FREE ASSOCIATION LISBON

What is conveyed by my speech, not only in terms of semantic content and affect, but further with regard to my past, as I address the person of the analyst? Who is this I? And to whom am I speaking? To that person? Or to someone else? Fédida reminds us that the French word for “person,” personne, as in “the person of the analyst,” is also a “no one” whose absence creates a potential in which, through the patient’s transference, present-time meaning originating in the past is created.

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Translation’s inherent critique of textual authority, the conversion of one voice into another, and the creation thereby of new forms bring to light some of the issues Fédida explored: the re-emergence of “the stranger” and of the archaic during communication between analyst and patient, as well as the “translations” at work between image and speech through the paradigm of the dream.

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Pierre Fédida was one of the great outlier French psychoanalysts from the 1970s up to his death in 2002, even while contributing, for example, to J.-B. Pontalis’s Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse (New Review of Psychoanalysis). Perhaps this was because, in training, he was drawn to the German phenomenologists, whose thinking continuously shaped his own, and so he stood apart from the Lacanian and post-Lacanian scenes in France. Notwithstanding, throughout his working life, he engaged in dialogues with painters such as Pierre Tal Coat and poets such as André du Bouchet, in addition to interrogating the art criticism of Rosalind Krauss and Georges Didi-Huberman and the philosophy of Henri Maldiney.

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But what place does Pierre Fédida occupy in the English-speaking psychoanalytic community today? The response is simple: very little, till now at least. The recent appearance of Psychopathologies of the Living, a new collection of selected essays, will doubtless remedy this situation.

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So as to introduce Fédida’s thinking, the Free Association Lisbon is hosting a conversation between the volume’s two editors, Patrick ffrench and Nigel Saint, who have also translated the lion’s share of the essays, and Steven Jaron. The point of departure will be questions of transference and translation as they relate to Fédida’s unique contribution to his re-thinking of psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice alike.

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Who, then, was Pierre Fédida? And why Fédida today?

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We invite you to participate in the conversation. There will be plenty of time for questions and remarks from our listeners, as everyone is invited to discuss the problems raised. So please join us for this special evening as we delve into the stirring interrogations of this enigmatic and always surprising analyst.

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Patrick ffrench is Professor of French at King’s College London, where he teaches 20th-century French literature, philosophy, and cinema, critical theory, and psychoanalysis.

Nigel Saint is Associate Professor of French at the University of Leeds, where he teaches literature, culture, and critical theory, and works on contemporary artists and art theory.

 

Steven Jaron is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in Paris. He is a member of the Society of Freudian Psychoanalysis (SPF).