Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel


Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel was a leading French psychoanalyst, a training analyst, and past President of the Société psychanalytique de Paris in France. From 1983 to 1989, she was Vice President of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Chasseguet-Smirgel was Freud Professor at the University College, London, and Professor of Psychopathology at the Université Lille Nord de France. She is best known for her reworking of the Freudian theory of the ego ideal and its connection to primary narcissism, as well as for her extension of this theory to a critique of utopian ideology.

Biography and career

Chasseguet-Smirgel was born in Paris in 1928; as a Jew of Central European ancestry, she lost many relatives in the Holocaust. She became a psychoanalyst, then carried out further studies in political science and eventually earned a doctorate in psychology. Like many other young French intellectuals, she broke with the Communist Party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Psychoanalytical critic of the French students' rebellion in 1968

By the time of the student rebellions of May 1968, she had become a political conservative. In their anonymous 1969 book L'univers contestationnaire, Chasseguet-Smirgel and her husband and co-author Béla Grunberger argued that the utopian political ideology of the student demonstrators, as well as of their Freudo-Marxist avatars Herbert Marcuse and Gilles Deleuze, was fueled by primary narcissism, the desire to return to the maternal womb. Further, that the very term "Freudo-Marxism" was oxymoronic—one could not reconcile the reality principle with the Communist utopia. Chasseguet-Smirgel's analysis of the views of the Freudian dissident Wilhelm Reich, who attempted a systematization of the libido, explains why his orgone theory collected followers despite its apparent pseudoscientific character.
As in many cases of paranoia, the coherent and systematic appearance of ideas is a symptom which allows the subject to function in an apparently normal way. The internal necessity that forces paranoiacs to persuade others as to the reality of their system of belief results in their 'recruiting' converts. These disciples will tend to be seduced by the paranoiac's ideas in so far as these deny reality and mobilize Illusion; an illusion which will be backed by manic rationalization.

The ego ideal

Chasseguet-Smirgel's critique of the totalitaritan ideology was a contribution to psychohistory. In her 1973 study La maladie d'idéalité, Chasseguet-Smirgel expanded upon her neo-Freudian reworking. Fantasy plays a vital role in the normative development of the individual—it "implies the idea of a project". For example, a child who fantasizes that she has greater abilities than a star athlete or musician may well eventually realize these goals, if her fantasy includes daily practice. When one project is complete, the child will fantasize further, leading to further work and further development. Even if the child successfully imitates his model, however, the ego ideal will interpret this "success" as failure. For in its quest for omnipotence, the ego ideal "prefers absolute solutions". The tension between the ego and its ideal is only lessened with maturity, when the adult, having reached Freud's "scientific" stage, acknowledges that omnipotence is unattainable by anyone.
Thus, Chasseguet-Smirgel postulates that the ego ideal, by "impl the promise of a return to that primitive state of fusion", effectively functions as a "maturation drive". Unfortunately, Chasseguet-Smirgel argues, environmental factors often interfere with the maturation drive. If the child's frustrations are too great, for example, reality-testing breaks down, and his "narcissism... remains split off from its instinctual life and cathects an exaggerated ego ideal"
may cause a regression towards a more archaic form of 'narcissistic reinstatement,' or even towards psychotic megalomania in which the original lack of differentiation between internal and external perceptions recurs.

Chasseguet-Smirgel argues for the ego ideal theory's relevance to the psychology of the group. She claims that the ego ideal "tends to reinstate Illusion," unlike the superego, which " to promote reality". Because of this fundamental opposition, the superego may be "swept away, as it were, by the sudden reactivation of the old wish for the union of ego and ideal." As Freud argued in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, the authority of the group can easily be substituted for the conscience of the individual, thus removing the superego's inhibitions and licensing forbidden pleasures.
Taking the most notorious modern example of a group run amok, she argues that Hitler's function in Nazism was that of a "promoter of Illusion":
If one considers that promise stimulates the wish for the fusion of ego and ideal by way of regression and induces the ego to melt into the omnipotent primary object, to encompass the entire universe... one can understand, in a general way, that the propensity to a loss of the ego's boundaries makes the individual particularly liable to identify himself not only with each member of the group but with the group formation as a whole. His megalomania finds its expression in this, each person's ego being extended to the whole group. The members of the group lose their individuality and begin to resemble ants or termites. This loss of personal characteristics... thus allows each member to feel himself to be, not a minute, undifferentiated particle of a vast whole, but, on the contrary, identified with the totality of the group, thereby conferring on himself an omnipotent ego, a colossal body.

While Chasseguet-Smirgel saw Jacques Lacan as a pseudoscientific fraud, one of her central arguments, that the formation of the ego ideal is the infant's response to the discovery that he is not omnipotent, recalls Lacan's famous mirror stage essay.

Controversies and polemics with the Lacanian school and others

Deleuze and Guattari, in their 1972 work Anti-Œdipus take the example of Chasseguet-Smirgel and Bela Grunberger, who wrote under the pseudonym André Stéphane, to argue that traditionally psychoanalysis enthusiastically embraces a police state:
In November 1968, Grunberger and Chasseguet-Smirgel, both members of the Paris section of the International Psychoanalytical Association, disguised themselves under the pseudonym André Stéphane and published L’univers Contestationnaire. In this book they assumed that the left-wing rioters of May 68 were totalitarian stalinists, and psychoanalyzed them saying that they were affected by a sordid infantilism caught up in an Oedipal revolt against the Father.
Notably Lacan, mentioned this book with great disdain. While Grunberger and Chasseguet-Smirgel were still disguised under the pseudonym, Lacan remarked that for sure none of the authors belonged to his school, as none would abase themselves to such low drivel. The two IPa analysts responded accusing the Lacan School of "intellectual terrorism".
Deleuze and Guattari also mention Grunberger and Chasseguet-Smirgel's book as an example of the cop-like tone of the psychoanalysts that want to impose the Oedipus model upon everyone; psychoanalysts like them consider those "who do not bow to the imperialism of Oedipus as dangerous deviants, leftists who ought to be handed over to social and police repression."