Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1928 – March 5, 2006) (whose surname is alternatively spelled Chasseguet-Smirguel, but generally not in English-language publications) was a leading French psychoanalyst, a training analyst, and past President of the Société psychanalytique de Paris in France.
Psychoanalysis and Illusion), 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.
Chasseguet-Smirgel's analysis of the views of the Freudian dissident Wilhelm Reich, who attempted a systematization of the libido, posits an explanation of why his orgone theory collected followers despite its apparent pseudoscientific character.
While Grunberger and Chasseguet-Smirgel were still cloaked by the pseudonym, Lacan remarked that for sure none of the authors belonged to his school, as none would stoop to such a low drivel.
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.
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 [the leader's] promise [of the arrival of Illusion] 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 .
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.
[...] notice of the dominant tone in the most respected associations: consider Dr. Mendel and the Drs Stéphane, the state of fury that is theirs, and their literally police-like appeal at the thought that someone might try to escape the Oedipal dragnet.
Oedipus is one of those things that becomes all the more dangerous the less people believe in it; then the cops are there to replace the high priests.In November 1968, Grunberger and Chasseguet-Smirgel, both members of the Paris section of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPa), 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.
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.