IPA French Webinar: To deconstruct the infantile
This webinar was in French.
Panelist: Professor René Roussillon
Moderator: Eléana Mylona
During this period of the pandemic, it is crucial that we all stay informed and that we preserve our links with our loved ones, but also with our colleagues and our psychoanalytic communities. So in view of the upcoming IPA Congress to be held in July 2021 in Vancouver on The Child: Its Many Dimensions, the IPA team wishes to invite members to a series of introductory webinars on the theme of the Congress.
In psychoanalysis, the word infantile appeared under Freud's pen as an adjective to operate a great revolution and qualify sexuality, to describe and account for a determinant of psycho-sexual life based on the sexual drive that is organized and manifests itself from early childhood. During the last two decades, certain adjectives have been proposed as nouns/concepts in order to conceptualise their functions or organizational qualities for the psyche. Infantile sexuality was thus broken down first into sexual, then into infantile supposed to encompass a whole series of psychic operations, a vague and vaster temporality which goes from the psycho-affective development of the infant to the child of 5- 6 years. Everything has become infantile, without forgetting the connotation of childishness. In this generalized polysemy that the infantile covers, the risks of confusion, both of hyper-condensations and of hyper-simplifications, René Roussillon will propose a deconstruction of the infantile, in order to give it its rightful place in psychoanalytic thought.
René Roussillon is a psychoanalyst and training member at the Paris Psychoanalytic Society. Professor emeritus of psychology at the Lumière Lyon 2 University. He was awarded the Maurice Bouvet prize in 1992 for his book Paradoxes et situations limits de la psychoanalyse, and in 2016 the international distinction of the Sigourney Award for his exceptional contribution in psychoanalysis . He is the author of the many books, among them:
Logics and archeology of the psychoanalytic framework, Paris, Puf, 1995 ;
Agony, splitting and symbolization, Paris, Puf, 1999 ;
Pleasure and repetition, theory of the psychic process, Paris, Dunod, 2002 ;
Transitional, sexual and reflexivity, Paris, Dunod, 2008 ;
The game and the inter-je (u), Paris, Puf, 2008 ;
The birth of the object, (co-author) Paris, Puf, 2010