French Critiques of Freud: Jean-Michel Oughourlian and the Psychology of the Interdividual
I have always thought that what one customarily calls the I or self in psychology is an unstable, constantly changing, and ultimately evanescent structure. I think . . . that only desire brings this self into existence. Because desire is the only psychological motion, it alone, it seems to me, is capable of producing the self and breathing life into it.
The first hypothesis that I would like to formulate in this regard is this: desire gives rise to the self and, by its movement, animates it. The second hypothesis . . . is that desire is mimetic. This postulate, which was advanced by René Girard as early as 1961, seems to be capable of serving as the foundation for a new, pure psychology—that is, one unencumbered by any sort of biologism. We have chosen to call this interdividual psychology.
—Jean-Michel Oughourlian, The Puppet of Desire
Jean-Michel Oughourlian has a special place in my study of French psychological thought, The Self Between: From Freud to the New Social Psychology of France. Of the various contemporary figures discussed there, he is the only one who is not only a practicing psychotherapist but also a medical psychiatrist (Lacan, of course, having died in 1981), and he brings to the fore themes and phenomena that tend to be more central to psychiatric work than to lay analysis. Roustang and Balmary are lay analysts and Borch-Jacobsen an academic theorist. Girard is a literary and cultural critic of very broad scope, and psychological thought is only one of his many interests. Oughourlian, who is also a professor of psychopathology at the University of Paris V (the Sorbonne) and holds doctorates in both medicine (with a residency in neuro-psychiatry) and psychology, brought to the Girardian school the special perspective of a widely experienced clinician with an interest in the history of medicine as well as of psychology. In addition to being coauthor of Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, on which he collaborated with Rene Girard and Guy Lefort, he is the author of two books of his own, La Personne du toxicomane: Psychosociologie des toxicomanies actuelles dans la jeunesse occidentale (“The Drug Addict as Person: The Psychosociology of Addiction in Western Youth Today,” 1978) and The Puppet of Desire [out of print], on the psychology of trance, possession, hysteria, and hypnosis.
The title and subtitle of the first of these indicate the way the Girardian perspective has focused Oughourlian’s special approach to psychiatric problems. Although he has a great deal to say in La Personne du toxicomane about the physiological aspects of chemical dependency, he does not approach the subject primarily from a physiological angle, as his background in medicine might have led him to do. Rather, he emphasizes the psychological needs that lead potential addicts to affiliate themselves with social groups that use drugs. He also emphasizes the social factors that contribute to chemical dependency at least as much as the physical effects of the chemicals themselves. His explanation for his use of the term personne in his title makes clear why he thinks this is so. One reason he gives is that the contemporary problem of drug addiction cannot be understood except on a psychosociological level, since the addictions of today, unlike those of the nineteenth century, for example, are group affairs, and the notion of a “person” in his usage expresses the interdependency of the individual and his communities; a person seeks communion with others and “can accomplish his I only in a we” (Personne, 12.). Another reason is that the term has implications of universality, so that, as Victor Hugo said, “When I speak of myself, I speak of you,” an idea that Oughourlian also associates with Girardian conceptions of personality. Still another, also deriving from Girard, is that aggressivity and violence play a central role in the life of both the person and the group, and much of the culture of drugs has to do with ways of managing or resolving these forces through their use in accord with the operative norms of the group involved.
In the foreword to his second book, The Puppet of Desire, Oughourlian says that the broad cultural implications of his earlier research into drug addiction led him into the study of general anthropology, ethnology, sociology, the history of religions, and philosophy—fields so wide that he might have been in danger of becoming utterly lost if he had not met Rene Girard and received from him two clues that enabled him to discover an underlying order in the phenomena he was investigating:
In his hypothesis about mimetic desire he offered an instrument for the systematic deciphering of psychological issues; and he also offered a key for sociological and cultural analysis: the mechanism of victimization. These have served as two lanterns that have enabled me to pass through the labyrinth of the human sciences without getting stuck in it (Puppet, xxiii).
More can be said about Girardian ideas regarding violence and the victimizing mechanism and their central role in both group formation and the maintenance of group identity. Here, I will concentrate on more strictly psychological aspects of the interdividual relation, especially as these are discussed in The Puppet of Desire, of which they are the primary focus.
Oughourlian begins that book with what he considers the most fundamental question of psychology, that of why there is specifically psychological movement or activity at all. What is it that impels a small child to commence mental activity? How, for example, does one teach a small child to say “Papa” or “Mama” or “cookie”? How does one teach him to speak the language of those around him and what makes him reach out to learn it? Oughourlian believes that the Girardian concept of mimesis provides the essential clue: “Answering these questions does not require complicated experiments. There is no need for measuring instruments or for statistical calculation. Immediate observation, everyday experience, and plain good sense are sufficient to answer them. All one need do is repeat the word to the child a sufficient number of times to trigger him to repeat it” (i). He subsequently refers to studies of child development that show how fundamental repetition and imitation are to learning, and especially to a study by Andrew N. Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore in 1977 that demonstrated that learning through imitation takes place much earlier than previous theorists had thought possible (7-8).
Likening his own psychological question to Newton’s about physical motion, Oughourlian attributes the causality of psychological movement to the force of mimesis, which he says is as fundamental and universal in the psychological domain as gravitation is in that of physics:
No one, to my knowledge, has ever thought of naming or defining the force which draws the child into reproducing what an adult says or does, this force of attraction, interest, and attention of which I spoke above—so much is it taken for granted, so much is it a part of the fabric of humanity. A young child has no power to resist that attraction. To feel such attraction is the child’s very nature, to the degree that he or she is “normal.” A child lacking this capacity would be deprived of something basic to his humanity; he would become isolated, autistic. That natural force of cohesion, which alone grants access to the social, to language, to culture, and indeed to humanness itself, is simultaneously mysterious and obvious, hidden in and of itself, but dazzling in its effects—like gravity and the attraction of corporeal masses in Newtonian space. If gravity did not exist, life on earth would be impossible. Without it, there would be chaos. Similarly, if this remarkable force that attracts human beings to one another, that unites them, that enables children to model themselves on adults, that makes possible their full ontogenesis and, as I just said, their acquisition of language—if this force did not exist, there would be no mankind.
Carrying further the analogy of “universal mimesis” to the theory of universal gravitation, Oughourlian goes on to say that there is also something fundamentally like Newton’s conception of “mass” at work in it and that this can be helpful in explaining both small scale interactions and the problems of group psychology:
It could be said that the mimesis between two individuals is the force of attraction that each simultaneously exerts on the other and submits to. This force is proportional to the mass, as it were, of each and inversely proportional to the distance between them.
What, however, is it that one can refer to as “mass” in psychology? For a young child in his or her relation to an adult, the notion of “mass” can be interpreted almost literally: the mass of the adult in comparison with that of the child explains the latter’s tendency to seek and submit to the adult’s influence. Between adults there is also a force of attraction, but in this case the notion of “mass,” which is to say, that which each represents for the other and the capacity each has to influence or attract the other, becomes more complex. Mass also correlates closely with quantity. The mimesis that a crowd triggers, the power of influence a group has, is proportional to the number of individuals in it. It is this prodigious magnification of the force of mimesis that explains the difference between the psychology of individuals and mob psychology and the stupendous transformations that the former can undergo when influenced by the mimetic power of a group, a crowd, or a mob.
Taking his cue from Girard’s discussion of mimetic rivalry, Oughourlian also goes on to speak of how, like gravitation, “mimesis is at once a force of attraction and a force of repulsion: imitation begins as discipleship, in which the model is taken simply as a model. But before long, the imitation of a gesture will cause the model and the disciple to grasp at the same object: the model will become a rival, and mimesis will take on the character of conflict. In this way mimesis engenders both attraction and repulsion” (4). This is a major reason why mimesis in the form of identification does not end in fusion, just as two corporeal masses drawn together by the force of gravity do not necessarily collide.
Mimesis also has both spatial and temporal dimensions as imitation and repetition. The former, the imitation of the gestures and attitudes of others, the capacity for communication and empathy, is central to the formation of society; while the latter, as the source of habit formation and memory, is fundamental to the psychological development of the individual:
Universal mimesis, considered as a principle of gravitation, binds people together and constitutes the human being as a “social” animal essentially through its spatial dimension, which is to say, imitation: this is man’s sociogenesis . . . By its temporal dimension mimesis holds a person together and constitutes him as “psychological” man: this is his psychogenesis. These two absolutely inseparable dimensions, the spatial and the temporal, together cause our ontogenesis.
This is why Oughourlian says that human ontogenesis is “as dependent on psychology as it is on sociology—two sciences that are artificially separated, but which in reality make up a single science.”
One of the most important implications he derives from this conception is “that mimesis precedes consciousness and creates it by its action” (6). The psychological “self,” that is, is a function of imitation and repetition, a result of mimetic learning, and it is organized particularly around patterns of desire, which Oughourlian agrees with Girard in conceiving of as completely mimetic. Like Girard, Oughourlian distinguishes between desire on the one hand, which is an artificial appetite aiming at purely symbolic goods that one learns to desire by imitating the real or supposed desires of others, and on the other hand the natural appetites, which aim at real but limited goods, like Sancho Panza’s piece of cheese (which is not to say that, depending on its context, even a piece of cheese cannot sometimes become less food than symbol). Girard usually contrasts “desire” with “appetite” while Oughourlian uses the sort of language specific to the field of psychology: “One must keep in mind my definition of desire and avoid confusing it with need and instinct, a habitual way of thinking that one can easily slip into” (175 n.). But the distinction they refer to is the same. It is desire, in this mimetic sense, that becomes the nucleus, according to Oughourlian, of what he terms the “self of desire” (le moi du desir).
Because patterns of desire may change over time, a given individual or “holon” (to use the term Oughourlian took from Arthur Koestler) may have a multiplicity of personalities or selves, some of which may be radically discontinuous with others. This is a theme Girard took up as well, in his discussion of Proust in particular in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (90-91), where he linked it with the theme of mediation.
Every mediation projects its mirages; the mirages follow one another like so many “truths” which take the place of former truths by a veritable murdering of the living memory and which protect themselves from future truths by an implacable censure of daily experience. Proust calls “Selves” the “worlds” projected by successive mediations. The Selves are completely isolated from each other and are incapable of recalling the former Selves or anticipating future Selves.
Girard also discusses Stendhal and Dostoyevsky in this connection, the first as describing a lesser degree of discontinuity of personality than that depicted in the work of Proust and the latter a greater degree.
The first signs of the hero’s fragmentation into monadic Selves can be seen in Stendhal. The Stendhalian hero’s sensibility is subjected to abrupt changes which foreshadow the successive personalities of Remembrance of Things Past. The personality of Julien Sorel remains an unbroken unity but this unity is threatened at the time of that temporary aberration which is his love for Mathilde . . . The greatest suffering is reserved for Dostoyevsky’s hero. The underground man’s mediators succeed one another so rapidly we can no longer even speak of distinct Selves. The periods of relative stability, separated by violent crises or intervals of spiritual emptiness, which we have seen in Proust, are supplanted in Dostoyevsky by a perpetual crisis.
Where Girard took his data bearing on this point from imaginative literature, Oughourlian took his primarily from classic studies of hypnosis, particularly Pierre Janet’s accounts of his hypnotic experiments. Or perhaps it would be more precise to say that Girard’s discussion of multiple personality is drawn from the insights of imaginative authors, while Oughourlian’s discussion of the self of desire is an attempt to draw upon Girard’s formulation of those same insights to explain data that were turned up in experiments by Charcot, Bernheim, Janet, and other investigators of hypnosis but that they were unable to explain. What the experimentalists found were odd facts, but apart from a few rudimentary concepts, such as suggestion, influence, trance, and so on, they had no explanation for them and no way of integrating them with the rest of their thinking about personality.
What Janet observed in experiments with posthypnotic suggestion was that subjects in the deepest stage of hypnosis, termed “somnambulism” by Bernheim, developed new “selves” that were quite distinct from the ordinary or waking self and had different sets of memories. As Oughourlian summarizes Janet’s account, he
. . . could cause a new self to develop by way of somnambulism, for example, new personalities for Lucie 1 and Leonie 1, which he called Lucie 2 and Leonie 2. When state 2 was well established, he hypnotized Lucie 2 and Leonie 2 again. Another hypnotic swoon took place, marking the dissolution of [self] S2 and putting an end to state 2, and then after that a state 3 took shape, more or less rapidly, giving birth within a deeper state of somnambulism to another new self, a new personality posterior to the prior ones, a Lucie 3 and a Leonie 3 (Puppet, 237).
Janet formulated three laws of memory to describe these phenomena:
1. Complete forgetfulness during the normal waking state of everything that took place during somnambulism.
2. Complete remembrance during a new state of somnambulism of everything that took place during preceding states of somnambulism.
3. Complete remembrance during somnambulism of everything that took place during the waking state.
But these laws were only descriptions of regularities; they were not in themselves explanatory. Oughourlian found, as will be explained shortly, that his hypothesis regarding the organization of consciousness through mimetic desire was able to offer an explanation for these phenomena that was both simple and complete.
To step back for a moment, however, from the special problems of somnambulism to the broader theory of universal mimesis and state Oughourlian’s hypothesis in the most basic terms: its starting point is the idea that human beings are both involved in and themselves constitute, by their innate mimetic tendencies, a field of forces which impinge on all simultaneously, although with varying degrees of intensity. On the level of a pair of individuals, A and B, one might say: A has a tendency to imitate the actions, the thoughts, the feelings and attitudes, and so on of B; while B has the same tendency with regard to A, although more weakly or strongly, depending on the state of relative deficiency or power.
Depending on the angle from which one considers the process to which this tendency gives rise, one may speak of it either as imitation or as influence. One and the same mimetic process, that is, may be viewed as imitation if one thinks of it as something A, for example, is doing to B, or as influence, if one thinks of it as a corresponding pull or attractive force exerted on A by B. To picture it in terms of diagrams, one may say that what appear to be two different vectors indicated by the two arrows (influence and imitation) in the diagram at left, are actually aspects of a single process, mimesis—so that the two can be equally represented as a single two-directional arrow in the equivalent diagram on the right:
In the normal course of events, moreover, both A and B experience the tendency to imitate the other (or, to put it the other way around, each exerts a certain degree of attraction with regard to the other), so that comprehensively considered, the two-directional arrow of mimesis in the right-hand diagram should be viewed as including not only both influence and imitation but also each flowing in both directions. To state the matter in terms of Oughourlian’s analogy between mimesis and gravitation, there is normally a relative balance between the forces of velocity, inertia, and gravitation that keeps one entity or holon from colliding with or being engulfed in the other. And there is also a possibility of imbalance. In the Newtonian analogy, a smaller body such as an asteroid may collide with a planet and merge with it, or else if it retains enough of its own inertial velocity not to collide with the planet but lacks enough to escape its gravitational pull, it will become a satellite of the larger body—and perturb its orbit to some degree through its own residual force.
The interdividual relation operates similarly. It is common for some individuals or holons to exert greater influence on others and thereby make satellites of them, but not without some corresponding influence coming in return from the other. The relations between a parent and child or a teacher and student can serve as examples. The parent has more psychological “mass” than a young child; a mother has less need of the child than the child has of her, at least until the child grows older and their respective positions of need, power, and influence gradually reverse. But even while the child is quite young, the parent feels some responsiveness to the feelings and attitudes of the child. A young child’s anger might not feel as painful to his mother as hers does to him, but it is usually not without at least some effect, and the affection between them is similarly reciprocal. So also a teacher normally is in a position of superior knowledge and authority, but a student’s questions, if they reach into new territory or bring to light unrecognized problems, may stimulate further thought in the teacher, perhaps even leading him to adopt a whole new approach to the subject at issue.
During the course of a person’s life, there are all sorts of relationships that he or she develops with other individuals and with the society and culture as a whole—or, as Oughourlian terms them, the “other” and the “Great Other.” Everyone feels the force of the opinions, attitudes, and feelings of others and of the group to which he or she belongs. Sometimes the relationship may also be with a culturally defined figure representing qualities that the group wants to encourage, as in the Christian’s imitation of Christ—a pattern that is, of course, familiar already as Girard’s “external mediation.” Sometimes the mimetic rapport may take on a special intensity and lead to what has long been called “possession,” which from this point of view consists essentially of an imitation so powerful that one loses one’s ordinary sense of independent selfhood in it, identifying one’s thoughts, feelings, and desires with those of the other, or Other. When this is unwanted, one may undertake an “exorcism” to become free from it. Or if it is wanted, as in the case of various African and Caribbean possession cults, shamanism, Christian “dying into Christ” in Baptism and Holy Communion, and so on, then one may engage in rites of what Oughourlian calls “adorcism” to encourage it. To state it in terms of the astronomic analogy, adorcism is the process by which one seeks to become a satellite of some approved figure, and exorcism is the process by which one who has become such a satellite tries to break free from the orbit imposed by the greater effective mass of the other.
EDITORIAL NOTE: Excerpt from The Self Between: From Freud to the New Social Psychology of France by Eugene Webb and used with permission from the University of Washington Press. Copyright © 1993 University of Washington Press.
