ABSTRACT
It is interesting to imagine the state of French psychoanalysis in 1963, when the IPA, having two years previously already suggested that Lacan should receive no new cases as a training analyst, stipulated that his training activities should cease entirely. A generation of analysts, now in their intellectual adolescence, had been taught, supervised and analysed by Lacan. They would have had in their minds his take on the ego, narcissism, the subject, representation, language, the Oedipus complex, the maternal signifier and (bearing in mind Lacan was more polyglot than most) his take on new theories written abroad. Those of Lacan’s analysands and students who chose to stay within the IPA, including Anzieu, Diatkine, Widlöcher, Laplanche, and Pontalis, perhaps made their choice because of new identifications they had made with other influences within the IPA, or perhaps because of a desire to stay within the most powerful organisation in their field, or because of a mixture of the two. The natural process of separating and individuating from a teacher and analyst may entail ambivalence between guilt and triumph, gratitude and hatred; however, the excommunication of Lacan by the IPA might have given this parting of ways a particularly aversive slant and made it less a separation than a repudiation. Because of the lack of contact between these analysts and Lacan afterwards and because of the absence of citations of his teachings in their work, one is pushed to imagine a kind of Cultural Revolution in which the young ones had to deny the father who had taught them the language of psychoanalysis. And yet, these young ones might have discovered, perhaps to their chagrin, that it is not possible to escape entirely the language of the parent, and that even as they came to speak more and more in their new psychoanalytic language, they were found to have “an accent”: their understandings were not quite those of the English-speaking world and the new theories they developed were unmistakeably underpinned by the repudiated father.
