https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89douard_Pichon
My journey starts in 1928 with the collaboration between Edouard Pichon, a founding member of the Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse, formerly a pediatrician turned psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and his uncle Jacques Damourette, a gifted linguist and philogist. Their collaboration was described in surrealist terms 'beautiful as the encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection table.' Together they brought out a seven volume grammar, an erudite complicated text entitled "Des Mots à la Pensée" (From Words to Thinking). In contrast to other logicians who derived the rules of grammar from modes of thinking, Pichon and Damourette proceeded in the opposite direction. They are clearly the early pioneers of structural linguistics and, of course, precursors of Lacan. In addition Pichon, who incidentally was the son-in-law of Janet, wrote a number of texts relevant to our topic. The first is entitled Grammar as a Mode of Exploration of the Unconscious(1925). The second article on which I would like to spend some time is entitled "On the Psychological Significance of Negation in French". (p. 502)
Through his mixture of linguistic and psychoanalytic thinking, Pichon was a powerful influence on Jacques Lacan (as well as a practical mentor).[5] In Écrits, Lacan paid tribute to "a divination that I can attribute only to his practise of semantics...that guided him in people's dark places".[6]
Among the psychoanalytic concepts introduced by what Élisabeth Roudinesco called Pichon's "fatalist genius",[7] were those of oblatory, scotomization, and foreclosure.
As a sequel to his work on negation and the psychosis Pichon adopted the term foreclosure. The same term will be appropriated by Lacan though without giving credit to its originator. (p. 504)
The next development in the story of the negative, is the appearance in France of Alexandre Kojève who reintroduced Hegel's phenomenology in a course in l'Ecôle Pratique des Hautes Études. (p. 504)
For Hegel, negation is rooted in the philosophical system of dialectic, in which dramatically opposed points of view are advanced—something is/something is not. The original contradiction is resolved via a synthesis. Hegel believed that thinking always proceeded according to this pattern; that is the laying down of a thesis is at once negated by its antithesis, to be resolved by a synthesis which leads, in turn, to a new antithesis and so on. Hegel believed that what drove thinking was the power of the negative and that any developmental process has two inseparable aspects —the positive aspects of growth—the emergence of something new and the negative aspect of rejection or the discarding of something old. Thinking, as Hegal sees it, is dialectical, in that it carries negation within itself. (p. 505)
The interest in negation spilled over into structuralism, deconstructionism and surrealism. (p. 505)
