Dominique Scarfone, MD, 2024
/Professor Dominique Scarfone’s work demonstrates how uniting tradition with radical thinking can expand the field of psychoanalysis. The Freud and Laplanche scholar maintains a solid belief that Freud’s foundational method offers a common ground between these cultures, and he has urged persistent questioning and a reconsidering of Freud’s methods to evolve new thinking.
Scarfone’s work has illuminated a modern path to understanding how the psychosexual enters the domains of transference and repetition, one’s relationship to art and ethics, and the deep complexity of what it means to be human. His notable work presents conceptual research and new ideas regarding the time dimension of psychic functioning. Scarfone explained that Laplanche taught him how to turn the Freudian method upon Freud’s own writings to critically reassess them and thereby constantly refresh psychoanalytic thinking.
His efforts have generated new ideas about the psychoanalytic stance towards transference with the concept of “readiness,” or “availability,” and the inescapability of trauma in psychic life. In the past decade he has augmented his work, publishing three significant books including Laplanche (2014), The Unpast (2015), and The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Jean Laplanche (2023).
Scarfone is a retired clinical psychoanalyst, a training and supervising analyst in the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society & Institute (Montreal French Branches) and a former full professor at the Université de Montréal.