El Dia Que Lacan Me Adopto

by Gérard Haddad

Ce texte est le récit, presque le roman, d'une expérience qui a transformé radicalement la vie de son auteur. En 1969, alors qu'il est ingénieur agronome, Gérard Haddad rencontre Jacques Lacan et commence avec lui une psychanalyse. Cette aventure va durer une dizaine d'années au cours desquelles se sera opérée une métamorphose.

Ce livre raconte donc un parcours et les incroyables rebondissements qu'il suscite. C'est un témoignage exceptionnel et en direct sur la pratique de Lacan. Les séances quotidiennes, de quelques minutes seulement, où Gérard Haddad expose sa vie dans ses moindres détails, se transforment parfois en fulgurances qui bouleversent tout. On voit comment Lacan intervenait dans la cure, son engagement et le cycle de formation que suivaient ses élèves. Lacan, personnage si célèbre mais mal connu, à travers l'image brouillée qu'il aimait donner de lui-même, s'y révèle attentif, génial et généreux.
Marxiste athée, l'auteur voit avec stupeur émerger, au cours de son analyse, la force du sentiment religieux qui l'habite. Ce retour a conduit Gérard Haddad à retrouver le judaïsme et à l'étudier en lecture croisée avec la psychanalyse.
Ce judaïsme trouvera sa forme ultérieurement dans la rencontre du personnage prophétique de Yeshayahou Leibowitz. La fin de cette psychanalyse a coïncidé avec la fin de la vie de Lacan et les violentes querelles qui ont alors opposé ses élèves. Ce texte constitue un témoignage sur ces événements auxquels Gérard Haddad fut directement mêlé.

Genres: Psychoanalysis

Paperback

First published April 2, 2002

Reviews

[Seppe · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the very few public testimonies of nine years spending analysis with Lacan. These are few in amount due to the highly intimate nature of analysis, and the discretion about what is told in these sessions. Truthfully it is rather voyeuristic, and the analysts story of the "passe", meaning to go beyond ones "impasses" in speech and life is often reserved for aspiring analysts in a professional association for psychoanalysis.

Unlike this one. Gérard Haddad is a keen writer who had a life altering experience due to his rather contingent meeting with Lacan, at which point he began analysis. Trained as an agricultural engineer, but confronted with a crisis of meaning making, Haddad chooses to follow his childhood desire to become a psychiatrist and accordingly, psychoanalyst. As this goes on well he reconsiders ideas on love, intergenerational conflicts and religion.

It is a autobiographical book, starting from his youth, through personal perils and neurotic suffering untill he meets Lacan, then we follow him how his decade of analysis altered his life and thought. A work of immense self-reflection.

The most crucial theme is the question of transference. The seemingly ironic title allures to the question of fatherhood, and finding a new stability with the father function. How Lacan intervenes throughout is surprising. Of great rhetoric it reminds me of the surrealist writers, he is creative and affective, unlike the often imagined idea of the abstinent analyst. He shows emotion, and applies verbal and non-verbal 'fatherlike' gestures and affective remarks. Using variable short sessions, variable payments and provocative interpunctions he drives Haddad to a crisis-like confrontation, which allows him to break through his resistances considering transference.

A great testimony on the creative rhetoric in dynamic psychoanalytical praxis, put together in a open, highly readable text of self-disclosure.

Haddad published many works on psychoanalysis, as well as his doctor of medicin thesis on the talmudic origins of psychoanalysis 'L'enfant illegitime" (1981). A thesis formed throughout this experience of analysis. Personally converting back to his religion of Judaism, is this a converging of two hermeneutic traditions.