After The weariness of the self and La société du malaise (The society of discontent), Alain Ehrenberg signs another book on the therapeutic culture so typical of contemporary Western societies, in which a nebulous array of psychological theories, disseminated well beyond specialized circles, shape collective imaginations, mores and sensibilities. He does not consider theories and therapies from the perspective of the psychologist, the historian of ideas or the therapist, but from that of the sociologist, by showing how they reveal an emerging moral order, which has supplanted the traditional one, and which is characterized by an unprecedented valorization of individual autonomy. Ehrenberg is endowed with a solid sociological sense, which allows him to avoid taking at face value the misleading way in which our individualistic society portrays itself: as a society which would be composed of the meeting of individuals and therefore would not really be a society.

In The mechanics of passions, he directs his attention to the transformations of our collective imagination engendered by the diffusion and multiplication of narratives about the brain, which is now frequently evoked to account for various conducts (they are seen “through the prism of the brain” (Ehrenberg, 2020, p. 38)).

Ehrenberg looks for connections between the narratives in which “the brain” plays a role and shifts in social norms. Far from assuming from the outset that the social molds all psychological theories, he looks for concrete evidence of “overlooked connections between scientific concepts and social ideals” (Ehrenberg, 2020, p. 6). He is particularly interested in theories that elicit a broad extra-clinical response, in those that are invoked by agents. He highlights the tension between the theoretical demands of research and the practical demands of various social partners, noting for instance: “No entity is more hypothetical than the self, but none has more theoretical value for the clinician.” (Ehrenberg, 2020, p. 108). He considers the contrasting attributions of responsibility allowed by different theories (while some place the burden of a fault on the shoulders of the person afflicted by an ill, others rather discharge her from this burden). Inspired by Baudelaire’s penetrating pages on the subtle “greatness” and “heroism” of the moderns (Ehrenberg, 2020, p. 46), he makes explicit the ideals displayed in case histories of patients facing adversity—who are presented as models against which to measure oneself. Thus, the author explores a number of avenues.

I will focus here on his treatment of the various collective idioms by which we explain ourselves to one another (we owe this concept to the anthropologist Edward E. Evans-Pritchard). Ehrenberg states at the outset that the cerebral idiom that has developed in recent years, and which is now spoken by so many people, is comparable to the psychoanalytic idiom that Freud created, that he taught us to use, and to which multitudes of people began to resort, more than a century ago, in order to ask and account for their actions to each other (as Serge Moscovici remarked, psychoanalysis had entered “into the life, the thoughts, the customs and the world of conversations” (1976, p. 20 (my translation))). The wide diffusion of this former idiom explains, for example, the fact that psychoanalytical references that abound in films, magazine articles, etc., do not need to be explained, because one can count on the familiarity of the reader or viewer. Ehrenberg wonders if we will get used to using this new idiom, as we got used to using the previous one. In a certain way, The mechanics of passions addresses the beginning of a transition from one idiom to the other: on the transition from a world where one meets neurotics to another one, where one also meets, and perhaps more frequently, neuroatypics; on the development of a new way of accounting for conduct, competing with the psychoanalytical explanation, which after a long period of dominance is in danger of being relegated to the second plan, or even forgotten (will future viewers of Woody Allen’s films still understand the allusions to the Oedipus complex, the latency period, etc.?).

Reading The mechanics of passions, one notices a number of similarities between the two idioms. Ehrenberg suggests that the transformation of customs brought about by the cerebral idiom occurs via “a complexification of the motives for action” (2020, p. 149). The formula is remarkably close to the one that Freud once proposed to evoke the psychoanalytical investigation of gestures, illnesses and dreams: “a complication of motives” (Standard Edition (subsequently cited as: SE), Vol. 7, p. 60). One can glimpse here that each of the two idioms allows a reform of the instituted practice whose role in the ordering of social interactions has been highlighted by Charles Wright Mills (1940): assigning motives, a practice that allows not only to explain the action but also to gauge its conformity to different social requirements. The complexification mentioned by Ehrenberg is largely due to the fact that the cerebral idiom allows to explain indirectly the action of the individual, by attributing motives to her brain, treated as a relatively distinct support of beliefs, desires and decisions: the brain becomes “a highly colourful character, an individual, a partner, an idea we talk about and that floats around in conversation, an autobiographical or fictional narrative”; in these stories, “the brain thinks, acts, decides” (2020, p. 48); in fact, these stories sustain “an ambiguity between its subpersonal status as part of a being and its […] personal status as a being” (2020, p. 112). Now, the psychoanalytical complication of motives proceeded by the same way, since the psychoanalytical idiom notably allows to explain the facts and gestures of an individual by attributing beliefs, desires and decisions to her unconscious, her ego, her id, etc. (Freud imagined the sphere of unconscious processes in an anthropomorphic way: the unconscious was a “second consciousness”, an “unconscious consciousness” (SE 20, p. 32)). Furthermore, psychoanalytical stories about the ego show the same ambiguity, since the term sometimes refers to the whole person, and at other times to a part of the person (Freud sometimes uses this word to refer to “one’s own person” and sometimes to designate rather one of the inner quasi-persons, “in contradistinction to other substructures of personality” (Heinz Hartmann, quoted in Laplanche & Pontalis, 1968, p. 242)).

These similarities suggest that the transition from one idiom to the other may not involve as drastic a cut as the resounding debates between supporters and opponents of psychoanalysis would have us believe. Of course, in order to determine the magnitude of the transition that has begun, one should also have to identify the elements that differentiate these idioms from one another. One could thus gain a better understanding of the social needs to which the cerebral idiom responds, those which the psychoanalytic idiom was possibly unable to meet. Simply put: a proper understanding of the transition Ehrenberg addresses (an understanding of its nature, causes and consequences) requires a comparison of these two idioms. And yet, the psychoanalytic idiom, more or less unexamined, remains in the background of his analysis of the brain idiom. Very few pages are devoted to it. When it moves to the foreground of Ehrenberg’s analysis, he is inclined to describe it in the terms used by its followers and to take at face value the dramatized account, to which Freud has accustomed us, of a psychoanalysis doomed to develop in the margins of the social world.

1. Which transition?

Ehrenberg does propose a description of a historical transition, but it is another one: he depicts the current individualistic society in opposition to the preceding authoritarian society. The shift from one to the other would have occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. Let us note at the outset that this is a startling chronology, since bird’s-eye overviews of the rise of a society marked by moral individualism (those proposed by Émile Durkheim, Louis Dumont, Charles Taylor, etc.) describe this rise as a long-term process, stretching over several centuries, and already largely underway at the beginning of the 20th century.

Ehrenberg’s hypothesis is based on testimonies of French psychoanalysts. Many of them claimed during the 1960s and 1970s that they were seeing new patients on their couches, no longer neurotic (like those they had previously cared for), but depressed. These new patients were “not able to recognize their conflicts, to picture them”, because they “lacked […] guilt” (Ehrenberg, 2016, p. 123). These psychoanalysts’ new diagnoses place “less emphasis on Oedipal issues, in which guilt and conflict are front and centre” (Ehrenberg, 2020, p. 5). Ehrenberg concludes from this testimony that there has been a profound change in social norms, which has left its mark on the souls of patients: “neurosis is the consequence of a conflict that rendered one guilty […], while depression was experienced as a shameful flaw” (Ehrenberg, 2016, p. 128 (amended translation)); this transformation of diagnoses would show that “norm is no longer based on guilt and discipline but on responsibility and initiative” (Ehrenberg, 2016, p. 9).

By saying that the conflicts of these former patients were located front and centre, by talking about the way they experienced their ill, Ehrenberg uses formulas that can mislead. Freud’s patients did not tell him spontaneously that they felt conflicted or guilty. He deduced such inner states from their symptoms. Those who forgot an appointment, he believed, were thereby showing that they were inhabited by a counter-will, unconscious because repressed deep in their minds, not to show up for that appointment (SE 6, p. 230). This counter-will, made silent, could only express itself in act, by sabotaging the plans of their conscious will. Likewise, those who uttered words other than those they had intended to use revealed that their counter-will was seeking to state something else (SE 6, p. 53-105); and those who through some clumsiness hurt themselves revealed to the informed eye of the psychoanalyst that they were seeking to punish themselves (SE 6, p. 178-186). One can see the interpretive principle that Freud implemented, and which allowed him to reform the practice of attributing motives: what appeared at first glance to be a fortuitous consequence was in reality a planned and desired end (SE 13, p. 121); thus, an interior counter-will was trying to express itself. In the eyes of an observer wearing analytical glasses, the dream, the indecision, etc., betrayed just as much this split of the personal will, between a conscious will and an unconscious and stifled counter-will.

Freud pointed out that the patient, in most cases, “does not feel guilty, he feels ill” (SE 19, p. 50); what’s more, the patients “do not believe us when we attribute an ‘unconscious sense of guilt’ to them” (SE 21, p. 135). He would not let this incredulity destabilize him: the patient who refused to admit the repressed desire attributed to him was only confirming in another way the existence of this desire. “The ‘No’ uttered by the patient after a repressed thought has been presented to his conscious perception […] does no more than register the existence of a repression and its severity; it acts […] as a gauge of the repression’s strength.” (SE 7, p. 58) To refuse to endorse a psychoanalytic interpretation of one’s conduct “is, at bottoms, to say: ‘This is something which I should prefer to repress’” (SE 19, p. 236). This refusal was produced by a resistance, aiming at protecting and perpetuating this repression, and provoked just like it by the fear of the judgment of others (in contrast, Freud treated the assent given to this interpretation as a sign of independence and maturity). More generally, Freud incited us to be suspicious of the motivations that patients attached to their behaviors: were they anything other than “rationalizations”, that is respectable reasons attached post facto to actions that were actually motivated by inadmissible drives? In short, guilt and conflict, in early psychoanalytic case histories, were not spontaneously mentioned by patients, who came to consult for other problems. These two elements were not part of the explicandum (of the phenomenon that the psychoanalyst was trying to understand), but of the explicans (of the explanation that she was elaborating to account for this phenomenon).

Ehrenberg’s reader is thus led to ask: how could the psychoanalysts of the 1960s and 1970s have perceived the absence of feeling of guilt and conflict in their patients as a new fact? Should we say that these new patients suffer less from inner conflicts or guilt than their predecessors? Those who are unconvinced by Freud’s explanation of forgetfulness and clumsiness (as generated by an inner conflict) will wonder if these former patients suffered as massively from inner conflicts as he claimed. Will Ehrenberg’s hypothesis convince any further Freudians? People still forget meetings, misspeak, make mistakes, etc.; in short, their behavior, seen through Freudian glasses, still signals inner conflict.

If the patients of yesteryear were no more likely than those of today to declare from the outset that they were experiencing guilt and conflict, should we not rather speak of a tranformation of the gaze of French psychoanalysts on their patients? This testimony would thus offer a source, not to the large-scale history of the norms enforced by global society, but to the much more circumscribed history of French psychoanalysts.

So, what should the social scientist do about the fact that the theory created by Freud, and quickly used by multitudes of people to explain the most varied facts and gestures, has led them again and again to uncover an inner conflict of wills, born of the repression of desires forbidden by social authority? What does this fact actually tell us? Freud’s contemporaries frequently recognized themselves in the critical narrative he was offering them, that of individuals who had suffered from the exorbitant claims of parental authority. Did they do so simply because the portrait reflected reality? Does the widespread recourse to psychoanalytic explanation simply indicate that the society of the time was overwhelmingly dominated by social authority? This is what Freud thought: each of his psychoanalytical investigations, by uncovering the stifling of an nth inadmissible desire, contributed to reveal a little more the extent of the suppression exercised by this society; therefore, he also thought that the person who, by offering an analytical explanation, contributes to this unveiling, would be fated to face its “distrust and hostility” (SE 15, p. 16). By arguing that the norm of the society within which psychoanalytic diagnoses appear and multiply is based on guilt and discipline, Ehrenberg, is inclined to depict this society in a similar way.

In doing so, he overlooks the fact that the view of social authority provided in these psychoanalytic diagnoses is a critical one: in the innumerable stories borrowing the narrative framework created by Freud, the internalized parental authority, portrayed as insatiable and cruel, is presented as the source of the disorder encountered; it caused the repression of the unacceptable desire which, buried in the unconscious, could only make itself known indirectly, through harmful symptoms. And most importantly, the historical hypothesis Ehrenberg proposes overlooks the fact that psychoanalysis was not a purely theoretical undertaking: the analytical unveiling of repressions opened the door to their therapeutic overcoming and to a “re-education in overcoming internal resistances” (SE 7, p. 267) which had to “correct mistakes” of parental education (SE 22, p. 175).

Thus, the critical portrait of traditional authority in the background of the psychoanalytical explanation of diverse conducts, the one that was echoed by so many people, allowed them to indirectly affirm aspirations to individual autonomy, via the denunciation of the action (repression) that transgressed these same aspirations. This way of accounting for conduct is entirely appropriate to the individualistic moral order of modern societies, which, as Charles Taylors remarks (1989, p. 337-340), largely takes shape indirectly, via the condemnation of the deficiencies of the authoritarian society of yesteryear. On occasion, Ehrenberg perceives this affirmation of values (he rightly notes that psychoanalysis has offered a “great model of an individualist attitude” and that the individual in its singularity constitutes the “supreme value” of the analytic cure (2010, p. 349)).

And yet, he depicts the society that enthusiastically embraces psychoanalysis as simply authoritarian. Ultimately, Ehrenberg’s portrait of the previous world, as one inhabited by guilt-ridden people, is a portrait of the world seen through psychoanalytic glasses. Therefore, it is not a portrait of the world in which these glasses and the moral aspirations they embodied also took place (the seeing eye is not in the visual field). This idiom, in the pages he devotes to the hypothesis of a shift from the guilt-based norm to the initiative-based norm, remains invisible. But once one admits that the countless adherents of psychoanalysis were not observing the multiple symptoms of repression from an observation post on Mars, but that they were social partners, that psychoanalysis offered them tools to practically negotiate interactions by defining them, and that this use modified their interactions, the idea that the society in which the psychoanalytic idiom spread was simply an authoritarian one, silencing any conversation about impermissible desires, and hostile to the psychoanalytic attempt to recognize those desires, collapses under the weight of its implausibility. Moscovici remarked: “To talk about sexuality, about conflicts with one’s parents, about such or such neurosis has become licit, even recommended.” (1976, p. 23-24) The society within which innumerable people resort to psychoanalysis to ask and account for their actions to each other, and in the process undertook to investigate the damage caused by traditional internalized authority, presents us with a pragmatic paradox. The judgment about traditional society in the background of the analytical diagnoses of this or that particular symptom, that of an authoritarian society pushing to suffocate a desire that could not be recognized, is frontally contradicted by the collective recourse to this critical diagnosis: by the resonant denunciation of this suffocation. Is it not on this pragmatic paradox that Michel Foucault tried to draw attention (in a book written at a time when psychoanalysis was gaining unprecedented influence in France) by expressing his astonishment at this society “which has been loudly castigating itself for its hypocrisy […], which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say” (1978, p. 8)?

2. Responsibility, control, interiority

Ehrenberg insists on the fact that today’s society “brings to the fore agents’ responsibility for their actions” (2020, p. 133; see also Ehrenberg, 2010, p. 207, 218, 306, 348). He notes that the rise of neoliberalism during the Reagan years was accompanied in the US by a critique of a so-called “culture of excuses”, accused of encouraging irresponsibility (Ehrenberg, 2020, p. 218; see also Ehrenberg, 2010, p. 117). One might therefore expect that the brain idiom, which took off during this period, particularly in the United States (where psychoanalysis, at the same time, experienced a marked decline), would promote individual responsibility to a greater extent than the old psychoanalytical idiom. Admittedly, psychoanalysis has frequently been used to soften the responsibilities of the individual; many people have evoked it to exonerate themselves, claiming that some of their actions were actually performed by one inner quasi-person, over whom they had no power. But it should also be kept in mind that by inviting us to treat what had until then been considered as accidental consequences as goals sought by an unconscious counter-will, psychoanalysis greatly extended the field of phenomena considered as actions: to the actions already recognized as such, one could add the hidden actions decided by the unconscious counter-will. This theory significantly expands the field of phenomena that each of us can be required to explain (Freud notably claimed the right to “question” the dreamer “as to what his dreams mean” (SE 15, p. 100)). Thus, when they were examined through analytical glasses, the traumas of the soldiers of the First World War seemed to have been decided by them, owing to the benefits they could offer: these soldiers were therefore held responsible, the unconscious nature of this decision earning them at best a mitigating factor (Fassin & Rechtman, 2007, p. 58-64).

In comparison, doesn’t the neurological approach, although it rose during the ascent of neoliberalism, lead to a decrease in individual responsibility? Consider the instruction a doctor sometimes gives to a patient diagnosed with depression, which the latter may share with the people around her: this harm is the consequence of an innate state, over which she has no control, and for which she cannot be held responsible (the patient, thanks to the cerebral idiom, “can invoke entities responsible for her trouble” (Ehrenberg, 2020, p. 40 (amended translation)).

At bottom, Ehrenberg is inclined to see the psychoanalytical idiom in very unsociological terms, in sharp contrast to those he uses when he deals much more confidently with rival approaches. We can see this in a passage in which he endorses an expected way of contrasting the historical situation of psychoanalysis with that of behaviourism. The first one, offering a “turn […] outward”, would be related to “the need for mastery” of the conduct of others (this approach, let us note, is thus connected to the societal need to coordinate interactions, by controlling social partners); the second one, offering “a turn inward”, would rather emanate from “the need for rescuing the personality from the impersonality of society” (David Bakan, quoted in Ehrenberg, 2020, p. 69).

By embracing this (quite angelic) image of psychoanalysis, Ehrenberg fails to see that it has frequently been used to hold others to account and to coerce them. He further suggests that it would not allow even such a constraint, insofar as it would grant each individual unquestioned authority over the interpretation of his actions: “it is he [the patient], not the clinician, who interprets the dream” (2010, p. 350). Now, in reality, Freud, as we have seen, encouraged us to be suspicious of the accounts that each person gives of his own acts and gestures. The key theories he developed (those of repression and resistance) prompt us to find the perspective of the observer more credible than that of the main person involved.

Undoubtedly, it is far from easy to perceive the social control that psychoanalysis allows. In comparison, it is obvious that behaviourism, which proposes a completely external approach to human action, is linked to the perspective of social partners on the individual, and to their attempts to control her. For it is a theory which, insofar as it turns its back on introspection, and claims that knowledge of the person requires rather the examination of her gestures, bestows epistemic supremacy on the perspective of the “spectators” of the action (Ehrenberg, 2020, p. 68). It is based, so to speak, on an extrospective approach, which makes everyone dependent on the words of others. Everyone knows the old joke: “Two behaviorists have sex. One turns to the other and says, ‘That was good for you: how was it for me?’”

Psychoanalysis, by contrast, imagines psychic life as taking place in inner spaces (SE 16, p. 295-296), which it urges us to explore: “Turn your eyes inward, look into your own depths, learn […] to know yourself” (SE 17, p. 143). The discovery of repressed desires and thoughts would be the outcome of a purified introspection, carried out by an individual who succeeds in admitting what she sees in herself, without taking into account the internalized expectations of others (SE 4, p. 101-103). And we collectively associate this theory with “an imaginary dimension of depth”, which embodies “the desire to live, to free oneself, to re-establish the truth” (Moscovici, 1976, p. 114-115).

Let us fully understand that if psychoanalysis were indeed rooted in this purified introspection, there would be no psychoanalytic idiom, in the sense that anthropologists give to this term: a language developed collectively, over the course of daily negotiations between social partners (via incessant exchanges of reproaches, excuses and justifications of actions) and that distills an implicit “cosmology” (Ehrenberg, 2010, p. 24), that is, a moral order of authority, which lets one knows who owes what to whom. The use of psychoanalysis in conversation would simply allow the adept to inform her interlocutors of the results of her introspection, which she would have carried out beforehand, without taking others into account; psychoanalytic vocabulary would simply be made up of a juxtaposition of innumerable individual communications. By asserting that analytic theory is far from operating via “a vague and precarious internalization”, Moscovici bluntly countered this chimerical account; psychoanalysis “serves as a mediator between members of the same group”, it has something “objective and, all in all, external” (1976, p. 182). This exteriority appears most clearly in certain cases, for example in the one of this woman who had undertaken an analytical treatment in order “to avoid the risk of appearing as a bad mother” (Frischer, 1977, p. 61): the psychoanalytical idiom constrained her conduct by determining how others would perceive and describe her actions. Examination of similar cases led Moscovici to write that the psychoanalytical idiom offers “not only a mode of information but also an instrument of influence” (Moscovici, 1976, p. 102) and that the analytical explanation of conduct frequently involves an “implicit blame” (Moscovici, 1976, p. 189).

How are we to reconcile this acknowledgement of the exteriority of the psychoanalytic idiom with the eloquent psychoanalytic valorization of the inner voice?

Here it is necessary to appreciate the distance separating psychoanalytic practice from classical introspective approaches. In the puzzling psychoanalytic approach to interiority, people who are presumed to have repressed their desire out of their preconscious, into their unconscious, where they can no longer recognize it, are treated as being “incapable of giving [coherent] reports about themselves” (SE 7, p. 16); they would now consider their own desires and thoughts from the outside, “as if they belonged to someone else” (SE 14, p. 169). The symptom by which is expressed externally what they have buried internally would be a message sent by a “communicating agency”, which is “seeking to express something” (SE 22, p. 14-15); the symptom, being a “step towards” a confession (SE 7, p. 76)), would reveal an “urge to tell the truth” (SE 5, p. 221). And moreover, as their resistances prevent them from recognizing their denied desire, the main interested persons would be even less able to understand these gestures-messages than a really external observer does: “we often fail to hear our own slips, though never other people’s” (SE 15, p. 68); the observer of the individual’s conduct “knows more of the other’s psychical processes than that person himself is ready to admit or believes he has communicated” (SE 6, p. 211). In sum, the primary voice of the individual, unable to be heard internally, would seek to express itself externally, through gestures, which only an outside observer could, following an extrospective procedure, translate into words. This observer is thus deemed to be qualified to carry through words the innermost will of the observed. As Michael Billig perceptively remarks, in the stories told by Freud, “the person, as it were, has been turned inside out”: what until then was considered as “internal and hidden” turns out to be “external and observable” (1999, p. 50, emphasis added)); the return of the repressed in the symptom engenders an interiority in plain sight.

If this paradoxical approach to interiority is frequently confused with classical introspective approaches, it is mainly because of the way in which the adepts of psychoanalysis imagine the therapeutic lifting of repression. The analyst, in order to transform an indirect, veiled and pathological expression into a direct and conscious one, willingly incites the patient to give her assent to the analytical interpretation of her gestures and to recognize as her own, by admitting it, the repressed desire that would drive it; to reach this result, she can question the patient about the meaning of her symptoms, redescribe as rationalizations the motives she attributes to herself, or tell her that her reluctance to endorse the interpretation proposed to her is a resistance betraying her heteronomous subjection to the expectations of others. Conversely, the recognition by the main person concerned of the truth of this interpretation would show that she is now capable of an uncontaminated introspection. This recognition, once obtained, would confirm this interpretation (“there can be no doubt of a parapraxis having a sense it the subject himself admits it”, her confession offers “a direct proof” of the truth of the interpretation (SE 15, p. 50)). Thus, the psychoanalyst, when her patient’s introspection confirms the conclusions of her extrospective diagnosis, recognizes that it provides indisputable proof of its validity; after having been portrayed as a suspect approach, less reliable than extrospection, introspection is presented as the supreme standard for measuring the correctness of the extrospective examination. There are many (notably among the orthodox exegetes of Freud) who, disregarding the fact that the observer only grants introspection this recognition in a very precise context, when it suits her, suggest that the analytical treatment invariably bestows the last word to the patient, or that this practice emerges in the introspective relationship to oneself: for instance, Adam Philips writes that the cure enabled Freud’s patients “to speak on their own behalf” (2014, p. 29) and that “Freud was always wary of people talking on other’s people behalf” (2014, p. 103); and Andreas Mayer argues that a sort of self-analysis opened the doors to analysis for Freud’s countless non-professional readers, who would have followed “the example given by the author” (by showing them how he had examined himself, he would have provided them a “demonstration of a new technique of observation on the basis of autobiographical material” (2020, p. 30)). This caricatural portrait of a practice systematically deferring to spontaneous first-person narratives has other roots. The fact that analytic theory has accustomed us to conceive the confession orchestrated by the analyst as a kind of second confession, by which the principal concerned would clearly reformulate the desire that her symptom, prior to the encounter with the analyst, had already tried to communicate, but “in a softened down, distorted and unrecognized form” (SE 22, p. 15), probably goes a long way to explain the fact, noted by Foucault, that “we no longer perceive” the actual analytic confession “as the effect of a power that constrains us”; on the contrary, thanks to this theory, “it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, ‘demands’ only to surface” (1978, p. 60). Thus, the psychoanalyst, far from influencing her patient, would simply remove the obstacles obstructing her expression (SE 7, p. 260-261; SE 16, p. 450-451). By asserting that the patient interprets her own conduct, Ehrenberg takes up this homegrown narrative of a therapy in the service of an ideal of individual autonomy.

So, the idea that psychoanalysis enables one to discover the most secret thoughts of others has marked the way we collectively imagine it. Moscovici’s respondents “insist on the penetrating gaze of the analyst who delves into the intimate lives of individuals” (1976, p. 165). A joke published in a newspaper shows even more clearly that the collective consciousness has been marked by this psychoanalytical reversal of interiority: “Are you really in love with Johnny? – How should I know, my psychoanalyst is on vacation.” (Moscovici, 1976, p. 319)

Isn’t the stupefaction expressed by this joke about the love life of the adepts of psychoanalysis exactly the same as that expressed by the joke about the sexual life of the proponents of behaviourism? Each of these jokes focuses on a theoretical invalidation of the perspective of the observed person and a corresponding validation of the perspective of the observer. And indeed, psychoanalysis is perhaps as closely linked to the perspective of the spectator as is behaviourism: the idiom that Freud crafted to tell stories of his patients’ actions, rivaling those they told him, incorporates this third-person perspective, by the moral and epistemic supremacy that it confers it; this idiom thus provides control tools to witnesses of various actions. And yet Ehrenberg only stops on what opposes behaviourism to psychoanalysis—the first one refusing the imaginary of interiority that the second one enriches in a paradoxical way.

More broadly, Ehrenberg is not inclined to see the (however appreciable) gap between what psychoanalysts do and what they say they do. On the contrary, he tends to take at their word the implausible account, shared by these adepts, of a psychoanalysis developed in the intrapersonal relation to oneself and which, placing the perspective of the first person above that of the third person, allows each one to free herself from the demands of others. This is all the more surprising given that this narrative is unquestionably an individualistic one, and that he usually understands perfectly well the inadequacies of such narratives (see notably Ehrenberg, 2010, p. 239-253). Is it not this unusual timidity in source criticism (this reluctance to step back from an emic narrative) that obstructs his sociological description of the psychoanalytic idiom, and thus hinders the understandings of the transition of idioms proposed in The mechanics of passions?

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Jean-Baptiste Lamarche