Editing Louis Althusser (section)

==Personal life==
===Romantic life===
Althusser was such a homebody that biographer William S. Lewis affirmed, "Althusser had known only home, school, and P.O.W. camp" by the time he met his future wife.{{sfn|Lewis|2014}} In contrast, when he first met Rytmann in 1946, she was a former member of the French resistance and a Communist activist.<!--{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=116}} --> After fighting along with [[Jean Beaufret]] in the group "Service Périclès", she joined the PCF.{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=116}} However, she was expelled from the party accused of being a double agent for the [[Gestapo]],{{sfnm|1a1=Althusser|1y=1992|1p=109|2a1=Elliott|2y=2006|2p=329}} for "[[Trotskyism|Trotskyist]] deviation" and "crimes", which probably referred to the execution of former [[Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy|Nazi collaborators]].{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=116}} Although high-ranking party officials instructed him to sever relations with Rytmann,{{sfn|Elliott|2006|pp=39–40, note 112}} Althusser tried to restore her reputation in the PCF for a long time by making inquiries into her wartime activities.<!--{{sfn|Lewis|2014}}  --> Although he did not succeed in reinserting her into the party, his relationship with Rytmann nonetheless deepened during this period.{{sfn|Lewis|2014}} Their relationship "was traumatic from the outset, so Althusser claims", wrote Elliott.{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=328}} Among the reasons were his almost total inexperience with women and the fact she was eight years older than him.{{sfn|Lewis|2014}}

{{rquote|right|I had never embraced a woman, and above all I had never been embraced by a woman (at age thirty!). Desire mounted in me, we made love on the bed, it was new, exciting, exalting, and violent. When she (Hélène) had left, an abysm of anguish opened up in me, never again to close.|Althusser, ''L'avenir dure longtemps''{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|pp=116–117}} }}

His feelings toward her were contradictory from the very beginning; it is suggested that the strong emotional impact she caused in him led him to deep depression.{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=328}} Roudinesco wrote that, for Althusser, Rytmann represented the opposite of himself: she had been in the Resistance while he was remote from the anti-Nazi combat; she was a Jew who carried the stamp of the [[Holocaust]], whereas he, despite his conversion to Marxism, never escaped the formative effect of Catholicism; she suffered under Stalinism at the very moment when he was joining the party; and, in opposition to his petit-bourgeois background, her childhood was not prosperous—at the age of 13 she became the sexual abuse victim of a family doctor who, in addition to the abuse, instructed her to give her terminally ill parents a dose of [[morphine]].{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=116}} However, this story could have been invented by Althusser, who admitted to incorporating "imagined memories" into his "traumabiography."<ref>{{cite journal|url=https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n24/john-sturrock/the-paris-strangler |title=The Paris Strangler |issue=24 |journal=[[London Review of Books]] |date=17 December 1992 |volume=14 |access-date=11 August 2020|last1=Sturrock |first1=John }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=Dupuis-Déri |first=Francis |author-link1=Francis Dupuis-Déri |date=2015 |title=La banalité du mâle. Louis Althusser a tué sa conjointe, Hélène Rytmann-Legotien, qui voulait le quitter= |trans-title=The banality of the male. Louis Althusser killed his wife, Hélène Rytmann-Legotien, who wanted to leave him |language=fr |journal=[[Nouvelles Questions Féministes]] |volume=34 |issue=1 |pages=84–101 |doi=10.3917/nqf.341.0084 |doi-access=free }}</ref> According to Roudinesco, she embodied for Althusser his "displaced conscience", "pitiless superego", "damned part", "black animality".{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=116}}

Althusser considered that Rytmann gave him "a world of solidarity and struggle, a world of reasoned action,&nbsp;... a world of courage".{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=328}} According to him, they performed an indispensable maternal and paternal function for one another: "She loved me as a mother loves a child{{nbsp}}... and at the same time like a good father in that she introduced me&nbsp;... to the real world, that vast arena I had never been able to enter.&nbsp;... Through her desire for me she also initiated me&nbsp;... into my role as a man, into my masculinity. She loved me as a woman loves a man!"{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=328}} Roudinesco argued that Rytmann represented for him "the sublimated figure of his own hated mother to whom he remained attached all his life". In his autobiography, he wrote: "If I was dazzled by Hélène's love and the miraculous privilege of knowing her and having her in my life, I tried to give that back to her in my own way, intensely and, if I may put it this way, ''as a religious offering'', as I had done for my mother."{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=117}}

Although Althusser was really in love with Rytmann,{{sfn|Lewis|2014}} he also had affairs with other women. Roudinesco commented that "unlike Hélène, the other women loved by Louis Althusser were generally of great physical beauty and sometimes exceptionally sensitive to intellectual dialogue".{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=117}} She gives as an example of the latter case a woman named Claire Z., with whom he had a long relationship until he was forty-two.{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=172}} They broke up when he met Franca Madonia, a philosopher, translator, and playwright from a well-off Italian bourgeois family from [[Romagna]].{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|pp=118, 172}} Madonia was married to Mino, whose sister Giovanna was married to the Communist painter Leonardo Cremonini. Every summer the two families gathered in a residence in the village of [[Bertinoro]], and, according to Roudinesco, "It was in this magical setting&nbsp;... that Louis Althusser fell in love with Franca, discovering through her everything he had missed in his own childhood and that he lacked in Paris: a real family, an art of living, a new manner of thinking, speaking, desiring".{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=118}} She influenced him to appreciate modern theatre ([[Luigi Pirandello]], [[Bertolt Brecht]], [[Samuel Beckett]]), and, Roudinesco wrote, also on his detachment of Stalinism and "his finest texts (''For Marx'' especially) but also his most important concepts".{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|pp=118–119}} In her company in Italy in 1961, as Elliott affirmed, was also when he "truly discovered" Machiavelli.{{sfn|Elliott|2001|p=xiv}} Between 1961 and 1965, they exchanged letters and telephone calls, and they also went on trips together, in which they talked about the current events, politics, and theory, as well as made confidences on the happiness and unhappiness of daily life.{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=119}} However, Madonia had an explosive reaction when Althusser tried to make her Rytmann's friend, and seek to bring Mino into their meetings.{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=119}} They nevertheless continued to exchange letters until 1973; these were published in 1998 into an 800-page book ''Lettres à Franca''.{{sfnm|1a1=Elliott|1y=2006|p=319|2a1=Roudinesco|2y=2008|2p=117}}

===Mental condition===

Althusser underwent psychiatric hospitalisations throughout his life, the first time after receiving a diagnosis of [[schizophrenia]].{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=328}} He suffered from [[bipolar disorder]], and because of it he had frequent bouts of depression that started in 1938 and became regular after his five-year stay in German captivity.{{sfnm|1a1=Ferretter|1y=2006|1p=4|2a1=Stolze|2y=2013|2p=7|3a1=Lewis|3y=2014}} From the 1950s onward, he was under constant medical supervision, often undergoing, in Lewis' words, "the most aggressive treatments post-war French psychiatry had to offer", which included [[electroconvulsive therapy]], [[truth serum|narco-analysis]], and psychoanalysis.{{sfnm|1a1=Schrift|1y=2006|1p=87|2a1=Lewis|2y=2014}} Althusser did not limit himself to prescribed medications and practised self-medication.{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=171, note 39}} The disease affected his academic productivity; in 1962, he began to write a book about Machiavelli during a depressive exacerbation but was interrupted by a three-months stay in a clinic.{{sfn|European Graduate School}} The main psychoanalyst he attended was the anti-Lacanian René Diatkine, starting from 1964, after he had a dream about killing his own sister.{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=120}} The sessions became more frequent in January 1965, and the real work of exploring the unconscious was launched in June.{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=120}} Soon Althusser recognized the positive side of non-Lacanian psychoanalysis; although he sometimes tried to ridicule Diatkine giving him lessons in Lacanianism, by July 1966, he considered the treatment was producing "spectacular results".{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|pp=120–121}} In 1976, Althusser estimated that he had spent fifteen of the previous thirty years in hospitals and psychiatric clinics.{{sfn|Ferretter|2006|p=4}}

Althusser analysed the prerequisites of his illness with the help of psychoanalysis and found them in complex relationships with his family (he devoted to this topic half of the autobiography).{{sfnm|1a1=Jackson|1y=1996|1p=135|2a1=Elliott|2y=2006|2pp=325–326}} Althusser believed that he did not have a genuine "I", which was caused by the absence of real maternal love and the fact that his father was emotionally reserved and virtually absent for his son.{{sfnm|1a1=Jackson|1y=1996|1p=135|2a1=Elliott|2y=2006|2p=326}} Althusser deduced the family situation from the events before his birth, as told to him by his aunt: Lucienne Berger, his mother, was to marry his father's brother, Louis Althusser, who died in [[World War I]] near [[Verdun]], while Charles, his father, was engaged with Lucienne's sister, Juliette.{{sfnm|1a1=Elliott|1y=2006|1p=326|2a1=Roudinesco|2y=2008|2p=115}} Both families followed the old custom of the [[Levirate marriage|levirate]], which obliged an older, still unmarried, brother to wed the widow of a deceased younger brother.<!--{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=115}} --> Lucienne then married Charles, and the son was named after the deceased Louis.<!--{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=115}} --> In Althusser's memoirs, this marriage was "madness", not so much because of the tradition itself, but because of the excessive submission, as Charles was not forced to marry Lucienne since his younger brother had not yet married her.{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=115}} As a result, Althusser concluded, his mother did not love him, but loved the long-dead Louis.{{sfnm|1a1=Jackson|1y=1996|1p=135|2a1=Ferretter|2y=2006|2p=114}} The philosopher described his mother as a "[[Castration anxiety|castrating mother]]" (a term from psychoanalysis), who, under the influence of her phobias, established a strict regime of social and sexual "hygiene" for Althusser and his sister Georgette.<!--{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=326}} --> His "feeling of fathomless solitude" could only be mitigated by communicating with his mother's parents who lived in [[Morvan]].{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=326}} His relationship with his mother and the desire to deserve her love, in his memoirs, largely determined his adult life and career, including his admission to the ENS and his desire to become a "well-known intellectual".{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=327}} According to his autobiography, ENS was for Althusser a kind of refuge of intellectual "purity" from the big "dirty" world that his mother was so afraid of.{{sfnm|1a1=Jackson|1y=1996|1p=136|2a1=Elliott|2y=2006|2p=327}}

The facts of his autobiography have been critically evaluated by researchers. According to its own editors, ''L'avenir dure longtemps'' is "an inextricable tangle of 'facts' and 'phantasies'".{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=325}} His friend{{sfn|Jackson|1996|p=131}} and biographer [[Yann Moulier-Boutang]], after a careful analysis of the early period of Althusser's life, concluded that the autobiography was "a re-writing of a life through the prism of its wreckage".{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=330}} Moulier-Boutang believed that it was Rytmann who played a key role in creating a "fatalistic" account of the history of the Althusser family, largely shaping his vision in a 1964 letter.<!--{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=330}} --> According to Elliott, the autobiography produces primarily an impression of "destructiveness and self-destructiveness".{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=330}} Althusser, most likely, postdated the beginning of his depression to a later period (post-war), having not mentioned earlier manifestations of the disease in school and in the concentration camp.{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=331}} According to Moulier-Boutang, Althusser had a close psychological connection with Georgette from an early age, and although he did not often mention it in his autobiography, her "nervous illness" may have tracked his own.{{sfn|Elliott|2006|pp=330–331}} His sister also had depression, and despite their living separately from each other for almost their entire adult lives, their depression often coincided in time.{{sfn|Jackson|1996|p=135}} Also, Althusser focused on describing family circumstances, not considering, for example, the influence of ENS on his personality.{{sfn|Jackson|1996|p=136}} Moulier-Boutang connected the depression not only with events in his personal life, but also with political disappointments.{{sfn|Jackson|1996|p=135}}