Communists and surrealists: study on the political reception of Jacques Lacan’s thesis

Abstract

Jacques Lacan’s doctoral thesis in medicine, On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality, published in 1932, was read and commented on by members of the communist and surrealist movements before receiving attention from the medical and psychoanalytic fields. In this article, we analyze the political reception of Lacan’s thesis during the period of its publication, between 1932 and 1933, composed of three texts: Notes de lecture, by Paul Nizan; Compte rendu de lecture, by Jean Bernier; and Notes en vue d’une psycho-dialectique, by René Crevel. We note that all of these texts were written from the perspective of historical materialism and tended to read Lacanian propositions as a kind of critique of ideology in the fields of the scientific study of subjectivity. In this sense, we attempt to formulate the hypothesis that the political reception of his thesis would have been part of the factors that influenced some of Lacan’s theoretical developments, especially the elaboration of his theory of the imaginary constitution of the I.