does not exist,” said Lacan. To hear how, according to you.
With this sentence, Lacan reminds us that there is no essence of woman. He puts the marker “the” to say that “in essence it is not all” and questions the universality of the article “the”. Lacan does not deny the biological reality of sex, but believes that for the unconscious the female gender does not exist as a sign in the same way as the phallus. For Freud, woman is an object of lack (penis envy, castration) and seeks compensation (child). Lacan does not abandon the Freudian position, but adds that it is “not everything”, there is a “plus” that can be found not on the side of desire, but on the side of pleasure. Now what is this feminine pleasure really all about? We would do well to ask ourselves: what do they know, absorbed in phallocentric theory? The moment requires us to turn to women psychoanalysts who have focused on female sexuality from the beginning. And to admit that this sentence, despite the provocation, the play with words, today, without reading Lacan, cannot be heard. we must be careful of these speeches that sound like slogans in the collective imagination. Words always leave a mark.

In 2024, when women want to “meet their desire”, “find their place”, what can psychoanalysis answer?
I have often defined psychoanalysis as the ability to lift one’s own desire and transform it into freedom. But we still need to be able to see clearly beyond the wishes of others, parents, education, society… And in these expectations and arrangements, let’s ask ourselves: What do I really want deep down? Then, immediately after. What do I do with this desire? Of course, our society is a society of pleasure. Now to enjoy is to “spish” in the moment. This implies a relationship with time that is with immediacy. On the contrary, desire implies a long time and, above all, a question of lack. Do we still need to learn how to deal with scarcity today? If you succeed, then anything goes… But the game is far from over for women to take charge of their desires at any age, and I mean any age; assert them, impose them on society. Suffering is still there, sometimes still hidden, silent or unheard. A slap in the face to the undercooked steak Marguerite Duras talks about Set freeIn 1985, it may have other forms in 2024, more insidious, more degenerate.

However, you remain optimistic.
Women and psychoanalysis, this has always been evident, although their discourses are erased behind the “masters”. Many modern women work, write, practice and think about psychoanalysis. I’ve talked about Marie Bonaparte, Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Helen Deutsch, Karen Horney, Françoise Dolto, Sabine Spielrein, Alice Miller, to name just a few pioneers, in several of my writings. I just wanted to reiterate the accuracy, one word.

(1) femininity, Sigmund Freud, Ed. Payot, 2016
(2) Will psychoanalysis disappear? Psychopathology of hypermodern life, Ed. Albin Michel, 2018