This article highlights some aspects of the interaction between law and psychoanalysis, including the extension of this interaction into the area of politics, from an epistemological, historical and conceptual point of view. Far from exhausting the topic, these considerations actually give emphasis to what still remains unexplored, concerning a complex relationship. It would be tempting to designate that relationship as « illegitimate », but I have nonetheless tried to demonstrate its versatility and its troubling affinities. After proving ultimately « legitimate » a collaboration which is far from self-evident, and revealing an overlooked aspect of Freud, who often exploits juridical language, this article points out the limits of the interaction between psychoanalysis and law. For, if the articulation of the individual and the collective is a constant in Freud's work, the analogical method correlating individual and collective psychical processes has never met with a favourable reception. The hypothesis about the transmission of mnemonic traces through the masses has doubtless contributed to that. Nevertheless, this part of Freud's work deserves to be further explored in its metapsychological, sociological and political dimensions. Moreover, the history of ideas and the history of psychoanalysis itself, in so far as it is a history of the production of works and of concepts and at the same time of their creators, as is the case with the Interpretation of dreams, would definitely be enriched by such an exploration.
Applied psychoanalysis; History of psychoanalysis; Psychoanalysis and politics; Psychoanalysis and law; Alienation