On Lacan, Reader of Melanie Klein by Marie-Claude Thomas

Abstract

We present to the Brazilian public the translation of the preface written by Laurent Cornaz for Marie-Claude Thomas’s book (Érès, 2012). The French psychoanalyst highlights the originality of Thomas’s approach in examining the “critical borrowings” Jacques Lacan made from Kleinian theory. The work analyzed by Cornaz is structured into five chapters that outline the essential elements of the theoretical connections between Lacan and Klein, while also noting their dissonances. The theoretical density of the early chapters–addressing the theory of anxiety, the ego, and narcissism–reveals a constant dialogue in which each Freudian observation finds resonances in both Klein and Lacan. The author’s interpretation carefully demonstrates how Lacanian clinical practice radically differs from Kleinian practice. While Klein’s predominant focus lies in fantasy as a pathway to the unconscious, Lacan conceives the unconscious as structured by language.Perhaps one of the book’s most significant contributions is its ability to sustain a fertile dialogue among Freud, Klein, and Lacan, thereby updating the status of psychoanalysis as a theory. It is a matter of reading Lacan reading Melanie Klein: analyzing step by step Lacan’s seminars, writings, and Klein’s texts, establishing a direct link that identifies Lacan’s points of refusal, support, and articulation–developed not systematically but consistently–regarding what we conventionally call Kleinian theory. From the hegemony Kleinian thought imposed on the psychoanalytic field between the 1930s and 1960s, Lacan distanced himself early on, forging his own identity as early as 1953 with the conference “The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real” as structuring elements of analytic practice.