France. Sartre paid homage to Freud in The Family Idiot( 1971 ),
a psychoanalytic treatment of Flaubert. In 1967 , Jean Laplanche
and J.-B. Pontalis published their influential overview of psy-
choanalytic vocabulary,The Language of Psychoanalysis.Ear-
lier, Octave Mannoni had applied Freudian ideas to the history
of European colonization in Prospero and Caliban( 1950 ).
Most important for Freud’s legacy in France, Jacques
Lacan, a prominent figure on the Parisian intellectual scene,
had since the early fifties been busy injecting psychoanalysis
with heavy doses of Heidegger and Hegel (the latter in Kojève’s
influential version). Like Derrida, Lacan had rebelled against
the influence of Sartre, scorning Sartre’s enthusiasm for Com-
munism and his sense of human existence as a heroic struggle.
Lacan opted for a grim, even cynical, sense of social life: a
perspective informed by Freud’s doubt about the nineteenth
century’s utopian hopes to transform society.
For all its partiality and obscurantism, Lacan’s reading of
Freud was a thorough and deeply personal vision. Derrida in
1966 had less of a sense of Freud’s strength as a critic of moder-
nity and as a vastly original spirit dedicated to redefining our
sense of our lives. His lecture on “Freud and the Scene of Writ-
ing” is devoted almost exclusively to Freud’s image of the
unconscious, which Derrida aligns with his own concept of
writing.
In his essay, Derrida shows little regard for Freud’s main
goal. Freud was dedicated to the cure: he wanted to enable in-
dividuals to recognize themselves and reimagine their lives, so
that they could pass from immobilizing sickness to health.
This process requires an argument within the self. Chiefly,
what Freud demands is a challenge to the superego: a shatter-
ing of the false images of self imposed by the unreal powers of
social law, powers internalized by the neurotic by means of
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 103