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 as a result of the attention given to them by mass media. An individual may attain a celebrity status from having great wealth, their participation in sports ...
actress
Huguette Duflos
Huguette Duflos (24 August 1887, Limoges – 12 April 1982, Paris) was a French stage and film actress.
Life
In 1910, she married the actor Raphaël Duflos, from whom she was divorced around 1928. Initially a theatrical performer with t ...
. 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 Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, and pu ...
, 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: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might b ...
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 interest in one's physical appearance or image and an excessive preoccupation with one's own needs, often at the expense of others.
Narcissism exists on a co ...
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 or fear, often to the point of delusion and irrationality. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concer ...
.
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 Didier Anzieu (; 8 July 1923, Melun – 25 November 1999, Paris) was a distinguished French psychoanalyst.
Life
Anzieu studied philosophy and was a pupil of Daniel Lagache, before undertaking his first psychoanalysis with Jacques Lacan. Then, aft ...
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]
See also
References
{{Reflist, 30em
Further reading
*Jean Allouch, ''Marguerite; ou, L'Aimée de Lacan'' (Paris 1990)
External links
Aimée, case of encyclopedia.com
History of psychiatry
Jacques Lacan
Women and psychology