L’avenir dure longtemps (The futur lasts quite a while), an autobiographical narration by Louis Althusser is a very wealthy text on quite a few aspects and may be used as material for psychoanalytic research. In this paper, ou reading was oriented by an approach through the theme of the superego.
Exploring Althusser’s history we came across a never-ending conflict: to be captivated from the incide, by the unconscious sexuality of the other person. We analysed the traumatic violent aspect of this power relationship – a sexual power – and we showed how it exercizes itself on the psychical economy by delineating a specific configuration on the level of the relationships between the topical agencies.
Such a clinical material enabled us to develop the idea that the superego agency is anchored in the drives thus compelling within the psyche a mode of “internal law” that becomes implacable and contradictory: The individual thus may somehow remain its prisoner.