Claude, Henri Charles Jules (1869-1946)

CLAUDE, HENRI CHARLES JULES (1869-1946)

Henri Claude was born in Paris in 1869, where he died in 1946. He was a French physician, psychiatrist, and professor of the chair of mental illness and brain disease at Saint-Anne's Hospital. He played a leading role in introducing psychoanalysis in France.

An assistant to Professor Fulgence Raymond at the Salpêtrière Hospital, he developed an interest in neuropsychiatry. Although committed to the physiological origin of mental disease, he developed an early interest in psychoanalysis. Although we may laugh, like Sigmund Freud, at his ambivalence, nonetheless he was one of the first to accept Freudian theories and to encourage the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the hospitals where he worked. He was, for example, receptive to the work of Adolf Schmiergeld and was present at the session of the Société de Neurologie on July 4, 1907, when Schmiergeld, together with P. Provotelle, presented "La méthode psychoanalytique et les 'Abwehr-Neuropsychosen ' de Freud," one of the first serious studies on psychoanalysis in France.

In February 1913 he authored a report on the fourth edition of Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (The psychopathology of everyday life), which concludes: "In short, this book, whose conception is so uncommon in the French literature (however, in this context, the work of Maeder, 1906, should be mentioned) and which is written in an accessible language, should be better known to psychologists and physicians."

When he was appointed the chair at Sainte-Anne in 1922, he apparently removed from his department Eugénie Sokolnicka, the woman Georges Heuyer had put in charge of psychoanalysis during his tenure, to replace her with René Laforgue. Claude commented, "I ask that this psychoanalytic practice, which is so shocking in some respects, remain strictly within the scope of medicine, and I exclude from these investigations anyone who is not impregnated with the notion of responsibility felt by any physician worthy of the name. . . . The danger is carrying out the risky Freudian transference" (1924).

From August 2 to 7, 1926, Claude attended the Congrès des Médecins Aliénistes et Neurologistes de France et des Pays de Langue Française, which was held in Geneva. During the congress, at which he presented a report on what was then the focus of his psychiatric work, "Démence précoce et schizophrénie," his young students René Laforgue, Gilbert Robin, and Adrien Borel, accompanied by Mrs. Laforgue, Raymond and Ariane de Saussure, Angélo Hesnard, and Édouard Pichon created the first Conférence des Psychanalystes de Langue Française (Conference of French-speaking psychoanalysts) on August 1, 1926. After 1931 it was in the lecture hall of the Clinique des Maladies Mentales that these conferences took place.

The department of which he was in charge welcomed psychoanalysis, whose therapeutic merits he extolled by publishing, with Laforgue, highly optimistic statistics on rates of recovery. Pierre Mâle became his medical extern in 1920. In 1927 Michel Cénac, one of the doctors who ran the clinic, along with Paul Schiff, Charles-Henri Nodet, Adrien Borel, and many others sought training with Claude. Later, Jean Delay, who was his student in 1939, continued to use psychoanalysis in his own department beginning in 1942. It was Claude who created the first laboratory of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis at the school of medicine at the University of Paris. In December 1931 he appointed Sacha Nacht to be head of the lab.

In 1926 Laforgue wrote to Freud, "I have enclosed the schedule of courses at Claude's clinic. This will give you an idea of the importance of psychoanalysis in these courses. Starting next year the courses will be given in the main building of the school of medicine." This was the only source of psychoanalytic training in France prior to the creation of the Institut de Psychanalyse in 1934. Departments of psychology offered no training in psychoanalysis since Georges Dumas, who had worked with Claude, was violently opposed to it.

As director of the review L 'Encéphale, Claude was a busy editor, publishing a number of articles and prefaces, including the preface to Roland Dalbiez's dissertation "La Méthode psychanalytique et la Doctrine de Freud," in 1936. But it was a preface he wrote in 1924 that later cast an unfavorable light on his character. Here he wrote "By agreeing to present to the medical public the book by Messrs. Laforgue and Allendy on Psychanalyses et les névroses, I have not hidden from the authors that it was not my intent to support their opinions . . . Certain investigative procedures which shock the delicacy of intimate sentiments and of certain habitual ways of looking at things, by means of an extremist symbolism, applicable perhaps with subjects of another race, do not strike me as appropriate in a 'clinique latine.'" Freud responded to the authors, on June 29, 1924: "I have received your book. Naturally, I haven't yet read it but after Claude's preface I see that it must be good, for his reservations prove to me that you have not compromised in any way and were not afraid of being contradicted."

More serious than these reservations, the presumed eviction of Eugénie Sokolnicka, the threat of his "patronage" to the detriment of Freud's during the creation of the Revue française de psychanalyse in 1927, and his attitude throughout the Occupation, when in 1941 he participated in René Laforgue's aborted project to create a French section of the Société de Psychothérapie Nazie (Nazi society for psychotherapy), directed by Professor Matthias Göring, diminished any positive elements of his support at a time when just about all French physicians were opposed to psychoanalysis.

Yet, André Breton may have said it best when he wrote: "The essential thing is that I do not suppose there can be much difference for Nadja between the inside of a sanitarium and the outside. There must, unfortunately, be a difference all the same, on account of the grating sound of a key turning in a lock, or the wretched view of the garden, the cheek of the people who question you when you want to be left alone, like Professor Claude at Sainte-Anne, with his dunce's forehead and that stubborn expression on his face ('You're being persecuted, aren't you?' No, monsieur. 'He's lying, last week he told me he was being persecuted.' Or 'You hear voices, do you? Well, are they voices like mine?' No, Monsieur. 'You see, he has auditory hallucinations.')."

Alain de Mijolla

See also: Congrès des psychanalystes de langue française des pays romans; Delay, Jean; Disque vert, Le ; Ey, Henri; Psychanalyse et les nevroses, La ; Revue française de psychanalyse ; Sainte-Anne Hospital.

Bibliography

Claude, Henri. (1913). Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, par Sigm. Freud, de Vienne (De la psychopathologie de la vie de tous les jours). (4th ed.). Berlin: Lib. S. Karger.

——. (1924, May). Freud et la méthode psychanalytique. Les nouvelles littéraires.

Freud, Sigmund. (1977h). Correspondance Freud-Laforgue, préface d'André Bourguignon. Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse, 15, p. 235-314.

Laforgue, René; and Allendy, René. (1924). La psychanalyse et les névroses. Paris: Payot.