Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel

Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1928 – March 5, 2006) (whose surname is alternatively spelled Chasseguet-Smirguel, but generally not in English-language publications) was a leading French psychoanalyst, a training analyst, and past President of the Société psychanalytique de Paris in France. From 1983 to 1989, she was Vice President of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Chasseguet-Smirgel was Freud Professor at the University College, London, and Professor of Psychopathology at the Université Lille Nord de France. She is best known for her reworking of the Freudian theory of the ego ideal and its connection to primary narcissism, as well as for her extension of this theory to a critique of utopian ideology.

Chasseguet-Smirgel was born in Paris in 1928; as a Jew of Central European ancestry, she lost many relatives in the Holocaust. She became a psychoanalyst, then carried out further studies in political science and eventually earned a doctorate in psychology. Like many other young French intellectuals, she broke with the Communist Party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

By the time of the student rebellions of May 1968, she had become a political conservative. In their anonymous 1969 book L'univers contestationnaire (reworked and published in English in 1986 as Freud or Reich? Psychoanalysis and Illusion), Chasseguet-Smirgel and her husband and co-author Béla Grunberger argued that the utopian political ideology of the student demonstrators, as well as of their Freudo-Marxist avatars Herbert Marcuse and Gilles Deleuze, was fueled by primary narcissism, the desire to return to the maternal womb. Further, that the very term "Freudo-Marxism" was oxymoronic—one could not reconcile the reality principle with the Communist utopia. Chasseguet-Smirgel's analysis of the views of the Freudian dissident Wilhelm Reich, who attempted a systematization of the libido, explains why his orgone theory collected followers despite its apparent pseudoscientific character.

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