Every practitioner feels, it must be said, an interest in the theory that underpins his practice — an interest at times merely formal. But the passion that Lacan felt for psychoanalysis, for the work of Freud, seems to me without equivalent. A passion devoid of the starchy, faintly religious respect one has for sacred or founding texts. Lacan never ceased both to marvel at and also to interrogate, to comment upon, indeed to call into question, with respect, certain propositions of the founder. For him, psychoanalysis was the most marvelous invention of the “human sciences,” and Freud a new Copernicus. How could such a theory, so surprising compared with the ideas contemporary to it, have come into being?
Very quickly the hypothesis imposed itself upon him that Freud’s Jewish origin was not foreign to this birth. This hypothesis had of course to be made precise. To do so meant acquiring a serious, indeed a lived, knowledge of Judaism, which implied the encounter with Jews. Lacan knew many of them, so numerous in the psychoanalytic milieu as in the human sciences, and formed a genuine friendship with some. No doubt the one who marked his first steps was his Jewish analyst, of Polish origin, Rudolph Loewenstein. With him Lacan undertook a long training analysis that lasted seven years, an exceptional duration for the time. Their relations were rather stormy. Loewenstein left Paris to settle in New York, where he died. It seems obvious that this analysis marked Lacan’s destiny. A young and talented psychiatrist, to whom the career of the mandarinate held out its arms, he preferred to devote himself to psychoanalysis and, for a time, to the bohemian life. It was thus that he met — when he was already married and had had three children from that marriage — an actress, Sylvia Makles, a Jew of Romanian origin, who acted in a film by Renoir, and for whom he felt a passionate love.
The Jews in the Lacan family
In a second marriage, Lacan thus wed Sylvia, née Makles, who had previously married the celebrated writer Georges Bataille, by whom she had had a daughter, Laurence, who grew up alongside her mother and her stepfather and would later marry a Jewish doctor, a grandson of Hélène and Victor Basch, murdered in 1944 by the fascist militia. From 1938 onward, Sylvia shared Lacan’s life without the divorce from Bataille having been pronounced. In 1941 the couple’s only child would be born, whom her parents, as a challenge to the Nazism then in place, named Judith. Lacan adored this daughter, whose portrait was prominently displayed in his consulting room. She herself, on many occasions, recalled the symbol that her father had wished to express in giving her this name.1 Lacan undertook a long legal battle so that his daughter would bear his name, and finally won his case in 1967. But Judith would bear the name Lacan for only a few months, before taking that of her husband, Jacques Miller.
Lacan and Sylvia finally married in 1953. For Wladimir Granoff, a psychoanalyst who was for a time the couple’s friend, Sylvia was the great love of the psychoanalyst, who nonetheless had a most rich sentimental life right up to the last years of his existence. Lacan’s love for Sylvia is not a matter of mere anecdote, since in his practice as in his theory he never ceased to develop the idea that psychic life, in its symptoms as in its productions, is nourished in the relation to the Other — that instance which was that of the mother, and for which the female companion substitutes herself.
Symptomatically, Judith would have two significant love affairs, with Jews. The first with a promising ethnologist, a student of Claude Lévi-Strauss, of Tunisian origin, Lucien Sebag. The latter, suffering from severe depressions, undertook an analysis with Lacan, an analysis that concluded tragically with his suicide in 1965. This drama affected Lacan enormously and cast a chill over his relationship, important though it was, with Claude Lévi-Strauss. “I did everything to save him!” he told me when I questioned him one day about this drama, having myself had some ties with the Sebag family, a Tunisian family that counted among its members numerous talented intellectuals. It is difficult to know the state of Sebag’s relations with Judith at the moment when he began his analysis. According to certain information, their break had already been consummated and had aggravated his depression.
Judith had a second liaison, certainly the most important of her existence, with a young philosopher, a normalien, Jacques Miller (who added a second given name, and would be better known by it: Jacques-Alain), the son of a radiologist of Polish origin. The young J.-A. Miller deployed great activity at the ENS. He founded, among other things, a journal, Les cahiers de l’analyse (The Notebooks of Analysis), which would disseminate the thought of Lacan, but also of Marxism, gathering around him several normaliens, Jewish for the most part. These, around 1968, saw fit to claim allegiance to Maoism and to Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book. “How could this elite have knelt before that ideology? It sickened me,” their ENS comrade Rémi Brague declared to me recently. In this group, Benny Lévy and Jean-Claude Milner stood out, as did J.-A. Miller’s younger brother, Gérard. Quite obviously, the atheism of these people, openly proclaimed, was beyond doubt. The later evolution of Benny Lévy is well known: he passed from Maoism to the most rigorous Jewish orthodoxy and would end up settling in Jerusalem, where he founded the Levinas center, of which he wished to be the disciple.
A privileged relationship was formed between Lacan and J.-A. Miller, who soon became his son-in-law. Lacan would entrust to him the preparation of his Écrits, the collection of the psychoanalyst’s articles that was the voluminous manifesto of Lacanianism. Likewise, it is to him that the editing of the seminars Lacan held for more than twenty years would be entrusted, before he became his universal legatee. J.-A. Miller appeared very far removed from Judaism… until the death of his father. As he would write, the latter’s funeral would be accompanied by the Jewish rites.
Lacan during the Occupation
The anecdote is well known. His companion Sylvia and her mother committed the imprudence, like many Jews at the start of the Occupation, of complying with the authorities’ demand by registering as Jewish at the prefecture of Cagnes-sur-Mer. Lacan, for his part, had perceived the danger of this census. He left Paris on the spot and went to that prefecture. There, with incredible nerve, he managed to filch his companion’s file and destroy it. He thus saved her life.
It was in that dark year 1940 that Lacan, together with a Jewish friend, Bernier, set out in quest of the translation of the Bible into English, the so-called King James Bible, the only one that knew how to recover “the spirit of the Hebrew text” (Julien Green).
An unexpected encounter was to enlighten me about Lacan’s conduct during the Occupation. It was that of Jacques Biézin, a Jewish doctor of Polish origin who, after having fought in Spain with the Republicans, took refuge in France. At the Sainte-Anne hospital he attended the lectures of Professor Jean Delay. It was there that he met Lacan and Daumezon. “They had created for us, the Jews, an atmosphere of compassion and solidarity. I remember the way in which they treated the Jewish patients who happened to be hospitalized. ‘Here you are safe, the Germans will not arrest you.’ One day Lacan came to tell me: ‘I know your difficult situation. If you have any problem whatsoever, do not hesitate to come and see me.’ In the final moments of the war, he took me into analysis. I would go to 5 rue de Lille. There I felt at home.”
Lacan was very early sensitive to the Jewish tragedy and to the concentration-camp problem. He was just about the only one in the psychoanalytic world to be so. He thus advised Suzanne Merleau-Ponty, the wife of his friend Maurice, to take as her thesis subject the concentration-camp neurosis. He himself plunged into the study of the Nuremberg trials. Later, he would define the concentration camps as “the real of our time.” He also had as a patient a survivor of Auschwitz, Anne-Lise Stern, who, by his account, would have influenced — through her testimony — the doctrine of her analyst.
The structuralist school: Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson
In the middle of the previous century, France saw the flourishing of a fine school of thought: structuralism. The common point of the intellectuals of this current was a double reference, on the one hand to the structural linguistics founded by Ferdinand de Saussure, on the other to Freud. The leader of this current was Claude Lévi-Strauss, a grandson of a rabbi, but one who had taken his distance from Judaism. He would nonetheless later happen to say that his method no doubt had very ancient roots — a probable allusion to the Midrash.
Lacan was for a long time close to Lévi-Strauss, drawing inspiration from him, until the tragedy of Lucien Sebag’s suicide, following which the ethnologist took his distance. Their disagreement even took a theoretical turn, Lévi-Strauss rejecting the principal thesis of Lacanianism — the unconscious is structured like a language — by inverting the terms: it is language that is structured like the unconscious. With hindsight, and with all the admiration one owes him, Lévi-Strauss there committed a blunder. The unconscious is an effect of language, and not the reverse.
Structural linguistics was essential in Lacan’s thought. After Saussure, numerous linguists developed this discipline, in particular those who belonged to the so-called Prague school. One of the most eminent thinkers of this school was a Russian Jew, Roman Jakobson, born in Moscow. Lacan and Jakobson were very close. When the linguist came down to Paris, Lacan would put him up, as I myself witnessed. Lacan borrowed from him the concepts of metonymy and metaphor, so important in his work, but he modified their content.
The great Jewish personalities
Lacan frequented numerous Jewish personalities, some of whom profoundly marked his thought. Most were natives of Eastern Europe, and above all of Russia.
The philosopher who most profoundly marked Lacan’s thought was Alexandre Kojève, who was not Jewish but profoundly philosemitic, a friend of the finest Jewish-Russian minds of the time, such as Alexandre Koyré. He developed in France the study of Hegel, in particular that of his Phenomenology of Spirit. Lacan attended his courses and formed with him a relationship of friendship. The Hegelian analysis of the dialectic of the master and the slave would remain an essential element of his doctrine, and he would never cease to recall it.
Another striking figure, a Russian Jew as well, was that of Alexandre Koyré, a friend of Kojève, a great philosopher and historian of science whom Lacan cites on many occasions. His influence is profound in contemporary philosophy. Koyré revolutionized our conception of the history of science, which would not be evolutionary but discontinuous, operating by leaps. According to him, modern science could be born only in a universe marked by the Bible and its concept of Creation. Trained in Russia, Koyré had a “solar” trajectory from East to West, teaching from Russia to the American universities. His astonishing biography, in which the Resistance had its place, is worthy of a novel.
In my research into Lacan’s encounters2 with Jewish intellectual personalities, chance — an encounter with the painter Alain Kleinmann — made me discover the astonishing personality of Olga Katunal, so little known, whom Lacan frequented and who would belong to a sort of secret life of Lacan’s with Judaism. Her story deserves to be briefly told.
Olga Katunal was a Lithuanian Jew, born in 1900, into a family that had broken with Judaism even though it counted numerous rabbis among its ancestors. She spoke seven languages perfectly: Russian, Polish, Yiddish, German, French and even Hebrew. In 1921 she fell in love with a German and followed him to Berlin. Following the disappointment caused by this liaison, she decided to live “like a man,” frequenting marginals, celebrities and delinquents. She still manifested no interest in Judaism. In 1923, she went to Paris, joined the Communist Party, and made the acquaintance of an important leader, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, whose mistress she became. But she very quickly left the Party. She would later say that this whole period of her life was a waste, and that she would have done better to undertake medical studies, as her friend Doctor Salmonof, Lenin’s Jewish physician, had advised her.
Passing through Berlin, she meets a strange character who plays a key role in this whole period, Oskar Goldberg, whose mistress she becomes. Goldberg held himself to be a kabbalist, which went well with a great sexual freedom in his messianic currents derived from Sabbatianism.3 Olga also made the acquaintance of orthodox rabbis, among whom Zalman Schneersohn, heir to the famous dynasty of the Lubavitch hasidim. But Zalman preferred to renounce this function and left it — for unknown reasons, but no doubt out of a refusal of the straitjacket of the office — to his brother-in-law, who would become the famous rabbi of New York. These rabbis agreed to initiate Olga into the Talmud, even though this study is traditionally forbidden to women.
Oskar Goldberg is the author of a work, Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer (The Reality of the Hebrews), which had a certain importance. He drew around him personalities as eminent as Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann, Franz Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Rais, and so on. He would also fascinate fascistic groups, among which militated Alfred Schüller, the inventor of the swastika. For Goldberg as for the Nazis, civilization is nothing but degeneration. After a moment of fascination, these personalities distanced themselves from the sulfurous character. Benjamin joined the Communist Party; Thomas Mann ridiculed him in the features of Doctor Breisacher in his work Doctor Faustus. For Goldberg, Maimonides constitutes the extreme of the degeneration of Judaism, an idea one finds again in France in an author such as Shmuel Trigano. In 1932 Goldberg fled Germany before settling in the USA, where Olga refused to follow him into “that den of capitalism.” She had not totally rejected the passions of her youth.
In the United States, Goldberg abandons Judaism for Buddhism. Returning to France in 1946, he finds Olga again, wants to convert her to his new ideas and to marry her. Olga refuses, henceforth faithfully attached to Judaism, probably to Lubavitch hasidism. In the last years of her life she resided at the Schola Cantorum, where Lacan would go to read Oskar Goldberg’s book. Olga received in her home numerous French intellectuals, among whom André Schwarz-Bart, the author of Le Dernier des justes (The Last of the Just).
What could be Lacan’s interest in Olga Katunal? One may suppose a reciprocal sympathy between these two exceptional personalities. But there was also the psychoanalyst’s interest in Goldberg’s book Die Wirklichkeit, of which Olga possessed a unique copy and which she refused to lend. This obliged the psychoanalyst to go several times to the lady’s home to read the work, never translated, though recently reissued in German. One finds traces of Goldberg’s ideas in certain seminars, such as this idea that the cloud in the desert was the body of God.
The man who introduced Olga Katunal to Lacan was Emmanuel Rais, no doubt Lacan’s best informant on Judaism. Emmanuel Rais was, until his death, Olga’s great friend. They had similar trajectories. A Russian as well, belonging to that prodigious Russian Jewry that contributed so much to the culture of the twentieth century, as much in the domain of ideas as in that of the arts. He introduced to Lacan several personalities of this brilliant diaspora, such as the scholar Marienstrass. Rais being librarian of the École des Langues orientales on the rue de Lille, it sufficed for the two men to cross the street to find each other. But it happened that Lacan would go to Rais’s home in precise circumstances to which we shall return.
In his youth, Rais left his native Bessarabia to settle in Germany. He too frequented marginal intellectuals, close to Luxemburgist circles,4 very far removed from Judaism. He had a passion for Russian poetry. Until the encounter with Oskar Goldberg, which was the turning point of his life and which made him renew his bond with Judaism. It was in this circle that he met Katunal. At the appearance of Nazism, he emigrates to France, first to Alsace, where he meets his future wife, the aunt of Rabbi Gilles Bernheim. He soon meets, during the war, a man who once again overturns his life and who would have an immense influence on French Judaism, Jacob Gordin, another Russian Jew, enamored like Rais of Russian literature and poetry. But Gordin was a pious Jew, very versed in the Hebrew texts, a kabbalist, but one who rejected Goldberg’s theology. He influenced those who would be the intellectual leaders of French Judaism after the war, namely Léon Askenazi, Robert Gamzon, André Neher, Emmanuel Levinas, developing a Judaism marked by Kabbalah and by Zionism.
Rais taught Russian literature at the Sorbonne before becoming librarian at the École des langues orientales. Lacan asked him on two occasions to attend the Passover Seder. I had confirmation of this later from Rais’s widow, whom I met. Lacan had come with a companion and remained silent throughout the entire evening. By a strange coincidence, the two men died in the same year, 1981.
One sees the intensity of Lacan’s relations with Jewish intellectuals, Russian for the most part, to whom are added two Tunisians, Lucien Sebag and… myself, since a good part of my analysis turned around the question of Judaism. Since I am evoking my own analysis, this is the moment to add that Lacan counted, over his long career, numerous Jewish patients. It is known that patients, like students, teach their analyst and their master an enormous amount, as this fine Talmudic maxim recalls: “I have learned much from my masters, but more still from my students!”
Among these patients, we have already evoked Anne-Lise Stern, who was the ardent witness of the deportation among the Lacanian analysts. Let us also evoke Alain Didier-Weill, who embodied his whole life a particular tragedy. From his adolescence, his father taught him that he would no longer bear the name Weill, but that of Didier. This change of name, which is not exceptional in the period that followed the war, was justified by the wish for a total assimilation supposed to ward off the danger of new persecutions. Such a change of name can have devastating effects, and Lacan was fully conscious of it. Alain Didier-Weill carried this tragedy into the public arena. A few months after having recovered his original name, Weill, he died.
To conclude, the intensity of Lacan’s exchanges with Jews reflects his keen questioning of Judaism, which seemed to him bound up with the enigma of psychoanalysis.
Notes
Argentine newspaper, Clarín, 15 August 1996.↩︎
The fruit of this research has been recorded in my book Le péché originel de la psychanalyse, op. cit.↩︎
Sabbataï Zvi had proclaimed himself the messiah. Cf. Gershom Scholem or my book Les folies millénaristes (The Millenarian Madnesses).↩︎
Close to the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg.↩︎