The body is the soul since the soul is the body

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

by Sigmund Freud, unpublished translation by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, threshold, 697 pages, EUR 25.

It does take long to make the work of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, fallen into the public domain, is the subject of translations in other publishers (Flammarion, Seuil) as its original publishers (Gallimard, Payot, the PUF). Strange infatuation. Is the work of Freud, who has almost a century, now exceeded by advances in the cognitive sciences, imaging and brain chemistry In fact, Publishers know that the sale of the works of Freud is never reduced. It is resistant to everything: conflicts between schools of psychoanalysts, development of new psychological therapies, cognitive science.

This is understandable and justifiable when it takes over the reading of the works of Freud today republished: "The interpretation of dreams", "Totem and taboo" (Translation by Dominique Tassel, presentation by Clotilde Leguil, the threshold), "Malaise in civilization" (Translation by Bernard Lortholary, presentation by Clotilde Leguil, threshold) also translated with another title: "The uneasiness in culture" (presentation by Pierre Pellegrin)(Translation by Dorian Astor, with folder in Garnier-Flammarion Edition).

The invention of psychoanalysis marks an irreducible and irreversible change in the way that men began to know who they are. Of course, Freud cannot. A replay Freud, which surprised, it is not until the scandal of psychoanalysis is undercover (through concepts such as libido, complex Oedipus or infant sexuality, which have become common), but that they have kept their uncanny character, as if we have not yet really taken the measure of the invention.

Psychoanalysis, is three things: a "science" of mental life, which the foundations are laid in the founding book that is "The interpretation of dreams" and that Freud would cease to, treatment of certain mental suffering and moral.

Greek tragedy

"The interpretation of dreams", it is down to the "underworld" (the term is of Freud himself), the offset of an animal whose life is essentially "unconscious", instead of strange fighting between "impulses" multiple and conflicting, which find their origin in organic life and each attached hard to harness as much to meet to stay alive. The nature of man does fight with itself and its environment in a kind of desperate survival battle. It is closer to the Greek tragedy than soothing words of the current coaches.

Psychoanalytic treatment is based on the fact that the economy of the more organic passions does not exist in humans unless they are represented. They are therefore linked with thought and language. The body is the soul since the soul is the body. It is possible to escape of deported and painful situations that it continues to dwell in more or less distorted forms, by association of ideas work.

Finally, there is a moral in Freud. Found lineaments in these texts of "applied psychoanalysis" are for example "Totem and taboo" and "Malaise in civilization". It has habit of despise these texts, to see the work of the Freudian imagination more than an anthropological reality. Is wrong. These are the works of a sage who wondered about the singularity of a resulting human condition of biological hazards and which there are no to survive, i.e. to prevail in conflict who will play in his own breast as with its environment. A necessary counterpoint to the dreams of ecological harmony.

These new translations of Freud's reading not confronted us with an author aged and beyond. It would rather think that readings that we made in the 1960s, the golden age of psychoanalysis in France, to have reduced a strange strange that it is an urgent need to relearn.