The Work of Daniel Lagache

Selected Papers 1938-1964

Daniel Lagache

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780946439898
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429922817
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Forensic Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In 1947, the author founded the Library of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Psychology at Presses Universitaires de France, and forty-two volumes have appeared, by French and foreign authors, nine of them works or reprints of articles by Freud. It was here that he produced his precise and important The Language of Psychoanalysis (1968), which has been translated into many languages. The Works of Daniel Lagache English edition in one volume is a selection of those texts that are most representative of the psychoanalytic thinking of the author. It is a thinking that is rich in epistemology, ensuring that psychoanalysis is set in relationship to behaviorism and clarifies its status as an "exact science". It deserves to provoke a lively response from the English speaking public.

Part One

Verbal Hallucinations

Chapter One

A contribution to the study of ideas of homosexual infidelity in jealousy

[1938]

In the usual form of jealousy, the love object is of one sex, the jealous person and the rival of the other. Less frequently, jealousies are observed where the jealous person is of one sex and the rival and the love object of another—viz. the same—sex. For example, a husband is jealous of his wife’s woman friend; a wife is jealous of her husband’s male friend. In such cases, there can be said to be an idea of homosexual infidelity. Only this form of jealousy will be considered, leaving aside jealousies that occur in a homosexual couple.

Psychoanalytic interest in the question is linked to the understanding of paranoia and jealousy. In a heterosexual couple, the usual jealousy results in part from the projection of homosexual interest in the rival. From there it is a short step to attributing the idea of homosexual infidelity to the projection of heterosexual interest in the rival. Or what role must projection play in unconscious homosexuality?

Ideas of homosexual infidelity have not been the object of any special research. An extensive perusal of French literature brought two cases (Gamier & Marandon de Montyel, 1895; Imbert, 1897). My own research enabled me to observe six cases—one man and five women. All the cases belong under the heading of paranoia in the widest sense of the term. As for clinical type, four are persecutory, and two can be considered, respectively, as a paraphrenic and a schizophrenic. One of the jealousies in the first group has been the object of prolonged analytic investigations.

Clinical data

In the man, the idea of homosexual infidelity is expressed in the form of accusations of lesbianism (cunnilingus). Such is the case of a jealous murderer observed by Gamier and Marandon de Montyel (1895).

This chronic alcoholic presented as a paranoiac with persecution mania and jealousy. He had been interned following an attempt to assassinate his wife. It was his second marriage of some years’ duration, and he was the manager of a hotel. He heard guests calling him ‘cuckold’ and saying that whoever wanted to could sleep with his wife. She, he claimed, was frigid and from the start had only had sexual satisfaction from clitoral masturbation. Then she had demanded cunnilingus and anal intercourse. For the one, the husband had felt insurmountable repugnance. He had gone along with the other but lost his erection at the thought of being in such a position. His wife had then proposed intercourse more bestiarum, and everything was all right until the day he realized that without his knowing she put his penis into her rectum. Then the husband became impotent.

The authors stress the elective quality of the jealousy and the querulous nature of the reactions. He lost his temper only with a friend of his wife’s and threw her out. Furious, his wife had predicted that thenceforth he would be impotent, which he was. He attributed it not to alcohol, but to poison his wife had made him take in order to destroy his virility. The jealousy, therefore, was only shown towards a female rival as the greatest repugnance for a sick person. He attributed his sexual failure and impotence to the perversity of, and ill treatment by, his wife. One could suppose that in the accusations of lesbianism and poisoning, he projected the guilt linked to his intemperance.

OBSERVATION 1

The only personal observation of a man concerns a subject, 36 years old, of weak character, violent and vindictive. Introduced to masturbation by his future brother-in-law shortly before marrying a sister four years older, he has long manifested a pronounced fear of women. In fact, in his first marriage, he was a victim of his wife and mother-in-law. The wife, pregnant by another man, only married him because of her pregnancy. This cynical consent made him leave after eight days, disgusted with women. Four years later, he married a woman with the same first name as the first wife. The ménage included the mother-in-law. After eight years of marriage, he was arrested and interned after domestic scenes, scandal, and threats of death. Several remarks from the two women led him to think that his wife was being unfaithful to him. On this point his conviction is weak. On the other hand it is positive regarding the lesbian practices between his mother-in-law and his wife. He saw them and knew his mother-in-law’s tastes: both before and during the marriage she had intercourse and fellatio with him. He also accuses his mother-in-law of oral sex with her two-year-old grandson, whom she prevents from developing. At first he is very vindictive towards his mother-in-law, whom he criticizes for having conned his wife and put herself in place of her, but he soon seems more conciliatory, taking her part against his wife who threw her mother out. A neighbouring friend of the wife was used as a scapegoat; if they wanted to sleep together, all three of them, it is nothing to do with strangers. Without going into the grounds of his accusations, one could say that what characterizes his attitude to women is fear, resentment, passivity, and the feeling that they know how to swindle.

What these two, admittedly inadequate, cases show is an attitude of estrangement from, and mistrust of, female solidarity.

* * *

With the woman, it is in the charge of pederasty that the idea of homosexual infidelity takes shape.

A similar case is that of an observation by Regis, published by Imbert in his thesis (1897). A woman of tainted heredity accuses her husband of passive and then active pederasty, when the question of homosexuality is raised in divorce proceedings. Her surveillance centres on a reputedly passive friend. She convinces her daughter of her father’s homosexuality.

The idea of homosexual infidelity can present itself episodically among other ideas of jealousy.

OBSERVATION 2

Such is the case of a querulous 50-year-old, who stuffs herself with hormones to combat the menopause. She presents as hypo-manic, self-satisfied, vaunting her sexual ascendancy over her husband, denying a jealousy proved by numerous domestic scenes and scandals, and accusing others of being jealous. In conflict with her father since childhood, she had upset the cradle of a young sister and as an adolescent wanted to strangle her when she saw her sleeping. After a stormy, tomboyish life, marriage had been tempestuous. Jealous from the outset, she accused her husband of incest, just as she had accused her sister of it. She accused him of all possible forms of infidelity, with women and girls. She called him a ‘satyr’ and said he practised passive and active homosexuality. A pertinent remark of her sister can be applied to all these accusations: ‘Everything she has, she puts on others; she is jealous, but it is the others who are jealous.’ The patient’s past was in fact full, not only of liaisons and prostitution, but perverse indulgences (mutual defecation and urination in the mouth). She had occasionally suggested anal intercourse to her husband. She had many anal character traits, among others marked greed and possessiveness.

In other cases, homosexual infidelity presents itself in the wake of ideas of heterosexual infidelity but becomes more the rule.

OBSERVATION 3

A woman of 56, more defective than paranoid, accuses her husband of infidelity, and particularly of pederasty with a young man. From the start he had been extravagant, randy, ‘lecherous’, a ‘boozer’, and he had suggested unnatural relations that she had refused. The patient’s interest in the anal region is manifested in the minutiae with which she ‘examines’ her spouse, inspecting his anus or noticing blemishes.

OBSERVATION 4

In a woman of 34, the idea of homosexual infidelity becomes even more the rule. It rests on interpretations, especially the interpretations of stains on her spouse’s shirt. (He, a former cavalryman, often suffers anal pruritus and scratches himself.) The delusional idea is formulated in an earlier episode in which the rival also attacks her daughter. Some years later there is a second episode, similar to the first, in which the masculine rival no longer attacks her daughter, but the little boy that she has had in the meantime. In spite of opportunities that reality presents, the patient has no tendency at all to jealousy of women. In compensation for the conflict with an unsatisfying reality, an erotomanic theme is developed, through dreams and hallucinatory states, in which the main hero attacks her daughter. While she accuses her husband of pederasty, the whole erotomanic theme is organized around fellatio: she refuses it to her husband, who repels her, and accords it to erotomanic objects who initiate it.

The analytic understanding of this case (the Theresa case), which was presented in greater detail in ‘Erotomanie et jalousie’ (Lagache, 1938b), demonstrates the essential role of unconscious homosexuality and the oral fixation to the mother.

The difficulties only begin with the first marriage: jealousy, thoughts of infidelity, at that time heterosexual, bring it to an end after two-and-a-half months. Pregnant by a lover and jealous as well, she has great difficulty in keeping her lover and legalizing their union. Frigid and rather smug, she is dissatisfied emotionally, socially, and materially; she criticizes her husband for his crude manners and tastes while striving to be refined herself. The patient’s dreams allow interpretation of her ideas of homosexual infidelity through rivalry with the man. The masculine rival is sometimes regarded as the sexual partner, but more often he and the husband try to rid themselves of her, to pass her off as mad.

In another dream, there is a serious car accident: the husband, by the side of a lorry, has a broken arm and is bleeding. The husband is not a good driver. He had cut in front of a lorry driver who swore vengeance on him.

She even sees herself in the role of her husband, taking his place at the car wheel. One night she dreams that, disguised as a man and wearing a peaked cap, she opens the door for him in order to play a trick on him.

Often she sees herself surrounded with bouquets. Once she picked a bouquet of cauliflowers and one of camomile and offered the former to the doctor. In fantasies, she sees herself as a dragonfly flitting from flower to flower.

She dreams that she has a ring on her finger with a pearl in it, a wedding ring. All day she is ‘apprehensive’ of finding such a ring on her finger.

During fellatio fantasies, the erotomanic object explains to her the feelings that a man experiences—a composite attitude, it seems, in which she participates on both sides of the situation.

One of the men by whom she imagines she is loved reproaches her in a dream ‘for loving her daughter too much in place of her husband’. The husband, conversely, appears as refusing to kiss her and being interested only in his little boy. The infrastructure of her family relationships seems to be homosexual.

The biographical data confirm the role that dreams play in the rivalry with the man. From her first years, she was in conflict with a brother slightly older than herself. At the age of 4 she lost her mother, to whom she remains fixated. Memories of blood-soaked cotton wool and a coffin are attached to this death and to the birth of a little brother. Moved from pillar to post, she returned at puberty to live with her father, who married again and got into open conflict with his mother-in-law. From the age of 12, she suffered attempted seductions by men and brutal assaults, which she fended off but which left her with the penis as a monstrous image. The happiest time of her life was when, as a chambermaid, she experienced some level of intimacy with her mistresses. The misfortunes began at 25 with the marriage and her first heterosexual relationships.

OBSERVATION 5

A final clinical observation concerns a paranoid delusion in a schizophrenic woman aged 32. The delusion begins in 1931, at 28: at the workshop, when she is in the toilet, her friends look at her and say, ‘She has a prick’. Later she criticizes her husband for chasing women with a friend, then of having homosexual relations with that same friend. In the street, she is followed by a blonde woman. She hears voices. In the toilet, while washing, someone says she is a man. During relations with her husband, lewd comments are made. That is why she ceases to have any sexual relationship. Afterwards she has sensations of genital contact and penetration. She feels, in the mattress, the movements of a strange object, a mortar. Someone says: I’ll stick a mortar in you.’ She is sent faecal smells. She is shown a nurse’s badge. She sees herself in opposing roles. In short, what is noticeable in this is the coincidence of ideas of homosexual infidelity and ideas of a change of sex. She lost her mother when she was 18 months old, and she was abandoned by her father at 7. After this unhappy childhood, at 15 she lost her virginity with the son of her boss. After that she thought she was abnormal. When she was married, she began to have a terrible fear lest the details of her dissolute spinsterhood would be discovered.

The choice of a homosexual rival, therefore, is neither fortuitous nor without special significance. There is no doubt that the circumstances—the spouse’s perversity, further the appearance of the idea of homosexual infidelity, but its systematization, the repetition of the same theme, the exclusivity of the jealousy—would demonstrate the intervention of individual factors. The accusation of pederasty allows her interest in the anal region and anal penetration to be expressed. Various facts highlight her fear of men’s aggression and maternity, the wish to be a man and to have a penis, a homosexual choice, and the oral fixation to the mother (Observation 4), and finally the tendency to homosexual ‘splitting’, to the united stand between women against men.

* * *

SUMMARY: in the woman, the idea of homosexual infidelity seems above all a response to the fear of the man and to rivalry with him, to the desire to castrate the man and to be the man, perhaps even to penetrate him. In the man, the charge of homosexuality would have its origin in the fear and disgust of the woman, the fear of being castrated by her, a passive attitude.

Psychoanalytic data

The psychoanalytic material is taken from a case, published in a work on amorous jealousy (Lagache 1947a). For the present purpose, I shall describe what is related to ideas of homosexual infidelity.

OBSERVATION 6

The patient is a jealous and querulous woman, who was 35 at the beginning of the analysis. She cohabited with a stranger four years younger and complained about this situation. She was extremely jealous of a female employee in the same place as her lover. The analysis lasted for two and a half years. Although it did not lead to fundamental change, it enabled the patient to live independently of her lover, who continued to come and see her, and to sublimate, in her professional activities, part of her masculine aspirations. Penis envy, in fact, was the nodal complex of the case. All her life had been dominated by a very ambivalent conflict with her mother, whom she criticized for having given her neither love nor a profession—in other words, for not having made a boy of her.

The very choice of lover helped in the understanding of the idea of homosexual infidelity. A weak character, he responded in his passivity and masochism to the patient’s spirit of domination and aggressivity. As a child he had, for a long time, been dressed as a girl, while she, until the age of 8, had been dressed as a boy.

Well before the start of the analysis, the patient had had ideas of homosexual infidelity. During the course of an erotomanic episode, which came up at the beginning of treatment, she told how in their disputes he sometimes stopped her leaving: undoubtedly he was afraid that she would commit suicide, or that she would not return; perhaps at bottom he was jealous. Then she talks about a friend of her lover, who came several times to visit them: he was a painter, a communist, a misogynist. The patient’s attitude towards him was hostile because of his political and moral ideas and because he did her a disservice with her lover. She experienced him as a rival. She felt repugnance for him. At the same time, she was uncomfortable with his black look, which undressed her. She wondered if his lover were not jealous. This problem, the symptom of the jealousy ascribed to the partner, reveals the sexual interest in the rival. At the same time as her wish for infidelity, it is likely that she also projects her homosexuality. Women friends take her side against the young man and approve of a break-up: women’s solidarity against men’s solidarity. Some months later, when the analysis of the patient’s masculine aspirations was beginning, she recounted the following dream:

‘Her lover sends her away and takes a young man, who serves him as a woman. She sees the two men coupled like dogs. She is taken away by her sister, who has turned blonde and become young and strong again. She takes her bitch with her, which her lover threatens to take away if he meets it. The sister takes her into a car, which she drives. She gives the dog to a maid. Her sister does not know the way. She meets a policeman who consoles her for having lost her lover and comforts her because she is afraid of being pregnant. He kisses her on the mouth.’

If the lover is caught red-handed in homosexual infidelity, the patient’s latent homosexuality is left easily explained. She leaves with her sister, who has assumed the classical sort of rival—a big, blonde woman, sporty and masculine (she drives the car), a type that the patient herself strives to become. The patient takes her dog of whom she is jealous. (She also identifies it with herself and finally kills it.) Beside her is a maid to whom she entrusts the dog. The separation of the sexes is complete. The solid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Part One Verbal hallucinations
• Part Two The psychologist and the criminal
• Part Three Transference
• Part Four Aggressivity and personality structure
• Part Five From fantasy to sublimation
• Part Six The capricious woman of the house
• References
• Index