Cinematic art and psychoanalysis are in their way sounding boards that tie together the intimate, social and political. Jean-Jacques Moscovitz is a witness to this encounter through a group of films. From "Un chien andalou" by Bunuel and Salvador Dali to "A Dangerous Method" by David Cronenberg passing through amongst others "Salo" by Pasolini, "Shoah" by Lanzmann" and The Memory of Justice" by Marcel Ophuls. For the author the effects of these films on the spectator evoke the symptoms, anguishes and inhibitions that the analysand speaks of on his psychonalyst's coach but not only they are also immersed in the din of the world.

Cinematic images and words spoken in psychoanalysis sessions keep their part of mystery because of the surprise they create and the beauty of the words and the images, whatever the generation  we belong to. The art of  cinema and the intelligence of the psychoanalytical approach enriches our vision and our capacity to listen allowing us hope for a kind of pacification of our intimate, familial and/or collective history which is linked in itself to the Great History. Psychoanalysis and cinema work together to emanicipate the subject and the society. 

PRESENTATION

DREAMING OF REPAIRING HISTORY .... between psychoanalysis, cinema and politics

by JJ Moscovitz

How are we witnesses to what is happening under our eyes, in our heads? How can it be inscribed so we can part with the trauma of the world's violence? In the beginning of January 2015 there was an attack on mankind in Paris and Vincennes. We can define mankind as having language, as an artist or simply a citizen, a Jew, a policeman or a journalist. The author doesn't talk about this attack because "Dreaming of repairing history" was published mid January and was under press at the time of the attack. But the path that the author takes us down is a testimony of what he feels from his practice as psychoanalyst and his position of a film spectator, of great films: "Shoah"," Le Dernier des Justes" by Lanzmann, "Memory of Justice" by Marcel Ophuls and many others. All are not works that center on the Shoah, what Walter Benjamin calls, the Breaking up of History. Other films are well represented such as "Gloria" by Cassavetes, "Zelig" byWoody Allen, "A Dangerous Method" by Cronenberg, "Intimate Grammar "by Nils Bergmann etc. He links his film analysis to the major contributions of psychoanalysis such as  "Civilization and its Discontents" by Freud, where in this text of 1929 the founder of  psychoanalysis approaches the opposition between the Eros and Thanatos drives. Far from making these two drives the equivalents to Good and Bad, the author locates them as forming the mental self of each and every one of us as regarding the politics and the collective.

This is what is difficult to show. The crime is an act committed by totalitarian regimes, either the murder of Jews in the Shoah, the genocide of the Tutsis and the islamic-nazism of today This is the order of the collective but it has such an unbelievable grip on our subjectivity, on our nature of speaking beings. How do contemporary events affect the subject's intimacy, that is J J Moscovitz's question. How does History break into the intimacy of the subject. As a reaction to this the subject needs to find his place as subject. Here ensues the persistent insistence that Lacan and psychoanalysts put into the term of subject. 

Cinema tells us about this malaise between the subject and the collective life. J J Moscovitz gives us here an interview of Françoise Dolto on the film "Shoah" where our so creative child psychoanalyst says "Psychoanalysis teaches us that there is no good nor bad for the unconscious." And our author then evokes Lacan's questioning of the "drama of nazism". Regarding this Lacan advances "under what veil is hidden this mystery, for whom is capable to courageously direct their gaze at this phenomenon." And then to quote Lanzmann: "To directly look at horror requires a renunciation of distractions and escape outs, the first of which is the falsely central, the question of why, with the undefined succession of academic frivolities or crookedness that this question never ceases to inspire."

Marie-ClaudeVaillant-Couturier was filmed at the Nuremberg Trials and Ophuls showed us this archive document where after having testified she stares down at each one of the Nazi criminals with a look that means far more than a judgement that is still important to indicate the "jouissance" of the committed murders. This stare of MC Vaillant-Couturier is magnificent it goes beyond the truth instituted by the law; it humanizes us, it is direct and courageous at the same time, creating words that can say the naked violence. This "naked violence" is a term used by Lanzmann. In "Shoah" he films the layout of Auschwitz, in an ultimate movement to show the horror. Which remains impossible to be represented. No prevarication here despite the desperate and derisory attempts of Godard and others who affirm that there exists photos somewhere of the gas chambers in action....

Today we can quote André Malraux. The author quotes him in reference to January 2015 in his blog of the association "Psychanalyse Actuelle" in a text entitled with a quip "If Freud was born before Christ we wouldn't be here..."

This echoes the famous "prophecy" in the 1950's that was attributed to André Malraux: "The 21st century will be religious (spiritual) or it won't".

In 1955 he says this: "Since 50 years psychology has reintegrated the demons into mankind. This is the result of psychoanalysis. I think that the task of the next century, regarding the most terrible menace that humanity has known, is to reintroduce the gods."

This book between cinema and psychoanalysis shows the capacity of J J Moscovitz to be surprised. Let's conclude with a few lines written by our author during the fright we all felt in the beginning of this year 2015 and which are in keeping with his thoughts when he adds the term of politics in the sub-title of his book.