Renewing the Dialogue between the Social Sciences and Psychoanalysis. Interview with François Bafoil and Paul Zawadzki
The result of three years of a regular seminar, Politiques de la destructivité, edited by François Bafoil and Paul Zawadzki, will be published by Hermann in June 2024. What kind of dialogue is possible between the social sciences and psychoanalysis, and on what issues? The editors of the book answer our questions about the ambitions of the seminar and the recently published book.
The book is based on a regular seminar you started at the CERI in 2021 with the aim of reconnecting the humanities and social sciences with psychoanalysis. Can you tell us how this seminar came about?
Despite the strong presence in public debate of themes such as memory, denial, and repression, and the renewed interest in authors such as Norbert Elias, who has never ceased to plough through the Freudian literature, we started from the observation that the thinking of the social sciences was not sufficiently linked to the psychic sciences, which is in a way surprising when one considers the contemporaneity of Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber (born in 1856, 1858, and 1864 respectively). In fact, the debate between these disciplines has never been very harmonious, especially in France, where, as we recall in Politiques de la destructivité , Durkheimian sociology was established by sidelining the study of subjectivity (...)
