René Laforgue

His collaboration, like Georges Mauco, with the Nazis over the Aryanisation of the society in Paris during the Occupation in World War Two cast something of a shadow over his later career. He organized himself with the active Nazi Matthias Göring, cousin of Hermann Göring, who was the propagator of aryan psychotherapy and aryan psychoanalysis, Nazi-oriented.

He was convicted during a purge trial after the Second World War. René Laforgue went into exile in Morocco to be forgotten in Casablanca, where he expresses mysticism and racism.[1]

In the year of his death, 1962, he was removed from the roster of training analysts by the International Psychoanalytical Association.[2]

In 1919 wrote a thesis on "The Affects in Schizophrenia Patients from a Psychoanalytical Point of View".[3] As his interest in psychoanalysis developed, he underwent a training analysis and began a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. In 1926, along with Marie Bonaparte and eight others, he founded the Paris Psychoanalytic Society.[4]

With his pupil G.Mauco, he meets Freud in Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia.[5] [6]

Laforgue is the author of several books on psychoanalysis, albeit more popularising than original;[7] as well as of a variety of articles on subjects ranging from the eroticization of fear in gambling,[8] through the development of the sense of reality, to such defense mechanisms as psychological repression and isolation.[9]

According to Roudinesco, intellectually however he remained as much indebted to the French tradition of Pierre Janet and Henri Claude as to Freud;[10] and the tensions implicit in his competing allegiances contributed to his debate with Freud over the French introduction of the term scotomization. Initially welcomed as a description of the blocking of unpleasant perceptions in hysteria by Freud, the latter swiftly turned against it, arguing that Laforgue himself maintained "that 'scotomization' is a term that arises from descriptions of dementia praecox, which does not arise from a carrying over of psychoanalytic concepts".[11]

Despite their theoretical disagreement, the two men remained on friendly terms, Laforgue visiting the Freuds on occasion in the 1920s: he would in the 1950s write a memoir of them, which offers a rare glimpse of Martha Freud as "a practical woman, marvellously skillful in creating an atmosphere of peace and joie de vivre".[12]

• Alain de Mijolla, Freud et la France, 1885–1945, Presses Universitaires de France, 2010 (ISBN 2130545157)
• M.O. Poivet, René Laforgue. Sa place originale dans la naissance du mouvement psychanalytique français. (1978). dirigé par André Bourguignon (Université de Paris Val-de-Marne, Créteil).
• Martine Lilamand, René Laforgue, fondateur du mouvement psychanalytique français. Sa vie, son œuvre. (1980). dirigé par André Bourguignon (Université de Paris Val-de-Marne, Créteil).
• Jalil Bennani, La psychanalyse au pays des saints, Ed. Le Fennec, 1996
• Annick Ohayon : Psychologie et psychanalyse en France. L'impossible rencontre 1919–1969, Ed. La Découverte, 2006, ISBN 2707147796