The Case of Aimée concerned the Frenchwoman Marguerite Pantaine, who in 1931 attacked the

celebrity Celebrity is a condition of fame and broad public recognition of a person or group due to the attention given to them by mass media. The word is also used to refer to famous individuals. A person may attain celebrity status by having great w ...

actress Huguette Duflos. Marguerite was hospitalised in a mental hospital, and was treated by

Jacques Lacan Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (, ; ; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Sigmund Freud, Freud", Lacan gave The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, year ...

, becoming the subject of his doctoral thesis.

Thesis

Lacan used the pseudonym "Aimée" to protect the identity of Marguerite Pantaine. In his thesis, he linked "Aimée"'s psychosis to her life experience, developing an innovative theory of psychogenic psychosis which drew heavily on

psychoanalysis PsychoanalysisFrom Greek language, Greek: and is a set of theories and techniques of research to discover unconscious mind, unconscious processes and their influence on conscious mind, conscious thought, emotion and behaviour. Based on The Inte ...

to explain phenomena not usually tractable by psychoanalytic methods. Lacan argued that Aimée regarded her attack on the actress as an attack against a persecutory aspect of her own psyche, namely the image of her own Ideal ego; and that she carried out the attack in a sort of

narcissistic Narcissism is a self-centered personality style characterized as having an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one's own needs, often at the expense of others. Narcissism, named after the Greek mythological figure ''Narcissus'', has evolv ...

trance. He used her case to develop a theory of self-punishing

paranoia Paranoia is an instinct or thought process that is believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety, suspicion, or fear, often to the point of delusion and irrationality. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of co ...

. It was, however, primarily in the form of

ego psychology Ego psychology is a school of psychoanalysis rooted in Sigmund Freud's structural id-ego-superego model of the mind. An individual interacts with the external world as well as responds to internal forces. Many psychoanalysts use a theoretical c ...

that Lacan's psychoanalytic thinking was at this point framed: "The therapeutic problem regarding psychosis seems to me to make a ''psychoanalysis of the ego'' more necessary than a psychology of the unconscious."

Later identification

Ten years after Marguerite was discharged from hospital, she went to work for Lacan's father, and her estranged son Didier Anzieu went into analysis with Lacan. When the two Anzieus reunited, Didier realised his mother had been the subject of Lacan's thesis the decade before. Elisabeth Roudinesco reports the mother's complaint that Lacan, instead of helping her, "had stolen her life story and turned it into a thesis," and that she "had been observed, ransacked, fabricated, travestied, and made into a myth for the benefit of psychiatry."E Roudinesco, ''Jacques Lacan'' (Cambridge 2005) p. 190

References

{{Reflist, 30em

External links

Aimée, case of
encyclopedia.com History of psychiatry Jacques Lacan Women and psychology

Thesis

Later identification

See also

References

Further reading

External links