Pleasure of Thinking in French Psychoanalysis

Children discover the world with amazement and surprise. They stop and look at leaves and flowers; they ask questions about the origin of things; they laugh at an incongruous idea; they engage, concentrated, in a new construction; and they can be exhilarated if they found how to solve a problem. This speaks for a specific pleasure—a pleasure many of us are familiar with—the pleasure of thinking rarely discussed in academic literature. In this chapter, I address the question of the pleasure of thinking via French psychoanalysis. If, for the English-speaking world, French psychoanalysis is often synonymous with Jacques Lacan’s contributions and heritage, there is actually a very rich domain of study that has gone through important evolutions since the 1960s. After introducing Freud’s views on the pleasure of thinking, this chapter first focuses on André Green’s theoretical contribution to the domain. Having met Jacques Lacan, critical of his theory of language, Green indeed proposed a complex and integrative model of the psyche, accounting for the multiple forms of affects in language and mind. Not only did he play a major role in the evolution of French psychoanalysis after Lacan but also his model enables us to conceptualise the pleasure of thinking. Second, I turn to the rare work of Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor, also initially a Lacanian, author of the only psychoanalytical book specifically devoted to the pleasure of thinking, and examine her propositions. Third, I propose to complement this reading with current reflections in developmental and sociocultural psychology, domain from which I try to theorize the pleasure of thinking.