15 - The Deconstitution of Psychoanalysis

Summary

It is somewhat foolish no doubt to imagine one can circumscribe the extent of Derrida's engagement in writing with psychoanalysis, or with the work of Freud or Lacan or other psychoanalytic thinkers, such as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. While numerous texts might suggest themselves right away as obviously belonging to the classification, there would remain the irradiating effects across an entire oeuvre of what Derrida calls, in his first published essay on Freud, la percée or la trouée freudienne, the “Freudian breakthrough” (“Freud,” 199). In what follows, nevertheless, I have cut out and assembled a set of four distinct texts by Derrida that are “on” psychoanalysis, as we say, but that also share a seemingly contingent feature: they were all initially addressed, in person, to a gathering of psychoanalysts by profession and at their invitation. I have already alluded to the first of these, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” which, as the brief headnote explains, is the “fragment of a lecture delivered at the Institut de psychanalyse (Dr. Green's seminar)” (“Freud,” 196). The three subsequent texts I have in mind, which each responded to invitations from René Major, are “Du tout,” “Geopsychanalysis ‘and the rest of the world,’”, and “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul.” What is interesting is this constancy of Derrida's interventions from the place of an outsider invited to address an assembled institution or constitution of analysis.