Dominique Scarfone

• M.D.
• Professor at Université de Montréal

L’auteur explore, en quarante-cinq brèves propositions, la proximité et la différence entre « précoce » et « prématuré », en y insérant la question de l’originaire et de l’après-coup. Il est proposé, entre autres, que le précoce relève de l’observation empirique en termes de développement tandis que le prématuré renvoie d’abord au constat de la sit...

Taking a critical stand on contemporary trends in psychoanalysis regarding trauma, the author addresses the problem of psychic trauma mainly in terms of how it affects the patient’s status as a subject. After reexamining the notions of subject and subjectivity, the author illustrates the usefulness of the notion of “subjectality,” defined as a crit...

Cet article décrit la complémentarité du cadre et du processus psychanalytique sous l’angle des principes organisationnels communs à l’ensemble des systèmes vivants. En prenant appui sur la théorie des systèmes autopoïétiques, qui se situe au croisement de la biologie, des sciences cognitives, de la sociologie et de la philosophie de l’esprit, nous...

Not everything is sexual in the psychoanalytic conception of the human condition, but the Sexual is at the core of the central conceptual cluster of psychoanalysis, along with translation/repression, resistance, transference and the après-coup time structure (Nachträglichkeit). For all its importance, the Sexual should not be used by psychoanalysts...

La division primitive du travail à la source de nombreuses formes de domination et d’exploitation fut dès le départ une division sexuelle du travail, créant des relations asymétriques et hiérarchiques, où les femmes occupent le bas de l’échelle. Ce contexte socio-culturel ne peut qu’influencer les théories sexuelles spontanées résultant de l’activi...

Freud, inventor of a revolutionary method of inquiry that overthrew many traditional views, nevertheless formulated a most conservative theory about femininity. Leaving Freud's personal equation aside, the author explores the intra-theoretical factors that may have driven him astray and warns against their persistence in today's psychoanalytical th...

How do we psychoanalysts, first and foremost concerned with the Unconscious, go about thinking about consciousness? And why should we be interested in the first place? I believe that Antonio Alberto Semi’s answer would simply be this: because there is no talk regarding the unconscious if not from the standpoint of consciousness. In answering this,...

I contend that free association, far from being outdated, is a most central feature of the method of psychoanalysis, as it operates an essential reopening of the process of translation/repression. Free association sinks its roots in a Helmholtzian model of the mind and is, therefore, also congruent with modern neuroscience. Through the notion of su...

Because of the polysemy of the term "readiness," Hamlet's famous phrase "The readiness is all," which Freud reprises in modified form, orients us toward a description of Freudian method as a combination of readiness - as opposed to preparation and prediction - and method - which aims to maintain the metastability of the process. This method is inca...

“That is not (or that is) psychoanalysis” is a statement that, more often than not, can only remind us that psychoanalysis is divided into many schools and that discussion among them is difficult if not impossible. This will always be the case as long as analysts hold to their respective ontological definitions as if these were impervious to the la...

The author responds to his discussants by trying to remain true to the principles he posited in the main paper, that is, in abiding by the Ethics of translation. Resorting to Goethe’s wisdom, he comes to the conclusion that in trying to formulate into one’s own idiom the ideas of others, a psychoanalyst should try to reach for the untranslatable in...

The author contends that it is possible to reconcile trauma and drive theories of psychopathology if we carefully examine the general notion of trauma and reexamine Freud's (1919) theory of war neurosis and of repression itself as an elementary form of traumatic neurosis. The logic of these views follows Laplanche's reintroduction and generalizatio...

The author contests the existence of unconscious fantasies in the strict sense, basing his approach on important meta-psychological considerations and in accordance with the work of Michel de M’Uzan who, in 1970, denied the existence of unconscious affects, referring, instead, to a process of affectation. The author does, however, describe a “proce...

The Introduction to Volume 4 proposes a different way of reading Winnicott, not only to appreciate his various key concepts, but also to capture the mode, logic and movement of his thinking, by reading him slowly . Reference is made to Winnicott’s idiom - his own use of psychoanalytic language - which keeps the language personal and alive, and whic...

Freud and Winnicott have expressed the opinion that if their psychoanalytic ideas are correct, then poets and writers will have thought of them first. The author of the present article, who, in a previous work, has developed the concept of “actual time” on metapsychological grounds, concurs with their opinion by showing that variants of “actual tim...

The author makes a plea for a reading of Winnicott's writings that searches for Winnicott's way of thinking besides searching for specific ideas and concepts. He addresses the question of Winnicott's language, which, the author suggests, may reveal itself at odds not so much with classical Freudian psychoanalysis, as is often purported, as with an...

I make a number of observations about what can be learned from the concordance and the differences that exist between an enactive theory of perception in cognitive science and in philosophy of mind, the metapsychology of perception that can be drawn from Freud's Project and Laplanche's theory of generalized seduction. Through this parallel between...

That there is a lack of consensus as to how to decide between competing, at times even contradictory theories, and about how to integrate divergent concepts and theories is well known. In view of this situation, the IPA Committee on Conceptual Integration (2009-2013) developed a method for comparing the different versions of any given concept, toge...

Se sabe que no hay consenso acerca de como elegir entre teorías conflictivas y, a veces, contradictorias, o como integrar conceptos y teorías divergentes. Ante esta situación, el Comité de Integración Conceptual de la API (2009– 2013) elaboró un método para comparar las distintas versiones de cualquier concepto dado y las teorías y presupuestos fun...

The Unpast. The actual unconscious. Psychoanalysis seems to be interested in the past, but what haunts the psychic apparatus is a time in the form of a deadlock—here called the Unpast—when important aspects of life seem to be confined in sterile repetition, requiring a work of elaboration through the unweaving and reweaving allowed by analysis. Thi...

Let me say right away that the notion of memory without recollections gathers my full support and that what Cesar Botella introduces in its wake is an interesting outlook on the theory and practice of psychoanalysis today. This being said, there is much to be discussed in Botella's paper. I will address three main points, more in the hope of clarif...

Freud's Three Essays on Sexual Theory (1905a) are still today highly significant because of their novel way of considering the human sexual dimension. The author intends to show that a close reading of the Essays, combined with the reintroduction of the seduction theory by Jean Laplanche, provides a specific and foundational sexual theory for psych...

Taking as a starting point the work of Michel de M'Uzan on literary creation and, particularly, on the concept of "creative commotion" which he introduced in the 1970s, the author examines the traumatic dimension of this "commotion". He proposes that it belongs to a specific temporality, which he calls "unpast", or "present time", and that he sees...

L’auteur propose ici une « étude », c’est-à-dire une exploration de la concordance et de la différence qui peut exister entre, d’une part, la conception énactive de la perception en philosophie de l’esprit (Alva Noë) et, d’autre part, la conception métapsychologique de la perception de l’autre humain, qui va du Projet de Freud à la théorie de la sé...

It is well known that there is a lack of consensus about how to decide between competing and sometimes mutually contradictory theories, and how to integrate divergent concepts and theories. In view of this situation the IPA Project Committee on Conceptual Integration developed a method that allows comparison between different versions of concepts,...

The author proposes an introduction to the work of Jean Laplanche, a well-known figure of psychoanalysis who recently passed away. He foregrounds what he views as the three main axes of Laplanche's work: firstly, a critical reading method applied to Freud's texts; secondly, a model of psychic functioning based on translation; and, thirdly, a theory...

The actual has very rapidly entered into the psychoanalytic vocabulary, essentially connected to quantitative or organic factors, indicating a proximal, almost immediate causality, without psychic elaboration and assuming a linear and relatively brief temporality. But the temporal aspect of the actual must not hide from it the dimension of action....

Body phantoms, language residues By making an « excursion » into the neurological field, the author attempts to answer the following questions: What do a phantom pain, a repetitive word in an aphasic, a post-traumatic state and a fetish have in common? How does this relate to the notion of a life of the soul? How is this connected with the fact the...

In psychoanalytic theory, space metaphors are frequently used to describe the psychic apparatus. As for time, it is traditionally invoked under the heading of timelessness of the unconscious, more aptly described as the resistance of the repressed to wearing away with time. This paper examines how the insertion of time into psychic events and struc...

In this article, the authors, following Freud, pose the question of what enables play to be a " free " activity with regard to the test of reality. Reconsidering earlier discussions of the distinction between reality test and test of contemporaneousness, and stopping a while to consider the little discussed Freudian concept of " motor hallucination...

The analytic process is discussed mainly via images, in particular those of Freud's work and its developments, but also via images provided by a certain number of patients. The procedure adopted is not a conceptualisation of the psychoanalytic process, but an extraction of the images that we continually encounter and that constitute the inexhaustib...

Continuing the impromptu debate held at the Lyon Congress, the author expands on a number of remarks concerning the problem of guilt. The feeling of guilt, considered with regard to the working over or deterioration of affects, is a mean term between raw anxiety and more finely modulated feelings, such as concern for the other and the feeling of re...

The post-Freudian authors who have closely studied the problem of the test of reality have often claimed that Freud's three successive formulations (the capacity to distinguish perception from representation; the capacity to distinguish an "inside" from an "outside" via motor action and finally the judgment of existence) were irreconcilable. It has...

Resume — Les auteurs postfreudiens qui se sont penches sur le probleme de l'epreuve de realite ont souvent affirme que les trois formulations que Freud avait successivement proposees (capacite de distinguer le percu du represente ; capacite de distinguer un « a l'interieur » d'un « a l'exterieur » par l'action motrice et enfin jugement d'existence)...

With the ranging debate particularly in the United States regarding the establishment through the path of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis of the reality of traumatic events, the author insists on a rigourous use of the terms of the debate. The Freudian theory, surrounding the concept of psychic reality could not bear only on the unconditional suppo...

RÉSUMÉ Face au débat qui fait rage, surtout aux États-Unis, à propos de rétablissement, par la voie de psychothérapie ou de la psychanalyse, de la réalité des événements traumatiques, l'auteur insiste sur un usage rigoureux des termes du débat. La théorie freudienne, axée ici autour du concept de réalité psychique, ne saurait se porter à l'appui in...

Resumen: Frente al encendido debate, especialmente en los Estados Unidos, sobre la posibilidad de establecer la realidad de los eventos traumáticos por la vía de la psicoterapia o del psicoanálisis, el autor insiste en un uso riguroso de los términos. La teoría freudiana, aquí centrada en torno al concepto de realidad psíquica, no podría entregarse...

The individual reactions to traumatic factors affecting the psychological welfare in the field of work are not limited to a mental symptomatology. To account satisfactorily for matters of health at work in relation to psycho-social factors one needs to refer to a theoretical frame which goes beyond the psyche-soma dichotomy. To do so, the author in...

Résumé Les réactions individuelles à des facteurs traumatiques pour le psychisme dans le milieu de travail ne se limitent pas à une symptomatologie mentale. Pour rendre compte de façon satisfaisante des questions de santé au travail en relation avec des facteurs d'ordre psychosocial, il convient donc de se référer à un cadre théorique qui dépasse l...

The term of burnout as a syndrome of professional malfunction has become a great success in the North American psychological and psychiatric journals. This article presents a critical review of this concept which shows that it is neither as rigorous nor as specific as its advocates claim. The concept is related to the older notion of stress at work...