The Self Between ─ From Freud to the New Social Psychology of France

After the disappointing events of the 1960s, including the loss of Algeria, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the American war in the former French colony of Indo-China, people in France began to look seriously to Freudianism in the transformed version of Jacques Lacan, for a new way of understanding human relations and the relations between human beings and society. The movement in France is not specifically psychoanalytic but developed against such a background. Psychoanalytic thought acquired the kind of centrality in French intellectual life once associated with existentialism and Marxism and later with structuralism--a centrality it probably never possessed in the United States, even at the peak of its popularity. The movement was a reassessment and rethinking of Freud’s thought and influence, and it iwa a movement that was almost unknown to the American public.

Eugene Webb is professor emeritus in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.