The politics of kinship: Anthropology, psychoanalysis, and family law in twentieth-century France

My dissertation examines the ways in which French anthropology, psychoanalysis, and family law have worked together since the beginning of the twentieth century to produce and promote particular definitions of the family and of the social body, intimately tying the two. I focus on the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, both of whom highlighted the interdependence of the sexual and the social by positing a direct correlation between kinship and socialization. I trace how their ideas gained recognition, not only from French social scientists, but also from legislators and politicians who relied on some of their most difficult concepts—such as the symbolic, the incest prohibition, psychosis, and the Name-of-the-Father—to enact a series of laws concerning the family.;The first chapter offers an overview of family policy in France after the Second World War. It shows that the family has served as a central point of articulation for social policy since the Third Republic. In the second chapter, I turn to Lévi-Strauss's and Lacan's key works on the family which I read as sociological treatises focusing on the development of the social, on the transition from nature to culture, and on the essence of the "social bond." The third chapter traces how these authors' ideas on kinship came to circulate in the public sphere. It focuses on a series of "bridge-figures, "mostly psychoanalysts, who relied on structuralist notions of kinship and who were directly involved in formulating family policy and family law. The fourth and fifth chapters investigate a series of critiques of the family that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, within French law on one hand, and within the intellectual world on the other. The dissertation concludes with an analysis of the public debates surrounding two important legislative events of the 1990s (the bioethics laws and the PACS), in which psychoanalytic and anthropological "experts" intervened extensively.;I argue that structuralist anthropology and psychoanalysis were particularly well adapted to French political culture because they offered normative accounts of fundamental sexual and social mechanisms that seemed reassuringly compatible with the secular values of French Republicanism.