French psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel died in 2006. She was Freud Professor at the University College of London, and Professor of Psychopathology at the University of Lille. She is best known for her connection of the ego ideal to primary narcissism, her extension of this theory to a critique of utopian ideology and her theories on the relationship between art, creativity and perversion.
From Jahsonic:
Related: abnormal psychology – psychoanalysis – creativity – perversion
By the time of the student rebellions of May 1968, she had become a political conservative. In their anonymous 1969 book L’universe contestationnaire (reworked and published in English in 1986 as Freud or Reich? Psychoanalysis and Illusion), Chasseguet-Smirgel and her husband/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 Wilhelm Reich, the Freudian dissident who became an insane systematizer of the libido, explains why his orgonic theory collected followers despite its apparent wackiness.
Creativity and Perversion (1996) – Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Otto Kernberg Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
…the number of perverts involved in the field of art is probably much greater than the average for the population in general…. It can be supposed … that the pervert inclines in some particular manner to the world of art. –Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, 1984
And at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janine_Chasseguet-Smirgel [Dec 2006]